This chapter investigates the logics of punishment that animate the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. Examining the different yet recurrent tools with which academics in Turkey have been historically expulsed from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected yet changing forms of punishment directed at academics as knowledge producers from the early Republican period to the first two and a half decades of the twenty-first century. In keeping with the literature on changing regimes of punishment, I conclude that the logic for penalising those targeted has shifted from compensation in the early Republican era to a securitised logic of retribution (following the 1980 coup), to a cruel form of retributive securitisation in the form of subjection to civic death in post-2016 Turkey.

This chapter investigates the securitisation logic of control animating the AKP’s new securitisation technologies by enumerating the impact of four relevant factors on society: authoritarian lateral surveillance; centralised digital politics; shared contingency governance; and extra-legal and religious over-reach into domestic life. By focusing on these four factors in each section, I argue that under the sway of an authoritarian politics of securitisation, the AKP government combines the technologies of lateral surveillance and centralised digital politics to transgress the principle of individual criminal responsibility in favour of ‘shared responsibility’, a familial ‘sharing in the referent object of securitisation,’ and participation in the maintenance of security. I further suggest that this new development marks a shift away from state of emergency rule to an authoritarian securitisation in which Turkey uses peer-to-peer surveillance pervasively and invasively in the service of state protection.

This chapter reviews how the logic of biosecuritisation animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. It indexes the government’s attempts to reach deep into the population’s domestic life, families, and bodies to target women, LGBTQ+, and disabled people for biosecuritisation. The first section unpacks the theoretical dimension of biosecuritisation. In the next section, the focus is on biosecuritisation as a logic of authoritarian securitisation. The third section unpacks the gendered insecuritisation of women and the exertion of biopolitical control over their bodies and reproductive lives. The next section then turns to biosecuritisation of the already marginalised LGBTQ+ community, and their criminalisation as ‘deviant’. The last section describes the potentially catastrophic consequences of the biosecuritisation of disabled people. I argue that the biosecuritisation of the purges works to further insecuritise and exclude the already marginalised sub-groups of women, members of LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities by trapping them in the vicious circle of biosecuritisation.

This book examines how new AKP authoritarian securitisation practices shape and reshape the daily lives of people purged by emergency decree. The Introduction defines key concepts such as authoritarianism, securitisation, and civic death, as well as describes the methodology. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical ethnographic and historical research with theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the political, the book highlights the new forms of citizenship deprivation, security, and punishment that have emerged under the AKP. It argues that new methods of securitisation are designed to reduce those targeted for civic death, a type of disposable citizen who is denied the opportunity to reclaim their social, economic, and political rights even after they have been acquitted or the state of emergency has been lifted.

The Conclusion argues that, taken together, the AKP’s combined authoritarian securitisation state is predicated on five authoritarian securitisation logics:1) repressive protection of the state; 2) cruel retributive punishment; 3) centralised and mass lateral control; 4) self-regulation through informalised rule of law; and 5) biosecuritisation as a doubled form of civic death. I then examine present-day global empirics concerning the global system of securitisation to argue that the differences between democratic and authoritarian governance are increasingly more of degree than kind. Asking the question of what next, I look briefly at signs of democratic optimism visible in Turkish citizen’s capacity for resilience and innovative resistance.

Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule, Turkey has become an autocratic regime. The Turkish case raises questions about how international organizations tasked with upholding the rule of law can not only permit illiberal states to violate rule-of-law norms but also themselves undermine those principles. Conceptually, the rule-of-law/rule-by-law spectrum fails to account for authoritarian contexts. If the rule of law constitutes one end of the analytical spectrum, the other end is lawless rule, not rule by law, and the dual state lies somewhere in between. This chapter analyzes the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concerning Erdoğan’s resort to the law to consolidate his power (rule by law) and his utter disregard of legal rules in repressing democratic dissent and engaging in state violence (lawlessness). The analysis goes beyond ECtHR judgments to examine inadmissibility decisions and strike-out rulings.

The extant literature on the liberal commons takes as granted secure property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of law, all of which have been the exception rather than the rule throughout human history, and therefore fails to explore the origin of the liberal commons (from an illiberal regime). Authoritarianism poses a fundamental challenge to, but also an opportunity to explore the origin of, the liberal commons. This chapter defines the authoritarian commons by examining the tension between authoritarianism and the liberal commons both theoretically and in the specific context of neighborhood governance in urban China.

After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter recaps the books framework and findings. It shows how putting the logic of complex systems into conversation with qualitative and multi-method tools enables us to read political contestation in a non-binary way. Thus, we capture the causal role of shifting coalitions for and against pluralism (understood as openness to “Others” who may look, speak, pray or love differently than we do). Applying this framework to a pivotal, Muslim-majority country, Contesting Pluralism(s) offers an alternative to Orientalist accounts of Turkey’s history and present. The conclusion then offers a roadmap for channeling the book’s original and timely approach to comparative research wherever the nexus of political religion, populist nationalism and pluralism is hotly contested from India and Italy to the United States.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

We begin this chapter by outlining what constitutes a humiliating foreign policy. We then linger on a key feature in the phenomenology of political humiliation, namely the sense of being replaced. This sense manifests in a perception of being removed from importance and consequence – usually by someone not viewed as a worthy competitor. After describing the phenomenology of replacement, we point out that it is particularly important to understand this sentiment because it straddles personal and political psychology, and because a focus on the sense of replacement helps us distinguish normative and descriptive aspects of political humiliation. After discussing the phenomenology of replacement, we highlight the difference between democratic and autocratic rulers in their susceptibility to humiliation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the dual role of humiliation as both driver and method of war.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

Chapter 10 explores democracy versus autocracy. It offers a frequency-based fitness analysis of the political regimes in the world, demonstrating the superior fitness of democracy, represented by the United States in time and place, but also revealing the resilience of non-democratic forms of government, represented by China. Countering the larger historical trend, democracy has retreated and autocracy has gained in recent years. It is difficult to tell whether this is a temporary setback for democracy or the start of a longer trend. Evolution does not assume constant progress, so the chapter dives deeper into the performance criterion for competing political regimes by peeling off the labels and examining different components of a political regime. In addition, the chapter offers a discussion of how East Asians have lived with the liberal international order, which most current American and Western leaders view as central to their fight against autocracy.