Remaking the public through the square. Invention of the new national cosmology in turkey (original) (raw)
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Policing Dissent: Authoritarian Reformulation of the State in AKP's Turkey
inter-disciplinary.net
The 2001 economic crisis in Turkey threatened the balance of power and enforced the emergence of a new "Demo-Islamic" political subject embodied in AKP (Justice and Development Party) to establish a new social compromise in Turkey. This new hegemonic strategy is based upon the politics of recognition that replaces the politics of denial. The strategy shaped the popular image of the government as if it were indisputably democratic. It resulted in repositioning of the AKP in opposition to the state through the so-called conflict between democracy and regime of tutorship. The success of AKP in suppressing and controlling socio-political opposition lies in the unification of a discourse of anti-statism and of the state"s omnipotence. In this sense, AKP"s hegemonic strategy presented itself as an opposition party in the public perception, so that it contributed to the counter-mobilization of the masses. The illusion of a contradiction between the state and government destroys the potential opposition of society before it would be realized. Thus AKP exploits the disillusion of the masses by provoking them against "ancien regime" and all types of political opposition based on the previous social, cultural and ideological cleavages paralysed in this new antagonistic perception of the political sphere. The importance of creating a moral panic by manipulating social anxieties (such as economic instability, military coup or terrorist attacks) is particularly emphasized during this period. Under the rule of AKP, a sort of emerging populist ventriloquism excludes citizens from political participation and the government violently prevents all penetration attempts -especially by leftists and Kurds, but also some nationalists-. In this context, several investigations and trials (such as Ergenekon, KCK, Oda TV, etc.) documented by thousands of pages of indictments including deep internal contradictions, extremely long-detention time without being formally charged with any crime and many other violations of right to due process appeared as a most influential tool of oppressing the political opposition. This catch-all process that criminalizes dissent as "terrorist crime" will be considered as a perfect way of folk devil creation. This paper considers authoritarian populism as an attempt to organize populist participation and to produce mass consent for AKP"s anti-statist discourse, in perfect harmony with this process of neoliberalization. In view of carrying out work on the transformation of the state apparatus and state administration in Turkey in 2000s, this paper defines its subject as the analysis of process of realization of state authority in everyday political life and policing popular dissent through the vast repertory of authoritarian state practices.
On the night of July 15, the Republic of Turkey was attacked in the most treacherous way ever. The FETÖlinked army officers attempted to overthrow the elected president, Erdoğan, and the AK Party government. However, the July 15 was not a mere military coup. It was the manifestation of the parallel structuring within the state that has recently become the top-priority issue of Turkey. This paper aims to investigate the unprecedented nature of the July 15 incident and its heroic aftermath. Unexpectedly, international community failed to see the big picture regarding the coup attempt. This study hence concentrates on the factors behind this failure. The influence of FETÖ diaspora network in the West over generating the discourse on Turkey is significant in that sense. The study problematizes the usage of false analogies as a part of this manipulation process. The paper concludes that contrary to the efforts of FETÖ and its international collaborators, New Turkey is in the process of its formation and this time with the historic opportunity for creating a plural and truly democratic republic that should not be missed.
Media, Culture & Society, 2018
In the wake of the failed coup on 15 July 2016, Turkey’s ruling AKP called citizens to public squares to take part in ‘democracy watches’ – hybrid events that lasted for 23 days and were both celebration of the people’s victory over the coup and guard duty to prevent further coup attempts. From beginning to end the watches were structured around and choreographed to the needs of the media screen with the twin aims of reflecting the ‘sovereign nation’ back to itself, thereby textually constituting a particular public to comprise the ‘New’, post-coup Turkey. This article, based on participant observation and collected media discourse, examines the relationship between squares, screens, and publics at the watches. It first compares the watches to the 2013 Gezi Park protests, detailing how central Gezi’s legacy was to the watches. It next turns to screens, adapting Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples’ notion of the ‘public screen’ for the realities of Turkey in 2016. Finally, drawing on Michael Warner’s framework for publics, it offers the notion of a screened public: a co-production between government and some citizens that is directed by authority, via and for the use of screens, toward a political goal.
