No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Abstract
This article argues that the AKP has dismantled secularism in Turkey through stealth Islamization. Defined as incremental and top-down Islamization of social and political life, this process entails four processes: (1) institutionalization of Turkish Islamist political imaginary; (2) redesigning the Diyanet and public education system to spread Islamic beliefs and practices (da'wa); (3) the privileging of Muslim identity at the expense of secular choices, whose costs have increased substantially; and (4) return of Islam to the public space through changes in the built environment. This article unpacks these four processes, which entails AKP's colonization of the state to Islamize society.
... This also means distinguishing between different types of social and political activism as well as ideological perspectives that are grounded Islam, considering the concept's origin and the historical foundations that shaped its meaning and usage in different contexts. For example, the so called 'Islamist' (Gumuscu 2024) politics of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey cannot be described without reference to the relevance of the history of secularization, institutional regulation of religion by the Presidency of Religious Affairs 2 (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), especially since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, and the impact of these on public sociopolitical attitudes concerning religion. Reconsideration of the term Islamism descriptively as such in a particular context can make important empirical and theoretical contributions to political science scholarship. ...
This article demonstrates that concept of ‘Islamism’ is sometimes used arbitrarily in political science literature to describe ideological political activism, supposedly grounded in Islam, and argues that descriptive work can improve the academic engagement with Islam by acknowledging the pitfalls of naming ideologies that are affiliated with religions. Instead of labeling a broad range of political activism as Islamism in an arbitrary fashion and/or taking such labels for granted and proceeding with causal inquiry and inferences in reference to such labels, scholars can communicate the nuances in different forms and actors of activism to the readers by descriptively specifying the who, the what, and the when of the activisms that quote particular religions as their subject matters or motives—the histories, agencies, contexts, and contents that elaborate on what is in a name.
... The government relied on its parliamentary majority to pass omnibus bills and enacted decrees in law-35 in 2011 alone-to reorganize the state institutions and redefine bureaucratic ranks (Özcan & Kimya, 2023;Yılmaz, 2020: 269). In line with its assertive and revisionist foreign policy during the Arab Spring protests, the government launched a process of stealth Islamization of the country to increase the role of religion both in political and social life (Gumuscu, 2023(Gumuscu, , 2024. ...
What accounts for the variation in the judiciary’s ability to serve as a democratic guardrail under populist rule? This article contends that populist governments
use judicial activism against their political agenda to portray courts as institutions that curtail popular sovereignty and subsequently adopt a democratizing discourse to conceal their assault on the judiciary. Based on the Turkish case under the rule of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), it explores how the judiciary’s democratic deficits provided a legitimation strategy for the ruling party’s gradual capture of the courts. During its initial term, the right-wing populist AKP government faced staunch opposition from high courts aligned with the secular establishment. In response, it strategically used the Turkish Constitutional Court’s counter-majoritarian decisions to legitimize its actions, paving the way for court-packing and other forms of judicial manipulation through a series of constitutional amendments. These changes set a dangerous precedent for future clashes with the judiciary, hastening the erosion of Turkish democracy and the subsequent shift toward a competitive authoritarian regime.
The first Islamist parties to come to power through democratic means in the Muslim world were those in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 election in Turkey, and Ennahda (Renaissance Party) in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were both elected in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2010/11. Yet only Ennahda could be said to have fulfilled its democratic promise, with both the Turkish and Egyptian governments reverting to authoritarianism. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in three countries, Sebnem Gumuscu explains why some Islamist governments adhered to democratic principles and others took an authoritarian turn following electoral success. Using accessible language, Gumuscu clearly introduces key theories and considers how intra-party affairs impacted each party's commitment to democracy. Through a comparative lens, Gumuscu identifies broader trends in Islamist governments and explains the complex web of internal dynamics that led political parties either to advance or subvert democracy.
For most of the twentieth century, Turkey has enjoyed a relatively liberal relationship with alcohol. In keeping with the secular vision of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish Republic’s venerated founder, the state has decriminalised and even encouraged the consumption and production of alcoholic beverages in a predominantly conservative Muslim society. As a result, drinking has become an accepted social norm amongst Turkish citizens, particularly amongst those pertaining to a secular lifestyle. However, the previous decade has witnessed some dramatic reversals in both social and state attitudes towards alcohol. Ever since the accession to power of the neo-liberal and pious conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in 2002, alcohol has become a deeply divisive, contentious issue in contemporary Turkish society. This chapter expands on the symbolic significance of alcohol in Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’.
