Browsing by Subject "AKP"
Now showing 1 - 18 of 18
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access A muslim feminist NGO in Turkey: The case of Havle Women Association(Bilkent University, 2023-08) Önal, ZeynepThis thesis focuses on the Islam-based feminist stance of Havle Women’s Association (HWA), its intellectual offerings and unique place in Turkey’s feminist movement. A newcomer to Turkey’s feminist movement, HWA was founded in Istanbul in 2018 and framed itself as “the first Muslim Feminist Women’s Association in Turkey”. The thesis examines HWA as a case study of Muslim - decolonial feminism in Turkey. By engaging with Islamic feminism and decolonial feminism literature, the study aims to investigate whether HWA produces new feminist direction in Turkey, how does HWA formulate its identity towards authoritarian AKP rule, Western stereotyped feminism, and Sunni-orthodox Islam understanding. I claim that by rejecting AKP’s enforced domination about gender roles and political implications, HWA produces an alternative framework for thinking about women’s issues from a Qur’an-based perspective. Parallel to this, the NGO also serves as the first and only initiation to the practice of modern and global Muslim feminist conceptualization in Turkey. Besides, by challenging mainstream women identity formulations, resisting Islam-referenced patriarchy, AKP’s hegemonic domination on gender-related matters and modernization and westernization stereotypes in Turkey, HWA produce an alternative perspective for its working area. Under the light of these, this study discusses HWA as a new intellectual direction for Turkey’s feminist movement.Item Open Access A process-oriented approach towards democratic backsliding: evidence from Hungary and Turkey(Bilkent University, 2023-07) Işık Canpolat, Ece AdviyeThis thesis explores different factors affecting the democratic backsliding process in today's world, where a cult of personality is established by using populism as the essential tool for achieving their goals. Considering the importance of weakening the checks and balances system, it also sheds light on other factors as the structure of the internal party organization, personalization of politics, and the political culture. Conducting a comparative case study analysis on Turkey and Hungary, this research aims to take a step forward in the democratic backsliding literature. Taking one step forward from the argument that democratic backsliding takes place when the checks and balances system abolishes, the research asks, "what happens after supposing that such governments do not fit the doctrine of separation of powers?" Through examining Turkey and Hungary as examples of hybrid regimes taking steps toward democratic backsliding day by day under AKP’s and Fidesz’s rule, the research seeks an answer to the question of "after diminishing the checks and balances system, what takes place and affects the democratic backsliding process in such examples?"Item Open Access Ambiguous break and vague transformation: The changing nature of capitalism during AKP rule in Turkey(Bilkent University, 2023-08) Arıcı, CemaliIn a conjuncture where global capitalism is undergoing changes and industrialised economies have begun moving away from the policies adopted during the last four decades, emerging economies have been adopting new growth regimes for some time. Large emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil have successfully pursued policies with a more intensive role of the state in the economy, which some scholars have explained in terms of a state-permeated capitalism model. During the last decade, Turkey’s political economy has undergone noticeable changes that seem to depart from the neoliberal paradigm that emerged in the 1980s and was reinforced in the early years of the 2000s. While the potential presence of state capitalism in Turkey has attracted the attention of scholars of political economy, the recent dynamics of capitalism in Turkey present a complex picture. Seeking to contribute to a better understanding of the changing nature of capitalism in Turkey, this thesis investigates potential transformations in Turkey’s political economy by analysing it in terms of the state-permeated capitalism framework. Based on an analysis of the model’s main components – namely, coordination mechanisms, institutional domains (corporate governance, finance for investments, industrial relations, education and training, innovation, and domestic markets), and institutional complementarities and clusters – the thesis points to the possible transformation of Turkey’s economy towards a hybrid form of capitalism, that preserves some liberal elements while also reflecting some features of the state-permeated capitalism model.Item Restricted Bir Türk bürokratı: Vecdi Gönül(Bilkent University, 2022) Meral, Derin; Kılıç, Mehmet Ali; Arslan, Emre Batın; Gök, Betül; Erkuş, Ayşe Alin12 Eylül 1980 askeri darbesi ile başlayan ve günümüze kadar uzanan süreç, Türkiye'nin kurumlarının ve dinamiklerinin yenilendiği kritik bir dönem olmuştur. Bu bağlamda özellikle ANAP ve AKP, döneme damgasını vuran iki siyasi parti olmuştur. Vecdi Gönül, darbe öncesi dönemde başta Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü olmak üzere birtakım önemli mevkilerde bulunmuş olsa da, özellikle darbe sonrası dönemde bahsi geçen her iki parti için de kilit bir rol oynamış ve Türk siyasetini derinden etkilemiştir. Ankara ve İzmir Valiliği, İçişleri Bakanlığı Müsteşarlığı, Sayıştay Başkanlığı, Milli