Populism Authoritarianism And Necropolitics

This book examines how Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan produces and employs necropolitical narratives in order to perpetuate its authoritarian rule. In doing so, the book argues that as the party transitioned from socially conservative Muslim democratic values to authoritarian Islamism, it embraced a necropolitical narrative based on the promotion of martyrdom, and of killing and dying for the Turkish nation and Islam, as part of their authoritarian legitimation. This narrative, the book shows, is used by the party to legitimise its actions and deflect its failures through the framing of the deaths of Turkish soldiers and civilians, which have occurred due to the AKP’s political errors, as martyrdom events in which loyal servants of the Turkish Republic and God gave their lives in order to protect the nation in a time of great crisis. This book also describes how, throughout its second decade in power, the AKP has used Turkey’s education system, its Directorate of Religious Affairs, and television programs in order to propagate its necropolitical martyrdom narrative.

First Published in 2004. This book provides a novel understanding of current thought and enquiry in the study of popular culture and communications media. The populist sentiments and impulses underlying cultural studies and its postmodernist variants are explored and criticized sympathetically. An exclusively consumptionist trend of analysis is identified and shown to be an unsatisfactory means of accounting for the complex material conditions and mediations that shape ordinary people’s pleasures and opportunities for personal and political expression. Through detailed consideration of the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and ‘the Birmingham School’, John Fiske, youth subcultural analysis, popular television study, and issues generally concerned with public communication (including advertising, arts and broadcasting policies, children’s television, tabloid journalism, feminism and pornography, the Rushdie affair, and the collapse of communism), Jim McGuigan sets out a distinctive case for recovering critical analysis of popular culture in a rapidly changing, conflict-ridden world. The book is an accessible introduction to past and present debates for undergraduate students, and it poses some challenging theses for postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers.

This edited book examines the growing worldwide phenomenon of civilizational populism in democratic nation-states and brings together research that explores this in a wide variety of religious, political, and geographic contexts. In doing so, the book shows how, from Europe to India and Pakistan, and from Indonesia to the Americas, populists increasingly define national belonging through civilizational identity, claiming that the world can be divided into several religion-defined civilizations with incompatible values. The volume also discusses the complex relationship between civilizational populism, democracy and nationalism and shows how nationalists often use civilizational identity to help define ingroups and outgroups within their society. With this, the book investigates the salience of the concept, its widespread and influential nature, and also explains how populists construct civilizational identities, and the factors behind the rise of civilizational populism.

This book investigates Turkey’s departure from a ‘flawed democracy’ under Kemalist secularism, and its transitioning into Islamist authoritarian Erdoğanism, through the lenses of informal law, legal pluralism, and legal hybridity. In doing so, it examines the attempts of Turkey’s ruling party (AKP) at social engineering and gradual Islamisation of the Turkish state and society, by using informal Islamist laws. To that end, the book argues that the AKP has paved the way for Islamist legal hybridity where society, state, and law, are being gradually Islamised on an ad hoc basis. Informal law and legal pluralism in Turkey have had a non-state characteristic which have permitted Muslims to solve disputes by seeking the opinions of religio-legal scholars. Yet under the AKP rule, this informal legal system has become increasingly dominated by conservatives, sometimes radical Islamists, which the governing party has taken advantage of by either formalizing some parts of the informal Islamist law, or using it informally to mobilize its supporters against the opposition.

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today’s populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy itself remains up for debate. Yet this much is clear: these challenges indict the triumphalism that accompanied liberal democratic consolidation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To respond to today’s crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing fraught social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention. Although reforms may stem the populist tide, liberal democratic life will always leave some citizens unsatisfied. This is a permanent source of vulnerability, but liberal democracy will endure so long as citizens believe it is worth fighting for.

This book focuses on securitization and authoritarianism in Turkey with research on the country’s Islamist populist ruling party’s (AKP) oppression of different socio-political, ethnic and religious groups. In doing so, it analyzes how the AKP has securitized to oppress different socio-political groups and identities, according to the time and need for the party's political survival. Research in the book sheds light on the use of traumas, conspiracy theories, and fear as tools in the securitization and repression processes.

This book explores state–religion relations under a populist authoritarian ruling party in Turkey. In doing so, it investigates how the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) instrumentalizes state-controlled religion to further, defend, legitimatize and propagate its authoritarian populist political agenda in a constitutionally secular nation-state. To exemplify this, the authors examine the Friday sermons delivered weekly in every mosque in Turkey by the Turkish State’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). By analyzing all sermons delivered between 2010-2021, the book shows how the Diyanet has enthusiastically adopted AKP’s increasingly Islamist, authoritarian, civilisationist, militarist and pro-violence populism since 2010, and how it has tried to socially engineer beliefs in line with this ideology.

"The essays collected here explore how global, regional, national, and local structures of power produce angry politics. They go beyond conventional academic debates about populism to explore the different kinds of anger that shape politics today, and to make legible the multiplicity of forces, antagonisms, conflicts, and emergent political forms that mark the present"--