This article studies Islamisation in Turkey by analysing some performances of the Supreme Council of Radio and Television (RTÜK), the state agency with the duty of licensing and supervising the various media organizations. As the article demonstrates, Islamisation at RTÜK occurs with its informal incorporation of Islamic ethical principles in its professional decisions. This instance of Islamisation is significant, for it operates informally by engaging Islamic rules directly. RTÜK demonstrates neatly how a state agency can reference Islamic principles in the very act of justifying the rationale of its official decisions about the content of the media organ under its review. It is with such analyses that this article aims to propose a more rigorous conceptualisation and explanation of Islamisation in Turkey than the ones commonly available in the literature: It provides an in-depth analysis of Islamisation in the news media, a field that Islamist political actors know full well to be strategic in the transformation of a society; and by demonstrating that Islamisation endeavours in Turkey are not confined to the obvious organs of propagandisation like the news media, but they penetrate informally also the supposedly neutral statutory rules and regulations.
The literature on populism overwhelmingly deals with the factors behind the rise of populism: the supply factors, and the economic and political crises. However, there is a lack of engagement in the literature on the construction of populist narratives and especially on the relations between populist narratives and violence. This paper addresses these gaps. Based on an empirically rich case study of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader President Recep T. Erdoğan, it shows that the populist narrative of the party and its leader is necropolitical as it is based on narratives of martyrdom, blood and death. The paper also shows that to maintain authoritarian stability, the incumbents instrumentalise these populist necropolitical narratives for repression, legitimation and co-optation. We analyse this complex case by combining the literatures on populism, necropolitics, politics of martyrdom and authoritarianism, and contribute to all of them.
This article discusses the recent politics of space in Turkey during the rule of the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi , AKP) through a focus on the capital city of Ankara. In order to analyze the recent politics of space in Turkey, the article elaborates upon the recent politics of toponym changes and the discourse over space and place in the Turkish capital. Particular attention is paid to the spatialization of neo-Ottoman, Islamist, and populist discourses and to the production of various representational and counter-representational spaces. One of the key foci of the article is its elaboration on the new Presidential Complex ( Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi ) as a case that, in its representational and conceptual aspects, reflects the spatialization of Islamist and populist discourses and symbolizes the recent transformations of social space and the emergent sociospatial order in Turkey.
This paper asserts that Turkish secularism and Islamism represent two faces of one coin – contemporary Turkish politics – when one considers their goals and strategies. The two ideological movements have shaped one another and each now seeks to impose itself as superior. This article unpacks these differences and similarities in the following steps: (a) it defines the socio-historic modes of Turkish secularism and (b) examines its social and political origins; (c) it then explores Islam’s return to the public domain as an oppositional Turkish identity; (d) and thereafter considers the diverse understandings of secularism resulting from neoliberal policies that relaxed state control over Islam, which then prompted socially-acceptable reinterpretations of Islam; and finally (e) describes how the AKP’s has re-imagined secularism while (mis)using Islam as a political instrument. The comparison highlights such commonalties as a collectivist character, a desire for state control as a vehicle to realize an ideology, intolerance of diversity and criminalization of other perspectives, and the differentiation of religion as morality in the private sphere versus its cultural role in the public sphere. It concludes that, under the AKP government, Islam is used as a tool to consolidate the power of Erdoğan’s kleptocratic regime.
This article argues that Turkey’s contemporary political regime is competitive authoritarianism. Tracing the evolution of Turkey’s political system from tutelary democracy to its current state, it describes the developments that resulted in the dissolution of the army’s prerogatives in politics and the rise of a new form of authoritarianism in the country. Associating this substantive change with the global emergence of competitive authoritarianism, I argue that the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey has been institutionalized by the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi , AKP) and that, since the 2017 referendum, the regime has displayed a tendency toward full authoritarianism that may render elections non-competitive by narrowing the legal channels through which the opposition can contest for political power.
