THIS CAN BE HIS TESTIMONY:

Taraf, a feisty upstart newspaper with an avid following among the country's liberal intellectuals, had begun to publish what purported to be secret military documents from 2002-3. These revealed an operation, code-named Sledgehammer, to destabilize and overthrow the newly elected government of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party. The plot, though never carried out, was packed with grisly details: Mosques were to be bombed, a jet downed, journalists arrested. It was also consistent with Turkey's long history of military coups.

When Rodrik and his wife spoke with Cetin Dogan, though, the general told them he'd never heard of Sledgehammer. They believed him. But that only deepened the mystery. Were the coup plans genuine? Had Dogan's name somehow been added to them? Rodrik and Pinar Dogan began to investigate the coup documents, which eventually became the centerpiece of a landmark court case that targeted hundreds of military officers. Many called it Turkey's "trial of the century." The two economists called it a fraud.

As a social scientist, Rodrik had always believed in the power of evidence to change people's minds. His Sledgehammer investigation revealed the coup plans to be forgeries. The evidence was clearer than anything he had ever encountered in economics. But it didn't matter. People clung to the story regardless.

To his bafflement, Rodrik found himself in a battle with Turkey's intellectual establishment: fellow liberals, many of whom he was friendly with, who shared his hopes for a more democratic country. Critics accused him of supporting militarism, of disgracing Harvard's reputation, of manipulating the facts to save his father-in-law. Once a favorite son, the Turkish economist with the highest global profile, he was forced to avoid his homeland for fear of detention.

It's a personal ordeal that still wakes Rodrik up at night. But it has also become more: the springboard for a new way of studying politics.

Dani Rodrik sat down to tell that story in April in his bright, roomy office at Princeton, N.J.'s Institute for Advanced Study, which he and Pinar Dogan joined in 2013. Rodrik's writing can be shrill, but in person his vaguely foreign voice rarely rises. He is a tall, graceful man with gray hair, a slight smile, and a modest demeanor -- generally. This morning he can't help mentioning that his Twitter profile, open on his desktop computer, has just hit 50,000 followers. He is describing that social-media audience -- about 40 percent of it comes from Turkey -- when four quick knocks at the door announce the arrival of Dogan, who works nearby in a much smaller space that is decorated with Radiohead album art. "I told Dani that I want to have a tent over here," she jokes. "Just give up my office."

Though Rodrik and Dogan share a discipline, in background, personality, and research focus the two are not much alike. Rodrik, 58, hails from Turkey's small Jewish community, the son of a self-made pen manufacturer who managed to send his son to Harvard. Dogan, 42, grew up moving among Italy, London, and southeastern Turkey, the migratory life of a military daughter. Rodrik is reserved. Dogan is animated. Rodrik is a public figure whose accessible books, columns, and blog posts speak to policy issues debated around the globe. Dogan is a more narrowly focused researcher who specializes in industrial organization, competition policy, and regulation.

By the time Rodrik got to know Dogan's father in 2004, the four-star general had already retired from the military, as the economist recalls in a long personal essay about Sledgehammer. Rodrik expected an authoritarian character; he found a soft-spoken man who doted on his daughter. But there was no chance he could win the general over to his political views. Cetin Dogan, like many Turks of an older generation, viewed the military as an essential backstop against Turkey's sliding into an Islamic state. Rodrik, like other liberals, wanted to see the military's role diminished.

Until the late 1990s, Turkey's intensely secular military had dominated politics in the mostly Muslim nation. It clashed with Islamist-rooted political movements like the Justice and Development Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leading figure in Turkish politics since he become prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014. The military also repeatedly stepped in to oust governments. General Dogan himself had played an important role in what is known as the "postmodern coup" of 1997, as Rodrik describes in his essay. The military, he writes, had "tightened the screws" on Erdogan's Islamist forerunner, Necmettin Erbakan. "There had been a purge of suspected Islamists in the bureaucracy and universities," Rodrik writes. Erbakan eventually had to resign.

"A lot of people hate my father-in-law in Turkey," Rodrik says, "because they associate him with a hardline view that has done much damage to the deepening of democracy."

But was he the murderous putschist depicted in the Sledgehammer plans? Soon after the coup story broke, Rodrik and Pinar Dogan began to spot odd inconsistencies. The first glaring anachronism concerned a well-known nationalist youth organization that had been named as a Sledgehammer collaborator in the core coup document, dated December 2002. The group turned out not to have been founded until 2006. For Rodrik and Dogan, that suggested a way forward. They weren't military experts. But they could search for further inconsistencies. "If they made one mistake," Dogan told her husband, "they must have made more."

Many more. 

Follow @brothersjudd