For almost a year now, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed, in speech after speech, that he is ready to restore the death penalty. Some have dismissed this as political theatre. And yet, Turkey would not be the first country to reintroduce the death penalty after it had fallen out of use. The paper from the European Stability Initiative (ESI) shows that reintroducing the death penalty would therefore isolate Turkey in Europe more than any military coup did in previous decades.
