Hakkı Taş

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Fellow at German Institute for Global and Area Studies

This article translates Michael Mann’s notion of infrastructural power into the foreign policy realm and develops a conceptual framework that allows for the systematic treatment of states’ strategic efforts at mobilising domestic non-state actors. Despite the common rationales underlying such efforts across regime types, the article argues that sta...

Scholars largely view populism as a democratic game and study it through the lens of civilian mass politics, thereby, dismissing the role of the military elite. Nevertheless, populist mobilization may introduce new dynamics into the political landscape of countries that have a long history of politically active militaries. This article scrutinizes...

Through a discourse-theoretic approach, this paper problematises the under-theorised chameleonic quality of populism. While populist politics is often expressed as construction of the people against the elite, this paper argues that the political should rather be sought in how populism revives itself despite (and through) constant discursive shifts...

Amidst multiple foreign policy flip-flops of the Turkish government, the Middle East is where observers agree most about the explanatory priority of ideational factors over realpolitik calculations. The assertive foreign policy activism to extend the country’s role in the region has largely been linked to the Islamist leanings of the ruling Justice...

Inspired by the populists’ salient urge to recalibrate and locate contingent developments within a larger temporal order and establish historical continuity, this paper dwells on the chronopolitics of national populism and calls for a systematic treatment of time in these movements. Focusing on the neglected narrative dimension, such an inquiry wil...

The Kemalist reforms are on shaky ground today. However, it is Kemalism’s key power that it informs even its rivals. Again, it is its self-defeating success in mobilising the masses towards socio-economic development that created new classes and outlooks, now serving to challenge the founding ideology. While Kemalism is still the most successful mo...

This chapter examines the foreign policies of contemporary populist leaderships in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We adopt a comparative regional approach to “populist foreign policy” (PFP) in MENA, seeking to identify commonalities and differences that distinguish PFP in these countries, as well as national and international factors that...

Diasporas do not arise from fixed connections to objective circumstances such as dispersion or relation to a homeland, but instead constantly are negotiated and re-constituted. Ranging from internal gradual change to sudden exogenous change, the re-making of a diaspora can take diverse forms. Despite the prevalence of constructivist and processual...

In global migration debates, Turkey comes to mind for its hosting of 3.7 million Syrians, the largest cross-border population of forcibly displaced people today. However, Turkey is also one of the top emigration countries, with over 6.7 million Turks living abroad and another three million having returned to Turkey permanently after being abroad. T...

Populists in power often resort to the politicisation of foreign policy to generate domestic support. This article explores this process. First, it conceptualises populist politicisation of foreign policy. Second, it develops expectations on how such politicisation will take place: the distinctive features of populism (the intensity of populist dis...

Post-truth is the latest entanglement of politics and power with truth claims. Epitomized by a disregard for facts, post-truth undermines the very foundations of reality and rationality while altering how politics unfolds. Beginning with a theoretical elaboration of post-truth, this chapter outlines the trajectory of the politics of truth in the Tu...

Much attention has been paid to the ongoing Islamisation under AKP rule in Turkey. Yet while President Tayyip Erdoğan nowadays relies more on coercion, the focus on the aforementioned ideological transformation overlooks the key relevance of the new security regime now dominating Turkish politics. Efforts to establish the New Turkey have culminated...

Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under Pr...

This article scrutinises the extraterritorial repression strategies of contemporary non-democracies, as evidenced by the Turkish Justice and Development Party’s efforts to purge the Gülen Movement globally after the 2016 coup attempt. Adopting “repertoire”, as conceptualised by Charles Tilly, this article explores it in light of “extraterritorial r...

Facing a heavy-handed crackdown since the 15 July 2016 abortive coup, many Gülenists are fleeing Turkey and seeking refuge mostly in European countries. With this ongoing influx, a Gülenist diaspora is in the making. The fall from grace and the traumatic experience of exile have paved the way for heated internal debates on what went wrong and how t...

Turkey’s presidential and general elections, held on 24 June 2018, marked a significant turn in Turkish politics. The controversial referendum of 2017 narrowly approved constitutional amendments that replaced the parlia- mentary system with an executive presidential one. With the 2018 presidential vote those amendments took effect, sealing Turkey’s...

