Ziya Gökalp in the context of "Atatürk's Reforms"

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician who has been the president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as the 25th prime minister from 2003 to 2014 as part of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which he co-founded in 2001. He also served as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. Coming from an Islamist background and promoting socially conservative policies, Turkey has experienced increasing authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and suppression of dissent under Erdoğan's rule.

Erdoğan was born in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, and studied at the Aksaray Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences, before working as a consultant and senior manager in the private sector. Becoming active in local politics, he was elected Welfare Party's Beyoğlu district chair in 1984 and Istanbul chair in 1985. Following the 1994 local elections, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred and banned from politics after reciting a poem by Ziya Gökalp that compared mosques to barracks and the faithful to an army. Erdoğan was released from prison in 1999 and formed the AKP, abandoning openly Islamist policies.

Pan-Turkism (Turkish: Pan-Türkizm) or Turkism (Turkish: Türkçülük or Türkizm) is a political movement that emerged during the 1880s among Turkic intellectuals who lived in the Russian region of Kazan (Tatarstan), South Caucasus (modern-day Azerbaijan) and the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey), with its aim being the cultural and political unification of all Turkic peoples. Turanism is a closely related movement but it is a more general term, because Turkism only applies to Turkic peoples. However, researchers and politicians who are steeped in the pan-Turkic ideology have used these terms interchangeably in many sources and works of literature.

Although many of the Turkic peoples share historical, cultural and linguistic roots, the rise of a pan-Turkic political movement is a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ottoman poet Ziya Gökalp defined pan-Turkism as a cultural, academic, and philosophical and political concept advocating the unity of Turkic peoples. Ideologically, it was premised on social Darwinism. Pan-Turkism has been characterized by pseudoscientific theories known as Pseudo-Turkology.

Sociology in Turkey has gone through several stages of development beginning with proto-sociologies in the 16th and 17th century. In the mid-19th century, sociology was taught within philosophy departments, and it uncritically adopted Western social theories and neglected research. In reaction to the rise of Western liberalism among several intellectuals, the Sultan supported sociology and opened the Dârülfünûn. The resulting division between Western liberalism and Pan-Islamism ultimately resulted in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

Following the 1908 revolution, sociological thinkers attempted to discern the foundations of Europeanization so as to graft Western social organization onto Ottoman institutions and Turkish culture. The sociologists of the time were heavily influenced by European, mainly French, sociologists. During and after the events leading to the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), the purported father of Turkish sociology, Ziya Gökalp, argued for a break from Ottoman and Western ideologies. Instead he contended that Pan-Turkism was the appropriate basis of the new nation-state, which influenced the Kemalist foundation of modern Turkey. This connection between sociology and the development of the nation-state continues to be a strong theme in contemporary sociological thought in Turkey. Sociology in Turkey was again influenced heavily by the influx of German thinkers during the Second World War and later by American sociology. Today, Turkish sociology is taught as the study of social problems using scientific research methods.