The Study of Politics in Turkey

Turkey with its rich but contested political history has been a crucial case to study topics that have global relevance including democratic backsliding, foreign policy activism, majoritarianism, post-truth politics, neoliberalism, political violence, populism, polarization, religious and ethnic politics, and secularism. Engaging with the broader literature on these topics, The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics offers an analytical, fresh, and comparative understanding of politics in a country that literally and figuratively epitomizes “being at the crossroads.” This chapter offers a thematic summary of the Handbook while addressing some of the most salient issues concerning Turkish politics. Synthesizing some of the major insights from the Handbook, it specifically addresses a set of interrelated questions: How do Turkish politics align with global economic and political trends? What have been the defining aspects of the Turkish state’s involvement in the economy? How could we make sense of Turkey’s descent into authoritarianism after a period of political reform? What are prospects for a democratic revival and social activism pursuing progressive change? What factors contribute to and limit activism in Turkish foreign policy?

The Kurdish Movement in Turkey

The prolonged conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), spanning four decades, has resulted in 4,000 villages evacuated, and more than 3 million people displaced. Despite this profound impact on people’s everyday lives, studies on people’s perceptions of the Kurdish movement are still limited. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Kurdish participants in Turkey, this chapter explores how Kurds from different backgrounds, of different ages, and politicized to different degrees, perceive the Kurdish movement and what motivates their commitment to it. Guided by an interpretivist methodology and drawing on findings from fieldwork, the chapter proposes that everyday experiences and understandings of the Kurdish movement are embedded and salient in a political sense. It concludes that by mobilizing people’s everyday perceptions and experiences and translating them into political engagement, the Kurdish movement shifts the scale of politics from a national to transnational and local levels. This shift implies that conducting extensive qualitative research among ordinary people brings a novel understanding of political movements and ethnic conflict in terms of both people’s motivations and movements’ strategic choices.

A Theoretical Account of Turkish Foreign Policy under the AKP

Turkish foreign policy has evolved significantly in different directions since 2002. The chapter sheds light on Turkey’s foreign policy during this period and argues that neoclassical realism, which successfully merges the impact of internal and external factors, is the most helpful theoretical perspective to understand this evolution. Turkey is a middle power country located in a delicate regional environment. Structural changes in the dynamics of politics at international and regional levels have produced immense effects on how Turkey’s rulers have defined Turkey’s foreign policy interests and behaviors. While systemic factors have had a strong influence on Turkish foreign policy, their impact has been mediated via the perceptions and interpretations of Turkish ruling elites. Accordingly, the political ideology and interests of these elites have shaped their interpretations of and responses to external developments. Building on this framework, the chapter analyzes Turkish foreign policy since 2002 in three periods: realist pro-Westernism shaping Turkish foreign policy decisively between 2002 and 2011; liberal assertiveness between 2011 and 2015; and re-securitization since 2015. Each period corresponds to a different set of external and internal factors pushing Turkish decision makers to pursue different foreign policies.

The Contemporary Politics of Health in Turkey

This chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of recent patterns in health politics and policymaking in Turkey by focusing on nine dimensions of healthcare and public health. These dimensions range from physician politics, the politics of international policy expertise, business politics, the politics of medical humanitarianism, and patient politics to sexual and reproductive health politics, tobacco control politics, the politics of drug abuse, and the politics of the COVID-19. Based on this analysis, the chapter reaches three main conclusions. First, since the early 2000s, a new scene of health politics has begun to emerge in Turkey where both corporate actors and patient organizations are actively present alongside the government, political parties, and the Turkish Medical Association. Second, the framing of health in Turkish politics is no longer confined to social policy. The multiplication of references to health in various political discourses in economic growth, market regulation, population, family, and humanitarian policies in recent years has generated contested meanings and policy implications. Finally, an increasing number of democratic actors such as patient organizations, opposition political parties, and individual citizens are deploying public health and social policy frameworks about a diverse set of health issues in making rights claims. These efforts reflect continued popularity of the social policy framing of healthcare and signify democratization of health politics by turning health into a platform through which rights, entitlements, and the role of the state are negotiated.

The Politics of Energy in Turkey

This chapter discusses the politics of energy in post-1980 Turkey from a social science perspective. In particular, it offers an explanation of the decisions characterizing Turkey’s high-carbon energy pathway over the years, by building on some conceptual lenses: geopolitical interstate relations, sociopolitical and sociotechnical imaginaries, production of socioeconomic inequalities, and formation of new political collective identities. A thorough reading of the energy politics literature in Turkey suggests that all these dimensions are helpful to understanding not only the country’s past energy choices but also contemporary energy debates and conflicts under the “new Turkey.” Three points come to the fore in Turkey’s relationship with energy from the 1980s onward. (1) Turkey has pursued high modernist ambitions to be a regional energy hub and provide uninterrupted supply for its economic growth goals. (2) Energy choices and policies were formed politically as governments in coalition with domestic and foreign private capital have primarily promoted particular private interests and instrumentalized a technocratic discourse to establish political hegemony and marginalize public criticism. (3) Energy-related decisions have been insulated from public participation, resulting in intense sociospatial and socioeconomic inequalities and conflicts. A historical and interdisciplinary perspective also helps to explain how different energy resources generate power symbolically as well as materially and reproduce hegemony through concepts such as energy scarcity, security of supply, and energy independence. The chapter concludes with a critical assessment of the challenges Turkey faces for a transition to fair and environmentally sustainable energy systems.

