The AKP and the spirit of the ‘new’ Turkey: imagined victim, reactionary mood, and resentful sovereign

Yılmaz, Zafer

doi:10.1080/14683849.2017.1314763

Cited by 81 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…A second and wider circle of victimhood, which depicts the Turkish nation under the constant assault of Western imperialists, entered into the AKP's lexicon after the 2013 Gezi Protests. Referring to the Turkish Liberation War (1919)(1920)(1921)(1922) following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Erdoğan declared a new liberation war against Western powers and their collaborators within Turkey (Yilmaz 2017). Since then, all developments from the coup attempt on 15 July 2016 to the Turkish Lira's fall against the dollar have been linked to Western ambitions to bring down Turkey.…”

Section: Recent Past: the Circles Of Victimhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beside Erdoğan's recurrent emphasis on being native and national (yerli ve milli), politics was redefined as a war between the national (milli) and nonnational (gayrı milli) (Bulut 2017). Throughout this process, the Turkish case is especially noteworthy due to the centrality of temporal references in Erdoğan's populism, including nostalgia for the Ottoman era and his projections for a 'New Turkey', as well as constant struggles between conflicting representations of the recent and distant pasts (Çınar 2018;Yilmaz 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The chronopolitics of national populism

Taş

2020

Identities

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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 will afford an alternative reading from which to engage with and critique the magnitude of populism. This study argues that despite ample variance and claims of uniqueness, national populisms employ a shared temporal template that accounts for a particular national subjectivity through a set of timing and sequencing of events complemented by affective stimuli. It focuses on the case of Turkey. More pronounced since 2013 Gezi Protests, the rising tide of national populism under President Tayyip Erdoğan's rule encapsulates how these populisms conflate the past, present, and future into a single narrative about the people's survival and prosperity.

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Section: Recent Past: the Circles Of Victimhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The chronopolitics of national populism

Taş

2020

Identities

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“…It was ordinary to hear of incidents where a headscarved woman would be harassed in a cafe, which were then compared to incidents where 'Islamist radicals' would attack lightly dressed women in public or people who do not fast during Ramadan. For decades, such narratives supported mutually exclusive, yet interdependent, positions of Muslim injury and victimhood on one hand, and secular anxiety due to an alarming Islamization of politics and culture, on the other (Kandiyoti, 2012;Yilmaz, 2017). 1 However, far from being incompatible cultural or religious differences, the categories of the Islamists and the secularists were products of the historically specific discursive processes of Turkish secularism, processes that absorbed rather complex sets of social differences to map them onto a dichotomic framework.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional and corporeal formations of secularism: a case study of military bases in Turkey, 1980s-2000s

Arik

2018

Social & Cultural Geography

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From the 1980s to the end of 2000s, the Turkish military was actively involved in the construction of Islam as a threat to national security, and in doing so it securitized religious identities in the political arena and in its own ranks. In the process, Turkish military bases became infused with public tensions around religion and secularity and became sites that produced social divisions along these lines on a daily basis. This article explores the uniquely emotional and corporeal the intertwinement of secularism and security as was experienced within the mundane social interactions in the daily life of military bases through ethnographic research conducted in 2011. It focuses on the narratives of the daughters and wives of military officers whose bodies were mapped on to the opposite ends of a security paradigm based on a secular/religious dichotomy. Caught in between designations of security and risk, women's bodily and emotional experiences reveal the spatial constructions of secularism and the inherently vague and ambiguous distinctions secularism cultivates as a function of modern power. Looking at the gendered and spatially mediated meanings of secular, religious, security and risk, this article contributes to scholarship in cultural and social geographies of secularism through an analysis of corporeal and emotional experiences. Formations émotionnelles et corporelles de la laïcité: un cas d'étude des bases militaires en Turquie des années 80 aux années 2000 ABSTRAIT Des années 80 à la fin des années 2000, l'armée turque a été activement impliquée dans la construction de l'Islam en tant que menace de la sécurité nationale et ce faisant, elle a sécurisé les identités religieuses dans l'arène politique et dans ses propres rangs. Ce faisant, les bases militaires turques se sont imprégnées de tensions publiques autour de la religion et de la laïcité et sont devenues des sites qui produisaient des divisions sociales de cette nature au quotidien. Cet article explore l'enchevêtrement exceptionnellement émotionnel et corporel de la laïcité et de la sécurité telles qu'elles ont été vécues au sein des ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…Islamist‐conservative intellectuals and political circles in Turkey regard themselves as the true ‘victims' of the modernization process beginning from the Tanzimat period of the late Ottoman Empire (1939–1976). According to this narrative, they ‘suffered at the hands of Kemalist state elites who were collaborating with the Western forces to oppress “innocent,” “devout” and “authentically” Anatolian children of the country' (Yılmaz : 483). Thus, the narrative of victimhood is framed mainly through this ‘chosen' trauma of modernization regardless of a hundred years' course of events such as the establishment of the Turkish‐Islamic synthesis as the official state ideology in the 1980's when the assumed secularism of the state and the military was questioned as a result of the 1980 military coup.…”

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confidence: 99%

Reading politics through emotions: ontological ressentiment as the emotional basis of current politics in Turkey

Tokdoğan¹

2019

Nations and Nationalism

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For almost sixteen years now, politics in Turkey have been analysed with reference to the theme of victimhood. It is true that the political discourse of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP) gained its power by the mass response to its victimhood claims. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the legitimacy of the victimhood claim rests mainly on the already‐existing emotions of masses, aroused and triggered by political elites. Thus, Turkish politics during the AKP period cannot be thoroughly understood without taking into consideration the emotions of both political elites and the masses. This article shares insights into the sixteen‐year‐long AKP reign of power based on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's appeals to such emotions as humiliation, envy, disgust, hatred, anxiety, and anger. It further argues that these emotions reveal a much deeper and stronger emotional trait which we identify as ontological ressentiment.

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The AKP and the spirit of the ‘new’ Turkey: imagined victim, reactionary mood, and resentful sovereign

Cited by 81 publications

References 24 publications

The chronopolitics of national populism

The chronopolitics of national populism

Emotional and corporeal formations of secularism: a case study of military bases in Turkey, 1980s-2000s

Reading politics through emotions: ontological ressentiment as the emotional basis of current politics in Turkey

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