THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast Ep. 135: The Turkish Question w/ Cihan Tugal

For the last two decades, Turkey has been ruled by the Justice and Development Party (better known by its Turkish acronym AKP), a political party with its origins in the country’s Islamist movement. The rise of the AKP was a profound shock for the secular nationalist elite that had dominated Turkish political life since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in the early 1920s. Initially, the AKP - under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan - postured as a liberalizing force in Turkish politics, promising greater political freedom, an end to military tutelage, a resolution to the Kurdish question, and an improvement of relations with neighboring countries. However, over the last decade the AKP and Erdogan have become increasingly authoritarian and repressive internally and aggressive abroad.

 
What explains this transformation?

 
What does it mean for the future of Turkey? And what does it mean for the broader Middle East and Balkans?

 
 
About Professor Tugal:
Cihan Tuğal studies three interlocking dynamics: 1) capitalism’s generation and destruction of communities, livelihoods, and places; 2) the implosion of representative democracy; 3) the crisis of liberal ethics. His ongoing research focuses on populism, the radical right, and neoliberalism in the United States and the Middle East. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.

Tuğal’s most recent book, Caring for the Poor (2017, Routledge), examines the emergence, globalization, and decline of liberal ethics by focusing on charity, philanthropy, and welfare. The book builds on a Maussian analysis of the gift, as well as Polanyian, Marxian, Bourdieusian, and Foucaultian theorizations of charity. Tuğal has published offshoots of his larger project on welfare ethics in the American Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, and Rethinking Marxism. His ongoing work explores ethical, religious, and spiritual alternatives to the rationalization and individualization of care and wellbeing.

 
Three articles on the global uprisings of 2009-2013 provide a snapshot of Tuğal’s work on capitalism and politics (see below: “Elusive Revolt”, "Decline of the Monopoly of Legitimate Violence," and “Resistance Everywhere”). Marketization, uneven growth, increasing ineffectiveness of American hegemony, and decimation of middle classes have undermined the (liberal-conservative) mainstream and incited revolt. As Tuğal’s collaborative work with De Leon and Desai emphasizes, political creativity (or lack thereof) thoroughly shapes what kind of a route societies take in response to such turbulence. For now, the American far right has scored (important but) restricted victories as a result of this global chaos (see below: "The Counter-Revolution’s Long March"). His earlier books unpacked similar processes in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia (Passive Revolution, Stanford University Press; and The Fall of the Turkish Model, Verso).

He has also written extensively in Turkish.

 
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