Savunma Bakanlığı yapmış olan Gönül'ün, aynı zamanda Başbakanlık Müsteşarlığı, İçişleri Bakanlığı, Dışişleri Bakanlığı ve Cumhurbaşkanlığı yapması da söz konusu olmuştur. Bürokrat kişiliğiyle bilinen Gönül, tüm bu önemli rollerine rağmen gerek siyasi analizlerde gerek de halkın gözünde geri planda kalmıştır. Dolayısıyla bu araştırma, Türk yakın tarihini anlamak için büyük değer taşıyan Vecdi Gönül’ün bu dönemdeki rollerini açıklamaktadır.Item Open Access Changing naturalization discourses for neoliberal mega projects under AKP rule : cases of 3rd bridge, 3rd airport and canal Istanbul(Bilkent University, 2017-08) Eriş, HacerThis thesis elaborates on the question of how Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) articulation of legitimization discourses for mega projects such as 3rd Bridge, 3rd Airport and Canal Istanbul changes in line with the rising opposition at both domestic and international levels. The thesis utilizes Historical Marxist Geography’s insights to indicate the issues to be legitimized about the neoliberal urban practices; such as gentrification of cities, strengthening of class-relations, rent seeking motives behind urban management and exclusion of majority from the decision-making procedures. While Marxist geographers argue that the elites articulate legitimization discourses based on economic development, environmental sustainability and urban security promises; they tend to ignore the socio-political context. This thesis directs attention to the socio-political atmosphere to analyze how AKP elites articulate their naturalization discourses. The historical process of AKP’s construction of hegemony over domestic politics led to the emergence of strong opposition since 2013. The evolution of the Party’s articulation of the opposition and further othering practices against it will be analyzed to demonstrate how AKP has articulated these developments for the legitimization discourses of neoliberal mega projects. To understand the changes in legitimization discourses, the Critical Discourse Analysis will be employed on the speeches given by AKP elites between 2010-2013 - in the absence of widespread opposition - and after 2013, when the government had started to face strong opposition in domestic and international arenas and pursued further othering practices against alleged enemies.Item Open Access Embattled ballots, quiet streets: Competitive authoritarianism and dampening anti-government protests in Turkey(Routledge, 2022-09-16) Kahvecioğlu, Anıl; Patan, S.Mass protests frequently occur in electoral autocracies. However, the opposite is true in Turkey, despite mounting grievances and a strong opposition presence with institutional resources. We argue that competitive authoritarian regimes, a subset of electoral autocracies, may dampen mass protests, allowing the opposition an opportunity to defeat the incumbents through elections. Studying Turkey’s main opposition party, we identify three mechanisms that show how politicians strategically respond to the regime’s incentives and constraints leading to protest-averse behaviour. First, the regime’s repression capacity discourages the opposition from openly supporting a mass protest. Second, the opposition learns to target the median voter, which leads to political moderation and protest averseness. Finally, prospective electoral success reinforces the opposition’s commitment to a ballot-centred approach.Item Open Access For the people, against the elites: left versus right-wing populism in Greece and Turkey(Taylor and Francis, 2020) Grigoriadis, Ioannis N.While the rise of populism has been a global trend in recent years, it has been prevalent in Greece and Turkey for longer, leaving a strong imprint on the politics of both countries. Left-wing populism has become one of the constitutive elements of the Greek political party system since the collapse of the 1967–1974 military regime. The 2009 outbreak of the Greek economic crisis set the stage for the radicalization of Greek politics through the rise of extremist far-right and far-left populist parties that professed populist agendas of different hues. Such populists accused old-party personnel of being members of a “treacherous elite” that sacrificed Greek national interests against foreign powers. The 2011 “indignados” movement is key for the better understanding of the social dynamics that facilitated the rise of the unusual SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government. Debates on Greek constitutional reform also highlighted the relevance of populism, especially as the SYRIZA-ANEL government sought topics to resonate with its disenchanted voters. On the other hand, a right-wing populist rhetoric has been one of the key instruments for the rise of Turkish political Islam and the establishment of the AKP hegemony in Turkey. Establishing a Kulturkampf-based narrative about the “secularist, ‘white-Turk’ elites” versus the “conservative, ‘black-Turk’ people” was of great political significance. The constitutional reform process proved again crucial for manifesting the relevance of populism in Turkish political discourse. This article explores the circumstances under which left- and right-wing populism have emerged into a dominant feature of Greek and Turkish politics. It also discusses the decreasing relevance of the established left-right political divide in party politics and suggests alternative classifications.Item Open Access In Between Democracy and Secularism: The Case of Turkish Civil Society(2013) Cevik, S.; Tas H.