This article examines the circumstances shaping the evolution of the Gülen movement. Once considered a relatively liberal and pluralistic Islamic movement based in Turkey, the movement later succumbed to authoritarianism and illiberalism following its political alliance with the AK Party and their subsequent falling out. The paper opens with a brief overview of the historical context of the relationship between state and society in the Ottoman Empire and then examines the politicization of Islam as a movement of resistance against the modernizing reforms of the Kemalist state. The complex interplay of these factors culminated in the construction of a secular communalism in Turkey. The remainder of the paper focuses on the triangulated relationship among state, society, and religion, targeting the alliance and political struggles between the AK Party and the Gülen movement. The paper concludes that once legal and political checks and balances are removed, Islamic movements bend towards authoritarian tendencies seeking to monopolize or, at least, influence nearly every sphere of social and political life. After a decade-long experiment with Islamic movements in power, Turkey—increasingly authoritarian in character and socially fragmented—is experiencing the most serious institutional crisis in its history as a modern republic.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, AKP, was for many years believed to be paramount in ushering in a new era of moderate Islamism. However, in recent years, AKP has troublingly reversed course. From violent repression of the Gezi protests of 2013 to the 2016 abortive coup and subsequent crackdown on opposition, the party has lost all semblance of moderate Islamism and radicalized. If AKP had truly moderated, how could the party have changed in such a short period of time? What explains the radicalization of AKP? First, we argue that the strategic benefits of moderation far outweighed its costs, rendering it analytically improbable to determine whether AKP’s actions were genuine or merely strategic. Second, we show that AKP has been in a process of radicalization characterized by the adoption of anti-system, anti-democratic, and violent tactics and rhetoric since 2011. The disappearance of domestic and international structural constraints created the requisite background conditions for the party’s radicalization. Radicalization was facilitated by what we call ‘Erdoganization’, an ongoing de-institutionalization process within which Tayyip Erdogan gained complete control over the party. Additionally, a series of four “external shocks” threatened the party’s primary goal of gaining hegemony and caused the party to radicalize.
In recent years, several observers of Turkey have recognised a novel development in Turkish politics: the rise of Erdoganism. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personality and style have come to embody the Turkish nation, the state and its economic, social and political institutions. But what is Erdoganism? What are its main attributes? Is it a mere ideology or the name of the emerging political regime in Turkey? While commentators have provided several observations of Erdoganism, it has not been duly examined on its own in the academic literature. This paper’s main premise is that in Turkey, a new political regime has emerged in recent years which can best be defined as Erdoganism. Erdoganism has four main dimensions: electoral authoritarianism as the electoral system, neopatrimonialism as the economic system, populism as the political strategy and Islamism as the political ideology. We first explain why we think Erdoganism is a better concept to define the emerging political regime in Turkey. We briefly discuss Sultanism, Khomeinism and Kemalism in order to produce a set of references for our discussion of Erdoganism. We then provide a thorough analysis, explaining the ways in which Erdoganism manifests itself through electoral authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism, populism and Islamism.
Despite the remarkable scholarly attention to populism and populist parties, the relation between populism and religion remains understudied. Using evidence from two long-term ruling populist parties – Turkey’s Justice and Development Party and Macedonia’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity – this study focuses on how and why religion can be an instrument for populist politics at three levels: (i) discursive, (ii) public policy and (iii) institutionalised alliances with religious authorities. The study highlights that religion comes into play at these three levels once populists attain comfortable electoral margins but encounter mounting political and economic challenges that can potentially weaken their grip on power. Ruling populists co-opt and monopolise the majority religion in the name of ‘the people’s will’ as they increasingly undermine democratic legitimacy but they need to justify their systematic crackdown on dissent, the system of checks and balances, the rule of law and minorities. The empirical findings of the study also demonstrate the dual function of religion for populists: its catch-all potential to create cross-class and cross-ethnicity popular support, and its instrumentality to discredit dissent as ‘religiously unfit’ while constructing an antagonism of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elites’.
Makalede, İslam siyasi tarih ve İslam siyasi düşünceler tarihinde iktidarın itikatlaştırılması sorunsalının teorik, tarihsel ve teopolitik yönleri eleştirel analize tabi tutulmakta ve günümüz örnekleri üzerinden bir inceleme yapılmaktadır.
