Populism and the Politics of Belonging in Erdoğan’s Turkey

Sawae, Fumiko

doi:10.1080/19436149.2020.1770443

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In 2012, from a highly family-oriented and pro-life perspective blended with developmentalist-nationalist discourses, he said that abortion was an insidious plan to eliminate Turkey from the world stage. 30 As Kocamaner (2018) stated, the JDP’s ‘family crisis’ discourse demonstrates a logic of governance in which ‘the family is both the cause of an individual’s disorderly conduct and the site of its containment and correction’. This discourse veils structural factors producing societal problems such as income inequality, unemployment and a lack of affordable housing, and directs the anger and resentment of the popular classes to ‘imaginary others’.…”

Section: Theoretical Background and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

Yarar

2023

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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Despite its long history since the late Ottoman period in Turkey, this article focuses on the headscarf issue within a particular period; since 2002, when the Justice and Development Party has been in power. Women’s issues have always occupied a large space in the Justice and Development Party’s project(s), which articulate diverse narrative lines ranging from conservatism to liberalism. The article aims to unravel this diverse insight into the Justice and Development Party’s politics within the context of its recent political drift toward authoritarianism while particularly focusing on its headscarf discourses. It argues that the Justice and Development Party’s political drift toward authoritarianism resulted in the replacement of the earlier politics of consensus/‘non-defiance’, which refers to a conservatism that denies radicalism and avoids emphasizing controversial issues like the headscarf, with the politics of dissensus/defiance that reveal social tensions and political conflicts such as those between Islamic and secular sectors, through revitalizing the old debate on the headscarf issue. In this sense, the lifting of the headscarf bans in public institutions in 2008 can be read as a symptom, not of the Justice and Development Party’s earlier liberal stand, but of the beginning of its shift toward authoritarianism based on its religious-nationalist project, which made use of this liberal right of pious women in enhancing the gaps between oppositional groups and in consolidating its social basis. This earlier attempt has been followed by continuous use of the headscarf as a symbol drawing a border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and signifying outrages and moral crisis for which the Justice and Development Party blamed the oppositional groups. Within this context, the article questions the ways in which the headscarf as a political symbol along with other conservative policies targeting female bodies and sexualities took a part in the constitution and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party’s radical right alliance and its authoritarian regime.

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Section: Theoretical Background and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 31. Kocamaner (2018) provided hints about new policies and legislations that have been conducted by the JDP during the period mainly after 2010. On the establishment of the ALO Fetva and other similar policies employed by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in the late 2000s, see also Yilmaz (2021) and Kalpaklioglu (2022). …”

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confidence: 99%

Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

Yarar

2023

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…This gradual slide into “authoritarianism” ( Sarfati, 2017 ), compounded by a decline in press freedom in Turkey since 2012 ( Martin, 2020 ), fuelled more political divisions and violence. The personalization of the AKP rule and consolidation of power in the hands of President Erdogan have divided voters into pro- and anti-Erdogan camps ( Sawae, 2020 ). Anti-Erdogan parties include the main opposition party, the Kemalist Republican People’s Party of Turkey, the Islamist Felicity Party, the Kurdish-leftist Peoples’ Democracy Party and the nationalist IYI Party, as well as the Democracy and Progress Party and Future Party, established by former ministers who left the AKP due to their disagreements with Erdogan ( TBMM, 2020 ).…”

Section: Political Polarization In the Akp Eramentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, in addition to secular dissidents, pro-Erdogan journalists and media companies started attacking known figures from the Islamic segment, as well ( Coşkun, 2020 ). According to Sawae (2020) , without any evidence, every day, someone could be accused in the media by Erdogan supporters, and labels, such as traitors and terrorists, have become widely used by journalists in the pro-Erdogan press. Those who criticized Erdogan, even in times of earthquakes ( Odatv, 2020 ), and public health disasters ( Yenicag, 2020 ), during which political elites should be in unity, were labeled as traitors.…”

Section: Political Polarization In the Akp Eramentioning

confidence: 99%

“Flattening the curve”: Communication, risk and COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey

Moussa

Douai

Parmaksiz

2023

Newspaper Research Journal

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This study examines Turkish online news media coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country. It explores media framing narratives, particularly how they reflected and promoted elite polarization or consensus in the COVID-19 debate. The findings shed light on Turkish political power dynamics during the first stage in the national response to the pandemic. The study highlights the calculations of political partisans who are keen on building a fragile consensus in an increasingly polarized society.

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“…Recently, populism has been widely adopted to frame the political activities of the Erdogan regime (Selçuk 2016;Yabanci 2016;Kirdiş and Drhimeur 2016;Özpek and Yaşar 2018;Yilmaz 2018;Castaldo 2018;Özçetin 2019;Sawae 2020;Tas 2020), especially in studies of Erdogan's populist framing of political crises (Türk 2018). Moreover, there are studies looking at the role of religion in the populist appeals of Erdogan's AKP and analysis of the religious references in his regimes' populist narratives (Yabanci and Taleski 2018;Yabanci 2020).…”

Section: Populism and Its Variants: Horizontal Vertical And Civilizational Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion in Creating Populist Appeal: Islamist Populism and Civilizationism in the Friday Sermons of Turkey’s Diyanet

2021

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Drawing on the extant literature on populism, we aim to flesh out how populists in power utilize religion and related state resources in setting up aggressive, multidimensional religious populist “us” versus “them” binaries. We focus on Turkey as our case and argue that by instrumentalizing the Diyanet (Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs), the authoritarian Islamists in power have been able to consolidate manufactured populist dichotomies via the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons. Populists’ control and use of a state institution to propagate populist civilizationist narratives and construct antagonistic binaries are underexamined in the literature. Therefore, by examining Turkish populists’ use of the Diyanet, this paper will make a general contribution to the extant literature on religion and populism. Furthermore, by analyzing the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons from the last ten years we demonstrate how different aspects of populism—its horizontal, vertical, and civilizational dimensions—have become embedded in the Diyanet’s Friday sermons. Equally, this paper shows how these sermons have been tailored to facilitate the populist appeal of Erdoğan’s Islamist regime. Through the Friday sermons, the majority—Sunni Muslim Turks are presented with statements that evoke negative emotions and play on their specific fears, their sense of victimhood and through which their anxieties—real and imagined—are revived and used to construct populist binaries to construct and mobilize the people in support of an authoritarian Islamist regime purported to be fighting a “civilizational enemy” on behalf of “the people”. Finally, drawing on insights from the Turkish case, we illustrate how the “hosting” function of the civilizational aspect plays a vital role in tailoring internal (vertical and horizontal) religious populist binaries.

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Populism and the Politics of Belonging in Erdoğan’s Turkey

Cited by 16 publications

References 17 publications

Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

“Flattening the curve”: Communication, risk and COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey

Religion in Creating Populist Appeal: Islamist Populism and Civilizationism in the Friday Sermons of Turkey’s Diyanet

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