Contested Hegemony Building in A.K.P.’s Turkey

Louis Fishman and Isabel David

Abstract

The introduction lays the ground for the book through the lens of cultural studies—via Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall—, and Antonio Gramsci. First, it discusses the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) domination of state institutions and of the economic realm. Next, it demonstrates the various reconfigurations of the A.K.P. power bloc, as the party transformed itself in response to opposition challenges. The introduction then proceeds to document the party’s attempts to secure hegemony through the cultural field by making use of a dual strategy: neoliberalization and governmentality. The chapter argues that the A.K.P. has made use of what we term as cultural populism, anchored on the dichotomy of White vs. Black Turks, in order to build the “new man”—the desirable citizen—and a “New Turkey.” The volume adds to a small but fundamental literature on culture in A.K.P.’s Turkey and further contributes to the wider debate on comparative studies of authoritarianism, de-democratization, and autocratization in the twenty-first century.

Keywords

Turkey, Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), Hegemony, Culture, Authoritarianism, Kulturkampf, Yerli ve Milli, New Turkey

This book contributes to the ongoing debate on the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) rule in Turkey through the prism of culture, a contentious locus where a battle for the soul of the country takes place. The field of culture has received scarce attention from the academic community working on Turkey. Indeed, after the groundbreaking book by Kandiyoti and Saktanber (2002), only in 2018 did a new comprehensive volume on culture in Turkey (Girard, Polo, and Scalbert-Yücel 2018) emerge, followed by Hecker, Furman, and Akyıldız (2022). Our volume adds to this small but fundamental literature and further contributes to the wider debate on comparative studies of authoritarianism, de-democratization, and autocratization in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as Turkey’s A.K.P. government has and continues to shape the country and its society for almost a quarter of a century, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that at least a third of its population, which reaches over 85 million, has only known Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as its leader, whether in his years as prime minister or later as president.