Editorial note: On November 26, 2021, after this review was submitted for publication, Metin Gürcan was arrested. Gürcan was a founding member of the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA), which was launched in 2020. He was charged with espionage, which some have argued is a part of systematic campaign by the Turkish government to intimidate members of the opposition.1Since the dawn of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the military has been the “de facto player” in domestic politics. In 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 military elites concerned with the country's fate under civilian leadership pressured elected governments—by force of arms or the threat of force—to step down from public office and hand stewardship to the Turkish Armed Forces. So traumatic and defining were each of these coups d'etat, it would be impossible to understand the history of the modern republic without appreciating the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF)'s role in molding the state and influencing its politics.For decades the TAF enjoyed its privileged status as the “defender” of Kemalism and Turkish secularism, against threats both foreign and domestic. However, the military was not impervious to change. And as documented in Metin Gürcan's book Opening the Black Box: The Turkish Military Before and After 15 July 2016, Turkey's model for civil-military relations underwent a significant evolution in the twenty-first century. These developments resulted in the narrowing of the gap between the TAF as an elite institution and Turkish society, fragmentation within military ranks about the TAF's future, and its overall diminution as a political force.Gürcan employs a multimethod approach, combining discourse analysis—primarily of press releases and statements by TAF brass between 2004 and 2015—interviews with eighty-two military “elites” and a representative survey of over 1,200 TAF officers. It is a rare glimpse into an unfamiliar world. As Gürcan explains, a number of factors have limited past academic research on the TAF, including the military's “self-imposed distance, lack of civilian expertise on security issues, general absence of a cooperative environment and mutual trust between the TAF and academia” (xi–xii). These obstacles were less imposing for Gürcan, a career officer who prior to his retirement served in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, and Iraq as a military adviser/liaison officer, and for a period as an analyst officer to the Turkish General Staff. It may be reasonable to assume that as an insider Gürcan earned unprecedented access to TAF officers and high-ranking officials who may have otherwise dismissed interview requests from civilian researchers.Gürcan argues that several variables—ranging from changes in the regional and global security environment, changing public opinion toward the military, Turkey's accession process to the European Union, and the rise of new political elites in the form of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)—contributed to the TAF's diminution in the twenty-first century. Turkey's accession process to the European Union is of particular importance, as Brussels conditioned Turkey's acceptance upon a number of reforms, including the democratization of Turkey's civil-military relations (CMR). Beginning in 1999 Turkey executed multiple reform packages that both enabled greater civilian oversight of defense-related issues and limited military influence over civilian institutions—notably the judiciary. These steps were warmly endorsed by the AKP, which achieved its first electoral victory in 2002 and campaigned for European accession. As Gürcan correctly cautions, however, AKP support for the reforms had more to with domestic interests, as it provided the party, “which had been under inquiry by the military due to the party's Islamist background,” and its ascendent leader—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—greater domestic and international legitimacy (27).The clash between Erdogan and the AKP, representing the new generation of elites, and the Turkish military may have been inevitable in hindsight. Yet Gürcan demonstrates how relations between the AKP government and TAF fluctuated, depending on the agenda of the Chief of General Staff—the highest-ranking official within the Turkish military. Relying on TAF press releases, Gürcan identifies how Turkish CMR during the first AKP government (2002–7) were relatively cordial but boiled over in 2007 when the AKP nominated Abdullah Gul as its presidential candidate. During the second AKP government (2007–11) relations darkened as dozens of high-ranking generals and admirals were accused of participating in a clandestine plot to overthrow the government. The Balyoz and Ergenekon court cases dragged on for years, resulting in the arrest of “one-in-ten generals and admirals in the TAF” (including many retired officers). Interference with Turkish domestic affairs had already damaged the TAF's once-untouchable reputation, but the Ergenekon affair accelerated these processes at an unprecedented rate. These external pressures eventually convinced military top brass to adopt a more conciliatory tone, in many ways accepting the AKP government's authority over areas previously under TAF jurisdiction.Though