What do we learn from Turkey and Tunisia regarding the relationship between political Islamism and democratization? Variables identified by current research such as autonomy, " moderation " , and cooperation with secular actors can cut both ways depending on various political-institutional conditions and prerogatives. Particularly, the article argues that preoccupation with " conquering the state from within as opposed to democratizing it " has been a key priority and intervening variable undermining the democratizing potential of the main Turkish and Tunisian political Islamic actors – primarily the AKP and Ennahda. These actors have prioritized acceptance by and ownership of their respective nation states over other goals and strategies, such as revolutionary takeover or Islamization of the state and confrontations with state elites. This has led to a relative neglect of designing and building institutions, whether for Islamic or democratic transformation. Hence, while contributing to democratization at various stages, these actors have a predisposition to adopt and regenerate, reframe and at times augment the authoritarian properties of their states. Research should ask how secular and religious actors can agree on institutions of vertical and horizontal state accountability that would help to address the past and present sources of the interest of political Islamists in conquering rather than democratizing the state.
Turkey’s ‘authoritarian turn’ in recent years indicates a democratic breakdown that can best be analysed by analytically distinguishing between two simultaneous developments. The first is the reproduction of Turkey’s long-existing semi-democratic regime – which the article calls old authoritarianism – in a new historical and dominant political–ideological context and under an Islamist-leaning government. The second is the emergence of a new type of authoritarianism – dubbed new authoritarianism – that is in many respects unprecedented for Turkey, is in need of better comprehension and displays important parallels with contemporary troubles of democracy in the world. Focusing on political society and institutions is insufficient to adequately examine the emergent authoritarian regime, for example to identify it as a regime type, to explain its popular support and to foresee how durable and repressive, and to what extent party-based rather than personalistic, it may become. It is necessary to combine insights from the new political economy of welfare, transition and communication with those from political and institutional democratization. Doing so suggests that new authoritarianism generates a new kind of state–society relationship where, paradoxically, political power becomes simultaneously more particularistic, personalized and mass-based. Hence, new authoritarianism has democratizing potential, but can also become more oppressive than any other regime Turkey has previously experienced. Oscillation between these two outcomes is also possible.
The loss of reform momentum and rising authoritarianism during the most recent phase of AKP government indicate that Turkish democracy is in crisis. Although the Gezi protests emerged as a movement from below reacting to the rising authoritarianism of the AKP government, it did not turn into an organised and sustainable movement. Similarly, external anchors or reputational effects are failing to reverse the backsliding of Turkish democracy. The notion of ‘bounded communities’ is a key concept in accounting for the continued dominance of Erdoğan and the AKP in the face of significant pressure for change. Erdoğan’s victory in the August 2014 presidential elections generates both benign and pessimistic scenarios for the future of Turkish democracy.
An influential political science literature argues that integration of radical political parties within the political system leads to their moderation. These parties trade off their ideological platforms for electoral viability and political legality. Radicals become moderates through strategic interests. In this article, I revisit this thesis and apply it to the Islamic political actors in Iran and Turkey by employing the comparative method of agreement. Three conclusions are reached. First, moderation helps explain the evolution of Islamists into Muslim reformers. Second, moderation is a double-edged sword, especially in regimes with strong un-democratic characteristics. Moderation of radicals may result in their domestication - a situation that does not contribute to democratic transition or consolidation. Finally, change in the ideologies of political elites is central in our understanding behavioural change. The data sources include ethnography, primary language sources and historical narratives.
This study sets out to explain the general characteristics of current Turkish foreign policy where it examines the interplay between important world events and emergent novel ideas at four different levels of analysis (conceptual setting, micro‐setting, domestic macro‐setting, and external macro‐setting). The new Turkish foreign policy vision and its normative strategy, derived from Davutoğlu's Strategic Depth, have been blended with five new principles: balance between security and freedom; zero problems with neighbors; multidimensional and multi‐track policies; a new diplomatic discourse based on firm flexibility; and rhythmic diplomacy.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had been in government since 2002, increased its votes dramatically in the 2007 national elections. It was a first since the 1954 and 1977 elections in Turkey. With immaculate Islamist credentials, had those who voted for the AKP actually voted for political Islam in 2007? Or, were there some other factors at play? This study examines the determinants of party preferences of Turkish voters in 2007. The nationally representative pre‐election survey of 2007 is used in the statistical analysis, which reveals that partisan affiliations followed by the voter satisfaction with the performance of the economy played the biggest role in determining the voter preferences in Turkey in the 2007 elections.
