Turkish researchers at the time like Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın and Rıfat Osman Bey also came up with the idea that Early Sumerians were proto-Turks.

[8] Implemented by Atatürk, the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey features nationalism (Turkish: milliyetçilik) as one of its six principles.

[9] The Kemalist revolution aimed to create a nation state from the remnants of the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire.

Kemalist nationalism, after experiencing the Ottoman Empire's breakdown, defined the social contract as its "highest ideal".

[citation needed] In the early Republican era, some intellectuals like Hilmi Ziya Ülken,[15] Mehmet Râif Ogan[16] and Nurettin Topçu[17] proposed that the origins of the Turkish nationalism should be sought in Anatolia, not in "Turan".

The term was coined in 1972 by the conservative historian İbrahim Kafesoğlu, who traced the Turkish-Islamic synthesis back to the first Muslim Turkic dynasty, the Karakhanids, in the 11th century.

[20] Following the 1980 coup d'état, the military dictatorship made a combination of Pan-Turkism,[21] Turkish-Islamic synthesis, and Kemalism as the official state ideology.

[42][43][44] Following two decades long Islamic-conservative AKP rule, many authors and scholars point out a newly emerging wave, called secular nationalism by the most.

[45] This new wave is yet to acquire a precise form and discourse,[46] but attracted interest mainly from young adults who are disillusioned with government policies - especially unregulated migrant inflow.

The article also states, expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime, and that it cannot be invoked without the approval of the Minister of Justice.

[49] Nationalists within the judicial system, intent on derailing Turkey's full admission into the European Union, have used Article 301 to initiate trials against people like Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, and the late Hrant Dink[50] for acknowledging the existence of the Armenian genocide.