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 society and promoted the development of secular platforms. This article argues that the discussion about civil society is misplaced, and the democratic potential of civil society is not related to its being Islamic or secular, but rather to its attachment to the state. For this purpose, it examines the emergence of a secularist civil societal current in Turkey with special focus on one of its major manifestations, the Republic Rallies in 2007. © 2013 Copyright Editors of Middle East Critique.Item Open Access Islamists and the state: changing discourses on the state, civil society and democracy in Turkey(Routledge, 2018) Köseoğlu, T.Once an oppositional ideology in the 1990s that united Muslim intellectuals around a radical critique of the state based on the ideals of democracy, civil society and pluralism, how has Turkish Islamism transformed into a state-centric and conservative world-view? This paper aims to document this transformation by scrutinizing the writings of a group of intellectuals in the context of (I) the 28 February 1997, military memorandum and the subsequent events which culminated in the AKP’s first electoral victory in 2002; and (II) the series of trials that started in 2008 known as the Ergenekon trials through which the AKP gained the upper hand in Turkish politics. In so doing, the paper problematizes the prevalent narratives on the relationship between Islam, on the one hand, and democracy and civil society, on the other, that miss how formulations and articulations of Islamism evolve in changing political contexts.Item Open Access Killing competitive authoritarianism softly: the 2019 local elections in Turkey(Routledge, 2019-11) Esen, Berk; Gümüşçü, Ş.On 31 March 2019 Turkish voters ended the Islamist local governance in the country’s largest cities after 25 years and handed the ruling AKP its most serious electoral defeat since its rise to power in 2002. The article explores the electoral strategies of major parties in the local election, offers a comparative analysis of the results, and discusses post-election developments, including the rerun in Istanbul. The election and its aftermath reaffirmed the competitive authoritarian nature of the regime, as the governing bloc enjoyed an uneven playing field, while the opposition had to meet a higher electoral bar than the incumbents to win. The economic crisis, growing discontent with the government’s policies, and effective coordination of opposition parties facilitated this outcome.Item Open Access The myth of ‘Europeanization’ of Turkish foreign policy: the Cyprus debacle as a litmus test(Routledge, 2014) Ulug-Eryilmaz, B.This article examines Turkish–EU relations and the Cyprus issue within the Europeanization framework. It seeks to underline how and to what extent EU conditionality was performed in Turkey’s Cyprus policy in the post-Helsinki period. The exploration of the relationship between domestic political pressures and the foreign policy choices of the AKP government on the Cyprus issue suggests that EU’s potential in transforming the foreign policy of candidates is both context dependent and questionable. Alongside EU-related factors such as the credible membership perspective, what accounts for change is predominantly determined by how domestic actors perceive it, and how much domestic power struggles are affected by it. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.Item Open Access Negotiating the foundations of the modern state: the emasculated citizen and the call for a post-patriarchal state at Gezi protests(Springer, 2019) Çınar, AlevExamining Turkey’s Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a representative case of the globally surging protest movements since 2011, this study claims that the basic aim of the protests is to contest the foundational rationality of the modern state, which, I argue, is based on a patriarchal social contract that empowers the state with the authority to represent the interests and speak on behalf of citizens using a logic of protection, and to construct, enforce, and monitor a regime of citizenship where citizens can only function as emasculated subjects who are dependent on the protection of the state. Based on an analysis of the use of gender metaphors and familial tropes by the AKP government, and the subversive use of humor and irony by the protestors, this article demonstrates that the protests target the patriarchal premises of modern statehood, both in its democratic (fraternal patriarchy) and authoritarian (paternalistic patriarchy) forms, and the state’s disciplinary, regulatory, and remedial interventions toward the interpellation of the citizen as an infantile or feminine subject who is not capable of meeting their needs and interests on their own, and whose life, therefore, needs to be continually monitored, controlled, and regulated by the state. Drawing on criticism brought to the contractual foundations of the modern state by feminist political theorists, this study makes use of the notion of modern patriarchy as a story told by social contract theories, which generates a power relationship between the state and the citizen based on the projection of threat where the state assumes the role of the protector. I conclude that objecting to these modern forms of subjugation, the Gezi Park protests call for a post-patriarchal state where it no longer resorts to a patriarchal protectionist logic that is justified through the claim that it represents the interests