In conclusion, Chapter 7 revisits the broad empirical and theoretical questions of this book. I highlight the key findings and implications of this study for the Turkish case and for world-making movements, generally. In addition, the chapter offers a subsection looking at how, for over two decades now, the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has contributed to the cultural groundwork. More broadly, this subsection shows how AKP-era politics empirically verifies the theoretical argument of the book: that we can better understand social movement resistance by examining the relationship between semiotic and material struggles and especially the processes by which activists integrate personal and political endeavors, first, by creating shared dispositions between mobilizing agents and their followers and, second, by securing consent for their dissident worldview. Across the Middle East and the globe, religious politics exerts significant influence to change or preserve existing modalities of state-society relations. In the final section of the Conclusion, I reflect on the lessons that can be drawn from the Turkish Islamist movement to improve our understanding of non-Muslim religious movements and contentious politics more broadly.

Turkish politics illustrates the complex relationships among populism, democracy, and human rights. Throughout the twentieth century, an urban, secularist elite largely monopolized government power and used it to modernize society against the will of much of the population. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has reversed this pattern since it took power in 2002. Its leader, now-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a paradigmatic populist: a charismatic leader who portrays politics as a Manichean competition between the virtuous people and a domineering elite, and his policy agenda as embodying a homogeneous popular will. The AKP has neutered the Kemalist military, bureaucracy, and judiciary, and has implemented policies favored by its once-marginalized supporters. But Erdogan's successive purges of internal rivals have bolstered the critique that he, like many populists, merely uses citizen supporters to legitimate his rule and policy preferences, rather than genuinely representing them. Since 2013, his government has harshly repressed real and perceived opponents, jailing tens of thousands, while portraying them as enemies of the people – another classic antidemocratic populist habit.