Defne Polat

Defne Polat reports on Turkey from inside and outside it. She has watched the long arc of the AKP era close in around her profession — journalists arrested, outlets shuttered, academics sent home — and she writes about it without nostalgia for the Kemalist republic that came before. She covers Erdogan's politics, the Kurdish movement's slow strangulation, Syrian refugee policy, the lira's collapse, and the diaspora's split allegiances in Berlin, London, and New York. She reads Turkish court decisions before they are translated.