For several years, the government of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Parti) was praised as a successful combination of Islam and liberalism and promoted as a model for the Middle East by Western academics, politicians and journalists. With the massive involvement of the Turkish government in the Syrian war and the hardening of the government’s internal attitude, these perceptions have changed. Within Turkey, a critical academic debate has accompanied the AKP government from the very beginning. This double issue of the Austrian Journal of Development Studies provides analyses of AKP government policies, ranging from policing, housing, industrial and monetary policies, to the gender implications of employment policies, and to AKP foreign policies, all examined from different political economy perspectives. The contributors – mainly coming from Turkey – put the policies into a wider historical and international context.