In November of 2002, the Justice and Development Party swept to victory in the Turkish parliamentary elections. Because of the party’s Islamic roots, its electoral triumph has sparked a host of questions both in Turkey and in the West: Does the party harbor a secret Islamist agenda? Will the new government seek to overturn nearly a century of secularization stemming from Kemal Atatürk’s early-twentieth-century reforms? Most fundamentally, is Islam compatible with democracy? In this penetrating work, M. Hakan Yavuz seeks to answer these questions, and to provide a comprehensive analysis of Islamic political identity in Turkey. He begins in the early twentieth century, when Kemal Atatürk led Turkey through a process of rapid secularization and crushed Islamic opposition to his authoritarian rule. Yavuz argues that, since Atatürk’s death in 1938, however, Turkey has been gradually moving away from his militant secularism and experiencing “a quiet Muslim reformation.” Islamic political identity is not homogeneous, says Yavuz, but can be modern and progressive as well as conservative and potentially authoritarian. While the West has traditionally seen Kemalism as an engine for reform against “reactionary” political Islam, in fact the Kemalist establishment has traditionally used the “Islamic threat” as an excuse to avoid democratization and thus hold on to power. Yavuz offers an account of the “soft coup” of 1997, in which the Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment overthrew the democratically elected coalition government, which was led by the pro-Islamic Refah party. He argues that the soft coup plunged Turkey into a renewed legitimacy crisis which can only be resolved by the liberalization of the political system. The book ends with a discussion of the most recent election and its implications for Turkey and the Muslim world. Yavuz argues that Islamic social movements can be important agents for promoting a democratic and pluralistic society, and that the Turkish example holds long term promise for the rest of the Muslim world. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, this work offers a sophisticated new understanding of the role of political Islam in one of the world’s most strategically important countries.
What is populism? What is the relationship between populism and democracy? Populism: A Very Short Introduction presents populism as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite,” and that privileges popular sovereignty above all else. It illustrates the practical power of this ideology by describing populist movements of the modern era—European right-wing parties, left-wing presidents in Latin America, and the Tea Party movement in the United States—and charismatic populist leaders such as Juan Domingo Péron, H. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and Hugo Chávez. Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist forces constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics.
This chapter provides the experiences of LGBTQ individuals who have been subjected to discrimination, physical abuse, and death in Turkey within the context of Turkey’s attitudes towards LGBTQ members. This chapter narrates the story of Ahmet Yıldız, who is believed to have been killed by his father because he was gay; Hande Buse Seker, a sex worker, shot by a police officer who was a client of hers; and Hande Kader, a gay activist who was subjected to police violence and burned to death during the march of honor in 2015. Furthermore, the study includes the accounts of two laborers, one soldier, and one teacher. These stories of gay people suggest that all systems in Turkey are united in discriminatory policies against LGBTQ members, and that civil society organizations have been unable to protect gay rights. Even though the Turkish Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Turkey is a signatory, guaranteed equal rights, the rights of LGBTQ people have been, and will continue to be, abrogated until the country and its people develop a more enlightened and humane view.
What kind of duty do we have to try to stop other people doing wrong? The question is intelligible in just about any culture, but few of them seek to answer it in a rigourous fashion. The most striking exception is found in the Islamic tradition, where 'commanding right' and 'forbidding wrong' is a central moral tenet already mentioned in the Koran. As an historian of Islam whose research has ranged widely over space and time, Michael Cook is well placed to interpret this complex subject. His book represents the first sustained attempt to map the history of Islamic reflection on this obligation. It covers the origins of Muslim thinking about 'forbidding wrong', the relevant doctrinal developments over the centuries, and its significance in Sunni and Shi'ite thought today. In this way the book contributes to the understanding of Islamic thought, its relevance to contemporary Islamic politics and ideology, and raises fundamental questions for the comparative study of ethics.
Numerous studies have analyzed Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. This article focuses on the Diyanet’s new role in the politics of the family and argues that this role constitutes the main channel for its institutional expansion. By discussing the female preachers employed to reach more women and the Family Guidance Bureaus established to strengthen the family through religious guidance, the article looks at the ways in which both have expanded Diyanet’s institutional capacity to reshape gender and family relations along state-sanctioned religious lines. It also suggests that desecularization may offer a conceptual framework with which the implications of Diyanet’s expansion through familialist policies can be analyzed.