Civil-Military Relations and the Demise of Turkish Democracy

A growing body of scholarship shows that Turkey has been part of a broader trend toward authoritarianism in the 2010s. As democratization scholars explore a myriad of factors underlying this, including but not limited to institutional misuse such as holding unfair elections to consolidate authoritarian power, this chapter examines how and why the end of military tutelage resulted in the civilian control of the Turkish military but not democratic consolidation. What factors explain the rise and eventual demise of the Turkish army as a major political power in Turkey? How has civilian control of the military gradually taken place in Turkey? What are the reasons why Turkish democracy failed to consolidate despite civilian control? The chapter argues and demonstrates that two internal threats, namely Kurdish nationalism and political Islam, were strategically used by both the military and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to subdue rival actors and consolidate power. In other words, both the military and the AKP government have limited political competition while depending on distinct sources of legitimacy: the military’s legitimacy was predicated primarily on its coercive capabilities, that of the AKP on electoral victories.

Human Rights Organizations in Turkey

This chapter analyzes the origins and the development of human rights organizations in Turkey since 1945. It first offers an overview of the limited number of elite organizations established between 1946 and 1974 and the initial skepticism toward human rights activism in the country in the 1960s and 1970s among grass-roots political movements. It then discusses the importance of two major events, the military coup in 1980 and the start of the armed conflict between the Turkish security forces and the PKK in 1984, for the development of human rights–based activism in the 1980s. The chapter then turns to the 1990s, characterized by the proliferation of human rights organizations and diversification of focus areas, ranging from LGBT rights to the rights of women to manifest their religion by wearing headscarves. It links these dynamics to the global rise of human rights activism in the 1990s and the subsequent appropriation of the human rights lexicon by a wide range of domestic social movements. The chapter moves forward with a discussion of the further proliferation of human rights organizations well into the 2000s as Turkey’s EU membership process boosted democratization and pluralism. The chapter ends with an assessment of the impact of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi’s authoritarian turn on the transformative power and horizons of human rights organizations in the 2010s.

Turkey and Europe

This chapter examines historical asynchronicities and perceptual asymmetries between Turkey and Europe. The major historical asynchronicity has been that in Turkey a bourgeois public has not grown and accrued the power necessary to turn the state into a state based on the rule of law. As for the perceptual asymmetries between Turkey and Europe, this chapter interprets the data gathered from research with the participation of Turkish and French university students. By applying a method of “deliberative dialogue,” the chapter uncovers the diverging opinions of the Turkish and French youth on such critical issues as European and Turkish identities and Turkey’s integration with the European Union. In the third and concluding section, the chapter argues that the postmodern European space is a competitive arena, with continually changing “boundaries” rather than fixed “borders.” Hence, Turkey’s integration with Europe will take the form not only of the Turkish state becoming a member of the European Union but, equally importantly, of the inclusion of Turkish cities, regions, academic institutions, political parties, art galleries, museums, labor unions, student associations, and the like into the emerging European cultural, academic, economic, and social space. Since the end of the Cold War, the peak point in EU–Turkish relations was in December 1999, when the European Council declared Turkey a candidate state to join the European Union. Yet the euphoria generated by this decision proved to be short-lived, and relations took a downturn soon after. In the 2010s, EU–Turkish relations entered a new phase, which can be termed “ultra-instrumentalism,” characterized by an almost complete demoralization and depoliticization of EU–Turkish relations.

Political Music in Turkey

Since the founding of the Turkish republic, music has been viewed and used as a nation-building tool by the state. Respectively, music has also been considered an instrument of opposition from the very beginning. This opposing character has expanded and diversified its vocabulary with a socialist and leftist tone over time, especially in the 1960s. During the end of the decade, we also see the emergence of Kurdish political music. During the early 1970s, Turkey witnessed the burgeoning of the ultranationalist music called Ülkücü music. While the 1980 military coup silenced all the dissident voices and music, musicians who received asylum from European countries continued creating music in exile. Leftist music after the military coup witnessed a popularization in the band music influenced by the Latin American musical genre Nueva canción, and solo musician Ahmet Kaya pioneered the leftist protest song scene. Kurdish political music bands called koms emerged by the end of the 1980s and became more prevalent during the 1990s. The 2000s saw the deradicalization, individualization, and depoliticization of overtly political musics in general. However, with the overpoliticization of the country during the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi regime, the dissident elements of protest music have also become dispersed into a wide variety of genres with a more moderate tone.

Democratization Theories and Turkey

This chapter investigates whether the major approaches in democratization literature offer satisfactory explanations for Turkey’s recent transition to unstable authoritarianism. It argues that modernization theory has a limited explanation for the rise of authoritarianism in recent years. The causation between democratization and development flows from the former to the latter in the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi era. Business and major unions have been, mostly if not all the time, state-dependent/state-led actors, and their impact on democratization does not have a strong independent effect. While (medium) leverage and (high) linkage with Europe and the West were crucial in the startling pro-democratic reforms (2000–2005), later on they did not save Turkey from being an authoritarian country. Studies on Turkish political culture suggest that support for democracy among elite and public opinion is highly contextual. Among subfields of democratization literature, Turkish studies have notably contributed to the debate on secularism. Future studies could focus on a kind of political Islam enmeshed within nationalism, especially in the form of Turkish-Islam ideology, as well as differences in religious communities and their alliance with political actors. Overall, Turkish studies offers a fertile ground to contribute to the democratization literature that investigates the uneasy relationship between nationalism, national identity, and democracy.