Süreyya Ağaoğlu and the emerging liberal order in early Cold War Turkey

Abstract

This article discusses the life, career, and associations of Süreyya Ağaoğlu, Turkey’s first female lawyer, in the years leading up to Turkey’s watershed 1950 election, in order to understand Turkey’s liberal opposition. Considering her writings and experiences reveals not only the contested nature of liberalism in this period but also ways in which postwar liberalism was intertwined with the networks undergirding the emerging American-led Cold War order. Not only did she interact in her professional life with champions of liberalism from around the world, but she was also connected through her family to important figures in Turkey’s own liberal tradition. Her experience as a both a product of the ‘Kemalist’ state-building project and a critic of its excesses helps us think about the nature of political opposition during Turkey’s late 1940s democratization.