Alper Çakmak

Populism and the Politicization of the COVID-19 Crisis in Europe is a successful discourse analysis of populist parties. The authors’ clean organization of these exceedingly difficult and intersecting cases  can serve as a useful and trustworthy guide for scholars studying different strategies of right- and left-wing populist parties and the discursive battles they wage in the context of a crisis environment. It provides a sense of why populists use this particular rhetoric and how this plays out with their core constituency. However, the analytic nature of the book places undue pressure on the authors to apply the same frame and this raises major problems that may cast doubt on the book’s central conclusion: there is little sense of the contestation and deep divides these populist strategies both tapped into and opened up further. Along with its scholarly value, the book will be of considerable interest to anybody curious about the populist parties and their reactions in a time of worldwide turmoil.

This study attempts to analyze the peculiarity of the migration stories of the Muslims in Germany who have emigrated from Turkey. Each of the four interviewees is treated as a case to explore diversity and pluralism amongst the Turkish immigrants. The main questions addressed in the study are: (a) How does anthropological discourse study of the interviewees reflect the particularities of migrants termed as “individuation”? (b) How can each personality be viewed as a conglomeration of sociological concepts through a discourse analysis? (c) How does anthropological discourse analysis approach to Muslims living in Germany who have a relationship with Turkey reveal personal backgrounds as a predictor of migration experience? An interpretative approach is exerted throughout the study to reveal the self-constructed individual realities that each story entails.