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The Gezi uprising can be considered a crucial turning in Turkish politics. As a response to countrywide democratic protests, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government revived the security state, escalated authoritarian tendencies, and started to organize a nationalist, Islamist, and conservative backlash. This essay argues that the Gezi Park protests revealed both the fragility of the AKP's hegemony and the limits of the dominant political group habitus, which were promoted by the party to consolidate political polarization in favor of the party's hegemony. Moreover, it is argued that the Gezi uprising transformed the culture of political protests in the country and paved the way for the emergence of affirmative resistance, radical imagination, and a new politics of desire and dignity against authoritarian and neoliberal policies.
Almost half of the political life has been experienced under the state of emergency and state of siege policies in the Turkish Republic. In spite of such a striking number and continuity in the deployment of legal emergency powers, there are just a few legal and political studies examining the reasons for such permanency in governing practices. To fill this gap, this paper aims to discuss one of the most important sources of the ‘permanent’ political crisis in the country: the historical evolution of legal emergency power. In order to highlight how these policies have intensified the highly fragile citizenship regime by weakening the separation of power, repressing the use of political rights and increasing the discretionary power of both the executive and judiciary authorities, the paper sheds light on the emergence and production of a specific form of legality based on the idea of emergency and the principle of executive prerogative. In that context, it aims to provide a genealogical explanation of the evolution of the exceptional form of the nation-state, which is based on the way political society, representation, and legitimacy have been instituted and accompanying failure of the ruling classes in building hegemony in the country.
A strong sense of victimhood, a discourse of social suffering, and complementary bodily performances, which mobilize rancor, resentfulness, and revengefulness, are fundamental elements of Turkish-Islamist ideology. This article discusses the political dynamics and implications of such assertions of victimhood in the Turkish context. To underscore these dynamics, it analyses the role of the logic of pain in the subject formation of Turkish-Islamist identity and how this logic has been revitalized by constitutive and hegemonic social imagination, and circulated and intensified by a reactionary mood. Additionally, it aims to expose how this reactionary mood profoundly depends on contradictory subjectification processes, which simultaneously involve mobilization of feelings of impotency, non-responsibility, self-pitying, and sublimation of power. This subject formation opens the way for identification with authoritarian figures in the Turkish case.
Almost half of the political life has been experienced under the
state of emergency and state of siege policies in the Turkish
Republic. In spite of such a striking number and continuity in the
deployment of legal emergency powers, there are just a few legal
and political studies examining the reasons for such permanency
in governing practices. To fill this gap, this paper aims to discuss
one of the most important sources of the ‘permanent’ political
crisis in the country: the historical evolution of legal emergency
power. In order to highlight how these policies have intensified
the highly fragile citizenship regime by weakening the separation
of power, repressing the use of political rights and increasing the
discretionary power of both the executive and judiciary authori-
ties, the paper sheds light on the emergence and production of
a specific form of legality based on the idea of emergency and the
principle of executive prerogative. In that context, it aims to
provide a genealogical explanation of the evolution of the excep-
tional form of the nation-state, which is based on the way political
society, representation, and legitimacy have been instituted and
accompanying failure of the ruling classes in building hegemony
in the country.