Black Box devotes attention to the power dynamics between political and military elites, it also addresses the TAF as an elite-making institution and how it responded to the changes taking place in Turkey society. Gürcan explains that—despite the popular narrative of the military being the bastion of Turkish secularism—the TAF has long been a heterogeneous body, composed of both conservative and reformist voices. He backs this claim by conducting a representative survey of TAF officers that covers a wide range of topics, including attitudes toward religion, gender equality, the media, democracy, rule of law, the TAF's operational performance, the TAF's authority to seize control of the government, and motivations for serving as commissioned officers. The survey is a snapshot, but it sets Gürcan's work apart. He successfully captures the diversity of the TAF's officer ranks, the generational divide between junior and senior officers, and the myriad forces pushing and pulling against the TAF's institutional values in the months leading up to the July 2016 attempted coup. On the eve of the coup, Gürcan concludes, the TAF's officer corps mirrored broader social trends and divisions within Turkish society.Black Box's description of the TAF's complexities is both well researched and well organized. Gürcan provides several lenses to understand the changes to Turkish CMR during the AKP era that stand up to scrutiny. But his analysis of the July 2016 attempted coup and its aftermath doesn't match the same standards as earlier chapters. Gürcan struggles to connect the big picture themes addressed in his quantitative research with the putschists' motivations to launch a coup d'état. He argues, for example, that the engine behind the “uprising train” were elite officers affiliated with US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen (a similar claim has been made by the Turkish government) but offers little detail of the Gülen movement's history, ideological underpinnings, past relationship with the AKP government, and reasons for executing the coup. His depiction of events often lacked citation, relying too heavily on articles that he composed for Al Monitor and the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Levent Türkkan, former aide-de-camp to Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar and an admitted member of the attempted coup and the Gülen movement. Compared to earlier chapters, Gürcan's tone is more journalistic than academic, prone to occasional hyperbole (at one point he references the putschists' tactics as “insane,” and likens Gülenists to jihadists) rather than a rational, unbiased assessment of events.The attempted coup of July 15, 2016 was a disturbing event in Turkish history whose repercussions are still being felt in daily life and in civil-military relations. But according to Kadir Has University's annual public opinion poll, confidence in the TAF decreased from 62.4 percent in 2015 to 47.4 percent in 2016 only to rebound a few years later to its pre-coup numbers.2 It is therefore surprising that toward the end of Black Box Gürcan breaks from his normally impartial tenor. “The 15 July putschists have broken the ivory tower in which the military once was living in a privileged fashion” (257), Gürcan surmises, “Now the military must live and work within the earshot of the people and the government” (261). Has the transition to civilian oversight actually made the process more transparent and democratic? Gürcan doesn't really provide the answers. Gürcan also asserts, “if those putschists had been aware of the findings of the pre-15 July military snapshot”—in other words, his research—”they would not have dared to implement their plan of making the TAF wholly involved in this heinous act on that night” (xix). Maybe this is true, but there isn't any evidence to back it up. His declaration that “Turkey passed a major democracy test” by resisting the coup attempt is equally open to counterargument. Following the coup, thousands of TAF officers were arrested on charges of plotting or sympathizing with the putschists. Similar purges were conducted in the judiciary, academia, civil service, and other government institutions. Who were these officers and what evidence was there of their wrongdoing? Was the legal process transparent? What became of them? And even if the attempted coup accelerated the transition to greater civilian oversight of the military, is the process more transparent and democratic than it was before? These are critical questions to understanding how the attempted coup affected the Turkish CRM, but Gürcan doesn't raise them.The connections that Gürcan draws between his quantitative research and the attempted coup feel like a forced effort because his survey was conducted before July 2016 and no similar survey was conducted afterward for comparative analysis. Moreover, Black Box isn't meant to be a study of military interventions but rather a window into an institution in transition. Simply put, the snapshot Gürcan provides is incomplete and raises just as many questions about the Turkish CMR as it provides answers. Gürcan acknowledges this shortcoming, perhaps knowing that the black box that he succeeded in prying open has once again become dark and inaccessible. Hopefully they will be addressed by another scholar in the future.