Popular Will against Democracy: Populist Autocratization in Turkey
Reflektif Journal of Social Sciences, 2020
In this article, I study the relationship of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) populism-in-power and democracy, from a comparative and historical perspective, and based on a critical engagement with the populism literature. I begin by highlighting the political institutional expression of the populist political vision (to reflect the popular will in power), which prioritizes competitive elections among a variety of modern democratic institutions and mechanisms. Based on this perspective, I outline a particular populist route to competitive (or electoral) authoritarianism: when in power, because populists exalt elections and undermine existing liberal democratic mechanisms that bridge people to power, they deprive citizens of the power to hold rulers accountable. I then trace the lineage of the populist political imagination in Turkey, demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities between the Democrat Party's (Demokrat Parti, DP) and the AKP's conceptions of the people and democracy. I argue that despite these parties' differences on the level of the politicization of cultural divisions, there is a crucial continuity: the equalization of democracy with an exalted elected executive branch. Finally, I concentrate on the impact of the AKP's populism-in-power on the Turkish political regime. I argue that because the AKP came to power in a defective democracy (with extra-democratic checks on elected rulers and prone to concentration of power), by 2011, the party managed to reframe Turkish political institutions according to its right-wing populist vision of democracy, an authoritarian regime with competitive elections.
Populism on Steroids: Erdoganists and Their Enemies in Turkey
Populism on the Loose, 2018
Perhaps the clearest indicator of one’s partiality towards a Laclauian approach to populism is the belief that it is a constitutive dimension of politics without which the latter ceases to exist. The presence of a frontier between the ‘people’ and its ‘other’ is the precondition of politics. But what if this frontier itself becomes the sole point around which those identities are articulated? Is it still possible to speak of politics when there is ‘too much’ populism? The article answers this question through an analysis of the extreme polarization in today’s Turkey over the hegemonic figure of the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Praises for Erdoğan government as a democratic model for the Muslim world withered away once the regime had decisively turned towards authoritarianism and begun consolidating Erdoğan’s personal control over state and society. A personality cult, named Erdoğanism here, has gradually materialised around his figure, overtaking all previous forms of political identity among his supporters and becoming one with ‘the people’. Those who display even a minimal reluctance to submit themselves completely to his will are excommunicated as ‘enemies’ of the people. Most interestingly, such an extremely polarizing discourse appears to have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, for it has been reciprocated by virtually all opposition actors in the form of Anti-Erdoğanism. The very survival of opposition in Turkey seems to have been locked into an anti-Erdoğanist corner, risking to run the whole political field into a zero-sum game between two polar opposites, a case of pure populism.
De-Orientalizing the Arab Spring, Bonomo University Press (forthcoming)
This study aims at transcending the essentialist accounts and homogenous constructions of the Gezi Park protests. It attempts to locate the context of the mass popular mobilisation into its sociological foundations by alluding to the concept of “anomie” developed by Émile Durkheim. The main argument of the study is that the explosion of the Gezi Protests and people’s frustration and disillusionment are rooted in Turkey’s anomic growth and discontinuation of democratisation process under the AKP decade. Relying on Durkheimian concept of anomie to understand this sociological development, it is argued that economic growth and formal democratisation under the AKP decade in the 2000s have raised people’s social expectations beyond their social limits. However, satisfactorily fulfilment of people’s expectations and aspirations are bound to fail under capitalist system. It is therefore emphasised that while the AKP implemented formal democratic reforms to control the military power and achieved high economic growth in a decade—which was unusual for Turkey—a dual process was on the track. While the political reforms and economic growth raised the expectations of society, frustrations of unfulfilled expectations and aspirations accumulated given that the AKP halted democratisation process after 2011 and started to play the role of a regulatory and authoritarian moral order.
Mobilization and Countermobilization: The Gülen Movement in Turkey
2005
This paper explores the attitudes of those opposed or indifferent to the Gülen Movement (GM) in Turkey. It pays particular attention to ongoing shifts in understanding the nature of the Turkish public sphere and civil society. The goal of this analysis is to examine how innovation and reform are introduced in the Turkish public sphere and the growing capacity of Turkish civil society to accept change. This approach highlights the importance of an open civil society and of public spaces that provide an arena for peaceful political and religious encounters. It is also intended to facilitate an understanding of the creation of consensus, providing people with new insights towards developing their capacity for action.
Turkey: the organic crisis of a post- populist moment
Open Democracy, 2018
How can we make better sense of debates about populism. Can there be a progressive populism? Is populism really a danger for the survival of democracy or a key to democracy's future? Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the oath of office ceremony in Ankara Turkey, 09 July 2018. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved. RETHINKING POPULISM. At a time when new political actors are mounting electoral and increasingly systemic challenges to contemporary democracies in the name of the people, there is little consensus in what the phenomenon is among academics, political activists and citizens alike. openDemocracy has been featuring articles on populist phenomena for some years (Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Mouffe, Marlière, Pappas, Skodo, Sofos, Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, Gerbaudo, Gandesha, Tamás to name but a few) and has been successful in stimulating a recurring interest. But despite or perhaps because of the extensive and thought-provoking research on populism, the term has come to denote a range of widely diverse phenomena.