12 September 4 am: Mapping Turkey’s 1980 Military Coup


The military rule that was inaugurated by the coup d’état of 12 September 1980 plays a key role in the history of modern Turkey. With this seizure of power, the third since the foundation of the republic, the military promoted a set of reforms that radically reshaped the political system, the institutions, and society. Even though elections were held three years later, the regime left an enduring legacy that remains hard to come to terms with. At the same time, studies on the military era have started to flourish almost simultaneously and the regime never ceased to be a prominent research object. This article maps the historiography on the 1980 era by discussing a selection of publications that in the past forty years opened the debate or led it in new directions. The article engages with the work of scholars from various disciplines and academic traditions, without neglecting publications by journalists and other authors. Even from this mapping, that includes a small and not exhaustive sample of studies, the 1980 era emerges as an undoubtedly complex period, whose understanding can count, however, on a set of landmark publications.