Turkey’s New State in the Making

Transformations in Legality, Economy and Coercion

Edited by Pınar Bedirhanoğlu, Çağlar Dölek, Funda Hülagü, and Özlem Kaygusuz

This work problematizes the AKP-led radical re-making of the Turkish state by taking into consideration the constitutive role of crisis-ridden global neoliberal transformations on the domestic social and economic dynamics and processes.

Description

Since the Gezi uprisings in June 2013 and AKP’s temporary loss of parliamentary supremacy after the June 2015 general elections, sharp political clashes, ascending police operations, extra-judicial executions, suppression of the media and political opposition, systematic violation of the constitution and fundamental human rights, and the one-man-rule of President Erdoğan have become the identifying characteristics of Turkish politics. The failed coup attempt on 15th July 2016 further impaired the situation as the government declared emergency rule at the end of which a political regime defined as the “Presidential Government System” was established in July 2018.

Turkey’s New State in the Making examines the historical specificities of the ongoing AKP-led radical state transformation in Turkey within a global, legal, financial, ideological, and coercive neoliberal context. Arguing that rather than being an exception, the new Turkish state has the potential to be a model for political transformations elsewhere, problematizing how specific policies the AKP adapted to refract social dispositions have been radically redefining the republican, democratic and secular features of the modern Turkish state.

Author Bio

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Canada. She got her Ph.D. in international relations from University of Sussex in 2002. She has published in English and Turkish, and also has articles translated into German and French on neoliberal state transformation, state-capital relations, privatizations and financialization in Turkey; the political economy of corruption and neoliberal anti-corruption policies; and the politics of capitalist transformation in Russia. Her most recent research addresses the neoliberal transformation of state security structures, and state transformation within and through financialization with a focus on Turkey and Global South.

Caglar Dolek received his Ph.D. degree in Sociology with a Collaborative Specialization in Political Economy from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in 2019. He has a B.A. in International Relations (2008), Minor Diploma in Sociology (2008), and M.A. in Political Science (2011) from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He has articles published in Science and Society, Critical Sociology, and Austrian Journal of Development Studies. His research reflects a transdisciplinary engagement with critical criminology, urban sociology, political economy, and police science from a comparative-historical perspective of the Global South. He is currently working on a book project with the following tentative title: “Thieves, Kabadayıs, and Revolutionaries on the Margin: A Social History of the Police in the Altındağ Slums in Ankara, Turkey (1920s-1970s).”

Funda Hülagü works as a research associate at the Department of Political Science, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. After receiving her M.A. in the field of Political Theory at the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, 2005) and Ph.D. in the field of International Relations at Middle East Technical University (Ankara, 2011), she worked as an assistant professor in different universities in Turkey. Since 2015, Hülagü has been living and teaching in Germany. She has several publications in the fields of critical political economy of security, state theory and critical theories of international relations. She has been currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled as “Police Reform in Turkey: Human Security, Gender and Political Violence under Erdoğan”. Hülagü’s current research interests include feminist international political economy, feminist state theory, and restructuring of the state in Turkey.

Özlem Kaygusuz is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Ankara University in Ankara, Turkey. She studied international relations at Middle East Technical University and completed her Ph.D. in political science at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Fall 2003-2004 and at Stanford University in Fall 2012. She is giving undergraduate and graduate courses on globalization, IR theory, critical security, democratization, and Turkey-EU relations. Her articles and works in these areas appeared in various academic journals and books both in Turkish and English.

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Introduction

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu, Çağlar Dölek, Funda Hülagü, Özlem Kaygusuz

Part I: Global political context of state transformation

1. Social constitution of the AKP’s strong state through financialization: State in crisis, or crisis state?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu

2. Deconstitutionalization and the state crisis in Turkey: What role for the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights?

Özlem Kaygusuz and Oya Aydın

3. Turkey’s double movement: Islamists, neoliberalism, and foreign policy

İlhan Uzgel

4. The shift of axis or business as usual? Turkey’s S-400 procurement decision and defense industry

Çağlar Kurç

Part II: Politics of economic management

5. Understanding the recent rise of authoritarianism in Turkey in terms of the structural contradictions of capital accumulation process

Fuat Ercan and Şebnem Oğuz

6. Turkey’s financial slide: Discipline by credit in the last decade of the AKP rule

Ali Rıza Güngen

7. AKP’s move from depoliticization to repoliticization in economic management

Melehat Kutun

8. AKP’s income-differentiated housing strategies under the pressure of resistance and debt

Özlem Çelik

Part III: Politics of domination

9. The transformation of the state-religion relationship under the AKP: The case of the Diyanet

Zana Çitak

10. From military tutelage to nowhere: On the limitations of civil-military dualism in making sense of the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey in the 2010s

Ahmet Akkaya

11. Courtrooms as solidarity spaces and trials as sentences: Defending your rights and asking for accountability in Turkey

Zeynep Alemdar

12. SETA: From AKP’s organic intellectuals to AK-paratchiks

Behlül Özkan

Part IV: Politics of coercion

13. Domesticating politics, de-gendering women: State violence against politically active women in Turkey

Funda Hülagü

14. War on drugs: A view from Turkey

Zeynep Gönen

15. “The law of the city?”: Social war, urban warfare, and dispossession on the margin

Çağlar Dölek

Reviews

'This book includes the best scholarly work currently available on the political economy of Turkey. The chapters in this volume address neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and the strengths and fragilities of the rule of the AKP in great detail, consistency, and reaching strikingly innovative and important conclusions. This work is indispensable for anyone working on contemporary Turkey.'
Alfredo Saad Filho, King’s College London

'This is an excellent book of critical and courageous argument and examination. It is indispensable for anybody who wants to know what is going on in the Turkish Republic under the Erdogan governments.'
Werner Bonefeld, The University of York

Turkish political economy has a new milestone. Empirically- and theoretically-rich, this book relentlessly traverses the neoliberal and financial transformation of Turkey under the AKP, posing an uncompromising challenge to the course of Turkish democracy and development. Read it. I say again: Read it!
Thomas Marois, School of Oriental and African Studies

Details

Publication Date: 26 August 2020
296 pages

Product ISBNs: Hardback: 9781786998705
eBook ePub: 9781786998729
eBook Kindle: 9781786998743

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