Contemporary developments throughout the world have been marked by post-truth politics. Epitomized by a disregard for truth coupled with a reliance on emotive arguments, the term ‘post-truth politics’ has not yet been adequately reflected upon by political or social theory. This article uses Turkey’s 15 July (2016) abortive coup as an entry point t...

This study examines the conception of nationhood developed by a political movement referred to as Ulusalcılık (nationalism), which emerged at the turn of the century. We focus on ways in which the Ulusalcı movement makes use of nation-building techniques to establish and propagate its own version of Turkish nationhood as one that is primordially se...

Although organized independently, both the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and the Gülen Movement (GM) have primarily addressed the same base and acted as mediums of upward mobility for Sunni Anatolian conservatives. Targeted by the old secular establishment, AKP and GM forged a mutually beneficial relationship in 20...

The dualistic separation between the public and private assumes natural and stable boundaries between these spheres. However, a perspective that relies on binaries may deprive certain groups, practices and processes associated with specific spheres from diverse experiences. For instance, women wanting to move from the private sphere and join the po...

With the tremendous visibility of popular mobilization in the last decade, scholars have increasingly directed their attention to the streets to examine the dynamics of power and resistance. Among emerging venues of politics, this study examines street art and graffiti as a performance of resistance in the 2011 Tahrir Revolution and 2013 Gezi Prote...

This study historicizes and contextualizes the contrasting representations of Alevism in the early writings of Stephen van Rensselaer Trowbridge, a Protestant missionary, and Baha Said Bey, a Turkish activist and researcher. Both Trowbridge and Baha Said undertook extensive research on Alevi culture in the early twentieth century. Though their work...

Guillermo O’Donnell’s influential work ‘Delegative Democracy’ set the discourse on a peculiar type of democracy. Lying between representative democracy and authoritarianism, the uniqueness of delegative democracy lies in its features, including an absence of horizontal accountability, strong centralised rule, individual leadership with unchecked po...

Since the mid-1980s, music has become a site of resistance and political mobilization for Turkish Islamists. Based on interviews with prominent Islamist musicians and analyses of a cross-section of their albums, this paper examines the development of Islamist music in secular Turkey. In order to elaborate upon the power struggle between the secular...

While in Western discourse terrorism first referred to the “Reign of Terror” imposed by the Jacobin state in France (1793–94), in recent decades it has become increasingly associated with non-state actors. Studies on the undertheorized concept of “state terrorism” have by and large neglected its role in liberal democratic states. In this essay I at...

The Gladio Scandal in Europe and, more recently, Turkey's Ergenekon trials highlight the importance of hidden power networks behind the façade of parliamentary democracy. Dubbed as "deep state" in the Turkish context, the phenomenon suffers from a scarcity of scholarly analyses. This paper demonstrates the lack of academic interest in this complex...

Since 2011, the Arab uprisings, signaling a new wave of political mobilization, have restored belief in the potential for civil society to make democratic openings. Nevertheless, the academic literature up to the present has attributed the enduring authoritarianism in the Middle East region to the weakness or dominantly Islamist nature of civil soc...

Identifying Islamophobia as a specific category of cultural racism is quite new and relates to the rise of identity politics in the late twentieth century (Weller, 2006). It is a new label for an old phenomenon that was popularized in the wake of terrorist attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001 attack. Specifically, anti-Muslim prejudi...

Honor killings are acts of murder intended to wipe out the shame a woman has supposedly brought to her family by actual or alleged “immoral” behavior. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that over 5,000 females are being killed each year by male relatives who accuse them of bringing dishonor on their families and community. These crimes of...

In September 2005, the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten ran twelve cartoons that satirically depicted the Prophet Muhammad and offended many Muslims throughout the world. The Danish response was to assert that the cartoons were printed in the name of freedom of speech without proffering an apology for any offense. This engendered great anger among Musl...

In 1981, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) was shot and wounded in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish citizen for reasons still remain unknown. The Pope, however, both forgave Ağca three days after the shooting and also visited him in prison shortly thereafter. In 2000, Italian President Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Ağca, who had been i...

is paper focuses on the psychological functions of nationalism using the case of the mo-dern Greek nation-building process. It also attempts to prove that nations embrace mul-tiple, sometimes conflicting references from the past in order to maintain the national self-esteem. e resulted ambivalence in the very definition of the nation can be compens...