For most of the first decade of its rule, the AKP touted itself as an agent for democratization, receiving much support both inside and outside of Turkey. More recently, the AKP has taken a clear authoritarian turn, raising the issue of why many observers of Turkey, including myself, did not see this coming. This paper looks at some of the blinders that I, among others, wore as we assessed the AKP and prospects for democracy in Turkey. These included excessive faith in the European Union as an external force for democracy, a belief that the military and militant secularism were the primary obstacles to Turkish democracy, confidence that what the AKP represented was an archetype of an Islamic-oriented party that had been ‘moderated’ by political inclusion and its own ‘learning,’ and a belief in the democratic promise of modernization theory. The article’s objective is to open up a wider discussion of lessons learned from the AKP’s years in power and how scholars may wish to revise some of their assumptions about Turkey as well as the broader literature on democratization.
After decades of multiparty politics, Turkey is no longer a democracy. A theory-upending case, the country has descended into a competitive authoritarian regime under the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), despite rising income and education levels and strong links with the West. What accounts for democratic breakdown in such an unlikely case? Instead of ideological and institutional factors, we offer a political economy account. We contend that the coalitional ties that the AKP forged with businesses and the urban poor through the distribution of public resources has altered the cost of toleration for the party leadership and their dependent clients, while reducing the cost of suppression for incumbents. This new political calculus led to increasing authoritarianism of the AKP government through securitization of dissent, mounting repression, and systematic violation of civil liberties.
This study examines the relationship between religion and politics in current Turkish society, particularly since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) consolidated its power over state institutions and replaced the Kemalist establishment in the early 2010s. It argues that the AKP has re-instrumentalized the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and used its mosques to enact a performance of nationalism, deviating from a Kemalist, laicist-national identity towards a more encompassing, Ottomanist, religious one. After discussing the unique understanding of laicism in Turkey and the transformation of Diyanet as a state apparatus, content and discourse analyses are used to examine the texts of 1,200 Friday khutbas, weekly prayers that are ordinarily prepared and distributed nationwide by Diyanet. These indicate how citizens perform their nation simply by participating in gatherings, composing the congregation, listening to imams, and being exposed to the reminders of their (re-)identified nationality. The content analysis of Friday khutbas over three distinct periods—1927, 1997–2010, and 2011–2018—illustrates that, as political power shifts over time, the repetition of certain banal reminders used in the khutbas has resulted in different performances of the nation and that, under the rule of the AKP, a new performance has already begun.
Cambridge Core - American Studies - Crises of Democracy - by Adam Przeworski
For centuries, Rome and Istanbul have been representing and epitomizing two empires and two entities with both significant spiritual and temporal power: the Papacy and the Caliphate. During the 19th and the 20th centuries, these institutions underwent significant changes in a context of state secularization: in the case of the Papacy, there was a loss of temporal power and its “reduction” to a mainly moral authority; the Caliphate, on the other hand, was abolished after World War I, succeeded by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a bureaucratic body under state control, founded in the era of Kemalist secularism. Despite these changes, today both institutions still play a significant role in the public life and public policies of the Italian and the Turkish republics. While the Vatican is able to influence the Italian public sphere and public discourse through both its influence on common people and its lobbying activities in relation to political decision-makers, in Turkey the Diyanet has become the main tool in the reshaping of Turkish society (both by the Kemalists and, later, by Erdoğan's AKP). This paper will analyze their influence on the two countries’ public policies in relation to religious pluralism and to family-related issues, to show how different ideas of secularism, institutional arrangements, and historical paths have led to a very different role of the two institutions in the Italian and Turkish political systems.
New Islamist Architecture and Urbanism claims that, in today’s world, a research agenda concerning the relation between Islam and space has to consider the role of Islamism rather than Islam in shaping - and in return being shaped by - the built environment. The book tackles this task through an analysis of the ongoing transformation of Turkey under the rule of the pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party. In this regard, it is a topical book: a rare description of a political regime’s reshaping of urban and architectural forms whilst the process is alive. Defining Turkey’s transformation in the past two decades as a process of “new Islamist” nation-(re)building, the book investigates the role of the built environment in the making of an Islamist milieu. Drawing on political economy and cultural studies, it explores the prevailing primacy of nation and nationalism for new Islamism and the spatial negotiations between nation and Islam. It discusses the role of architecture in the deployment of history in the rewriting of nationhood and that of space in the expansion of Islamist social networks and cultural practices. Looking at examples of housing compounds, mosques, public spaces, and the new presidential residence, New Islamist Architecture and Urbanism scrutinizes the spatial making of new Islamism in Turkey through comparisons with relevant cases across the globe: urban renewal projects in Beirut and Amman, nativization of Soviet modernism in Baku and Astana, the presidential palaces of Ashgabat and Putrajaya, and the neo-Ottoman mosques built in diverse locations such as Tokyo and Washington DC.
