This paper explores how the state employs digital technologies in its pacification of dissident political bodies, subjectivities, and communicative capabilities. It explores strategies of resistance to the surveillance practices which come to the fore as a state form, as a means of social control, and as a mechanism for creating manageable and disciplined crowds. Drawing upon ethnographic data, it focuses on the contemporary politics of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. In particular, it analyses the digitized surveillance and resistance of Kurds, both of which function as crucial components of contemporary power regimes in Turkey.

The majority of current political communication studies focuses on digital and social media, and overlooks the centrality of television for the production and endurance of strongman politics in the Global South. By focusing on the journalistic television productions aired during the June 2018 election period in Turkey, this article unpacks the televisual logic that is incarnated in different modalities of telling and narrating of televisual genres. I propose two main themes: the ‘political fear’ of physical and social security threats, and ‘post-truth communications’ as the main televisual idioms for a vision of the future that is either secure or chaotic, that is, with or without Erdoğan. By combining political economy, content and textual analysis, I scrutinise the production dynamics of the televisual economy and the control and content of factual segments.

The majority of current political communication studies focus on discursive dimensions of communications and disregard how communications partake in the governing of populations through economic, material and institutional practices. By focusing on Turkey’s case, here I move beyond this approach and examine the role of communications in the development of neoliberal capital accumulation, authoritarian welfare politics, political repression and the production of popular support. The article provides an empirical analysis of policy developments and plans and the restructuring of ownership and control of networks between 2002 and 2016 in Erdoğan’s Turkey.

This article explores the collective attachment to cellphones in Turkey by focusing on the dynamic relationship between the cellphone as a containing technology of modernity, and its non-elite users who are in search of a safe shelter for their hybrid identities. By taking a close look at the practices whereby the cell phone and its users reciprocally affect each other to produce experiences of the modern in negotiation with the local fabric, this article suggests that being with cellphones in Turkey means being with modernity in novel ways. These ways involve the experience and imagination of departure from the historical and collective melancholia that is dissociable from the historical elitist vision of modernity. Using data largely from fieldwork, this study explores how the cellphone has been integrated into the collective struggle to generate lived practices of modernity as a societal self-production which would take bodies away from historical and collective melancholia.

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