By Gareth H. Jenkins

March 31,  2017

Whatever the outcome, the Turkish constitutional referendum on April 16 will not resolve the country’s chronic domestic instability, heal its deepening social divisions, revive its flagging economy or end its growing international isolation. But it will shape both the nature of the further turbulence to come and the duration of what is already the final stage of the Erdoğan era. 

By Burak Bilgehan Özpek

February 28, 2017

The AKP regime has from the very beginning of its rule successfully deployed the tactic of defaming and delegitimizing opposition. But the tactic has ultimately been successful because those who have successively been targeted by the AKP – seculars, liberals, the left, Kurds – have also held each other’s demands or opposition to be illegitimate. Turkey’s democracy is thus crippled not only because the opposition has been defamed and even criminalized all along since the beginning of the AKP regime. It is the divisions in society that make authoritarianism possible.

By Toni Alaranta

February 17, 2017

It has become a commonplace to argue that Kemalism was a Turkish variant of right-wing nationalism with strong corporatist leanings and even fascist aspects. This is often compounded with the assertion that the Kemalist secularist state elite only sought to secure its own power and status in society, and that it only paid lip-service to Enlightenment ideals. It is pertinent to ask why the Kemalists would have embarked on a hugely unpopular project of culture revolution that threatened their hold on power by provoking a popular reaction, if they only sought to establish a right-wing dictatorship. The right-wing authoritarianism from which Turkey has suffered during most of its history has other sources.