This article discusses the “immoderation” of incumbent Islamic parties – defined by the pursuit of a moral agenda and by an unwillingness to compromise with the opposition – through a comparative study of four incumbent Islamic parties in the socio-politically different regimes of Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. Building on literature from religion and politics, social psychology, sociology of religion, and on the inclusion-moderation hypothesis, this study argues that (1) Islamic parties’ strong organizations resulted both in their success and in the absence of internal pluralism and that (2) their dominant status in the party system consolidated their majoritarian understanding of democracy. Through its discussion of “immoderation” this study aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary literature on religion and politics.
The results of the 2002 general election in Turkey came as a powerful shock to multifarious circles both within and outside the country. There were deep concerns that the ‘moderate’ Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) might try to dismantle the very bases of the secular state. Fifteen years of AKP rule have displayed four distinctively different periods: (1) Normalization and reinstitution of civil governance (2002–2007); (2) Methodological transition (2007–2009); (3) Consolidation of power-base (2009–2011); and (4) De-secularization, de-democratization, re-securitization and shift to authoritarianism (2011–2016). Drawing upon the ‘competitive authoritarianism’ literature and the concept of ‘instrumentalization of democracy,’ this article will elaborate the above points as well as the intrinsic Islamist mindset of the AKP. Use of foreign policy as an instrument of legitimation of Islamist policies and anti-secular transformation will also be examined.
The Arab Spring truly caught Turkey by surprise. In interpreting what was happening in the region, Turkey’s foreign policy-makers relied on a particular view, which helped steer Turkey’s foreign policy in the ensuing regional earthquake. This article seeks to dissect that view and deconstructs its main components mainly through the speeches of Ahmet Davutoğlu, who served as Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs during the heyday of the Arab Spring. The paper also illustrates how Davutoğlu’s interpretation heavily borrows from the Islamist interpretive frame of modern Turkish history. That frame, this article claims, originated in the late Ottoman period and has since evolved in contestation with alternative readings, both official and non-official. The article suggests that Davutoğlu’s view of the Arab Spring helps explain why Turkey welcomed the Arab Spring and advised Arab regimes to implement political reforms.
Revisiting some of the main tenets of the moderation theory, Çınar suggests three possible factors accounting for the Turkish AKP’s decay from a potentially “Muslim democrat” political force, embracing the universal principles of rule of law, human rights and pluralism, to a “populist authoritarian” political force. The latter redefines democracy in nativist terms to dismiss democratic opposition, centralize and concentrate power in its hands, and deploy the Islamic moralist language of “forbidding evil, commanding good” to legitimize its “instructive” policies. The three factors include strong leadership and internal party structure, the political context within which the AKP interacted with secular actors and the impact of the shifting international context on the revival of the AKP’s Islamist ideology.
Since its transition to a multiparty system in 1950, Turkey has witnessed six attempted military interventions in politics. Of these, four (1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997) were successful and two (1962 and 1963) failed. The latest coup attempt made world news late on the evening of 15 July 2016, when fighting broke out in Istanbul and Ankara and it seemed for a time as if the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader since 2002, might be falling. Yet as that dramatic midsummer evening and night wore on, something unprecedented happened: For the first time in modern Turkish history, a civilian government was able to call on its own mass following to stop a putsch in its tracks. © 2017 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press.
This article addresses the youth and education policies of the Turkey’s third Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government from 2011 to 2014. This government period was marked by the emergence of a new myth of youth in Turkey: the myth of a pious generation, aimed at replacing the previous myth of a modern and national youth, prevalent in Turkey’s political culture since the nineteenth century and reinforced by the Kemalist Republic. The article first situates the education and youth policies of the AKP in the history of youth in Turkey and discusses the continuities and ruptures between the Kemalist and AKP youth projects. Secondly, through a critical reading of the political discourses of AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and of specific youth and education policies of the government, the paper conceptualizes this newly emerging myth in the context of neoliberal economic and conservative social policies of the AKP government and its aim to control the future through reshaping the young.