of its citizens. By envisioning such a post-patriarchal state, I interpret the protests as a call for the renegotiation of the foundational premises of modern statehood such that the state-citizenship relationship is radically reformulated to enable a more empowered and autonomous citizen.Item Open Access Ottomentality : neoliberal governance of culture and neo-ottoman management of diversity(Routledge, 2017) Erdem, Chien YangThis essay proposes an alternative concept–Ottomentality–in order to more adequately assess Turkey’s growing neo-Ottoman cultural ensemble. This concept is deployed here to underscore the convergence of neoliberal and neo-Ottoman rationalities and the discursive practices that are developed around them for governing culture and managing a diverse society. The essay contends that the convergence of these two rationalities has significantly transformed the state’s approach to culture as a way of governing the social, constituted a particular knowledge of multiculturalism, and a subject of citizenry increasingly subjected to exclusion and discipline for expressing critical views of this knowledge.Item Open Access The perils of "Turkish presidentialism"(Cambridge University Press, 2018) Esen, Berk; Gümüşçü, Ş.Turkey has switched to a presidential system via a referendum held in April 2017 that will take full effect after the 2019 presidential elections. Turkish presidentialism increases the prominence of the executive at the expense of the legislative branch and concentrates power in the office of the president. Executive aggrandizement will deepen ideological polarization and electoral mobilization by significantly raising the stakes of the game for both the incumbent and the opposition. As such, we posit that the new presidential system will institutionalize the de facto personalism and majoritarian rule that the AKP has hitherto established in recent years. This trend is likely to trigger a transition from a competitive authoritarian to hegemonic electoral authoritarianism in case of Tayyip Erdoǧan's election, thus placing Turkey on par with the strongest executive systems around the globe such as Russia and Venezuela.Item Open Access Political manhood in 2000's Turkey : representations of different masculinities in politics(Bilkent University, 2012) Akyüz, SelinThis dissertation mainly questions the constructions of different masculinities in politics in Turkey. It re-reads the different representations of political manhood with reference to the AKP, the CHP and the MHP between 2000 and 2008. In order to reveal the embeddedness of masculinities and politics, this dissertation analyzes not only gendered discourses of the given political parties but also their leaders, namely, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Deniz Baykal and Devlet Bahçeli. With the guidance of Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical tools, especially, on the basis of the congruent relation between habitus and the field, this dissertation questions different representations of masculinities and identifies typologies of masculinities, namely ; (1) Neo-Muslim, (2) Kemalist/Secular, and, (3) Nationalist. With reference to the patterns of masculinities in Turkish political culture, this study argues that the gendered nature of the politics, in general, political parties in particular, use and reproduce dominant masculinist strategies. In politics as a field, leaders experience the praxis of being man rather than their ideological engagements; leftist, rightist or Islamist.Item Open Access Rising competitive authoritarianism in Turkey(Routledge, 2016) Esen, B.; Gümüşçü, S.Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 Turkey has undergone double regime transitions. First, tutelary democracy ended; second, a competitive authoritarian regime has risen in its stead. We substantiate this assertion with specific and detailed evidence from 2015 election cycles, as well as from broader trends in Turkish politics. This evidence indeed confirms that elections are no longer fair; civil liberties are being systematically violated; and the playing field is highly skewed in favour of the ruling AKP. The June 2015 election results and their aftermath further confirm that Turkey has evolved into a competitive authoritarian regime. © 2016 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com.Item Open Access A small yes for presidentialism: the Turkish constitutional referendum of April 2017(Routledge, 2017) Esen, B.; Gümüşçü, Ş.Following four elections in three years, on 16 April 2017 Turkish voters once again went to the polls - this time under the emergency law established after the failed coup attempt of July 2016 - to vote on constitutional amendments aimed at replacing the existing parliamentary system with an executive presidency. This article reviews the content of the proposed constitutional amendments, analyses the campaign including the strategies employed by the main political actors in the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ camps and the resource advantages enjoyed by the ruling party, assesses the electoral performance of both sides through a summary of results from provincial areas and geographical regions, and considers how Turkish politics are likely to take shape under the new system. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.Item Open Access Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism(SAGE Publications, 2021) Esen, Berk; Gümüşcü, Ş.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.