Author: Lauren Wolfe

Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The New York Times. She is a contributing writer for Washington Monthly, and has taught as an adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate school of journalism. She is the publisher of Chills, where she pulls back the curtain on her more than two decades of international investigative reporting.

This Is What Autocracy Looks Like: How Turkey’s Justice and Development Party Turned Its Back on Women and Girls

Over the years, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deflected public discontent with his economic and social policies by pointing fingers at journalists and women’s rights defenders, among others.

Since a failed coup in 2016, the Turkish government has become “incrementally more repressive,” explains Asli Aydintaşbaş, a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the nonprofit Brookings Institution. The outcome of this year’s election “creates a bit of a breathing space in urban areas in terms of free speech issues, but there has not been an improvement on the Kurdish issue,” she says.

(This article originally appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox! )