This article focuses on the complex relations between Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (the Diyanet) and the AKP in the last decade. It claims that the Diyanet, under AKP rule, has been transformed into a pliable state apparatus geared towards implementing the political ideology of the ruling cadre. In exploring this recent transformation, it analyses the ways in which this institution’s role has become synchronized with the ruling party’s discourses and actions, by giving examples from recent discussions on gender, social media, political economy and relations with other social groups.
Authoritarianism has been undergoing a metamorphosis. Historically, authoritarians openly repressed opponents by violence and harassment and subverted the rule of law to perpetuate their rule. The post- Cold War crackdown on these transparently authoritarian practices provided significant incentives to avoid them. Instead, the new generation of authoritarians learned to perpetuate their power through the same legal mechanisms that exist in democratic regimes. In so doing, they cloak repressive practices under the mask of law, imbue them with the veneer of legitimacy, and render anti-democratic practices much more difficult to detect and eliminate. This Article offers a comprehensive cross-regional account of that phenomenon, which I term "stealth authoritarianism." Drawing on rationalchoice theory, the Article explains the expansion of stealth authoritarianism across different case studies. The Article fills a void in the literature, which has left undertheorized the authoritarian learning that occurred after the Cold War and the emerging reliance on legal, particularly sub-constitutional, mechanisms to perpetuate political power. Although stealth authoritarian practices are more prevalent in nondemocracies, the Article illustrates that they can also surface in regimes with favorable democratic credentials, including the United States. In so doing, the Article aims to orient the scholarly debate towards regime practices, rather than regime types.
Referring to the linkages between neoliberal social policies and religious forms of governmentality, this article analyses the Islamisation of Turkey under the rule of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) since 2002. It discusses the strategies, discourses, and policies deployed by the AKP to take control of the state, with a particular focus on the changing environment of social policies. The focus is on the growing importance of the family, faith-based voluntary organisations, charities, education, and Islam for AKP rule. It concludes with brief reference to the #Occupygezi movement, which was partly a response to the Islamisation pursued by the AKP government.
The cleavage between the secular centre and the religious-conservative periphery has been the most important dividing line in modern Turkish politics. In the past, centre-right parties have successfully appealed to the peripheral majority, emerging as victors in almost all parliamentary elections since 1950. This trend continues with the Justice and Development Party (AKP). In power since 2002, winner of three consecutive elections with increasing majorities, the AKP qualifies as a predominant party. The article focuses on the AKP's recent drift towards an excessively majoritarian conception of democracy, or even an electoral authoritarianism of a more markedly Islamic character. Topics discussed include the Gezi Park events in May–June 2013, the conflict with the Gülen movement, corruption charges against government ministers, recent legislation weakening judicial independence and restricting freedom of expression, and the 30 March 2014 local elections.
This article studies variation in conflict theater choice by Western jihadists in an effort to understand their motivations. Some militants attack at home, whereas others join insurgencies abroad, but few scholars have asked why they make these different choices. Using open-source data, I estimate recruit supply for each theater, foreign fighter return rates, and returnee impact on domestic terrorist activity. The tentative data indicate that jihadists prefer foreign fighting, but a minority attacks at home after being radicalized, most often through foreign fighting or contact with a veteran. Most foreign fighters do not return for domestic operations, but those who do return are more effective operatives than nonveterans. The findings have implications for our understanding of the motivations of jihadists, for assessments of the terrorist threat posed by foreign fighters, and for counterterrorism policy.
The period leading up to the July balloting exposed a key fault line in Turkish society. On one side of the divide were those who supported the economic and political reform process that the AKP had undertaken since coming to power in the elections of November 2002. The main objective of the second of the "two Turkeys" is the preservation of the Republic as a unitary, strictly secular, and nationalist country rather than one which adopts federal or confederal arrangements to accommodate the Kurds, permits Islam to make its weight felt in the public sphere, and opens itself up decisively to transnational influences.
The Islamization of Turkey has been an ongoing process since the 1970s and was exacerbated by the 1980 military coup. The Turkish‐Islamic synthesis had been conceived as an antidote against communism and became a salient policy. The atmosphere became increasingly convenient for Islamists to participate in politics as well as in socioeconomic forums. The ruling AKP defines itself as conservative democratic. Tariqats have been educating young cadres to fulfill the Islamization mission. Prime Minister Erdoğan monopolizes foreign relations, which result in diplomatic scandals and cause people to ask whether Turkey is changing direction. Counterbalancing forces remain confrontational. Paradigm shifts in practicing politics are sorely needed.