How to Lose a Country

What Readers Say

Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist who watched her own country's democratic institutions erode under Erdoğan and has been thinking about it ever since. How to Lose a Country maps the seven steps she identifies in the process — and readers bring it up specifically when talking about how these things happen incrementally, how they don't announce themselves as what they are. It gets mentioned in the same breath as Pomerantsev's Russia books for people who want to understand the global pattern rather than just one country's story.

Who It's For

Readers who want to understand the mechanics of democratic backsliding with the clarity of someone who lived through it firsthand. Less theoretical than The Origins of Totalitarianism, more personal than Manufacturing Consent. Good for readers who want a human perspective on a pattern that keeps repeating.

Reading Context

The 2024 edition includes a new foreword from Temelkuran with updated perspective. Often grouped with Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, This Is Not Propaganda, and The Origins of Totalitarianism for readers building a reading list around authoritarianism and propaganda. Turkey's trajectory since the book's original publication gives her argument ongoing evidence.