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Download fileReclaiming the national will: Resilience of Turkish authoritarian neoliberalism after Gezi
This article explores why and how authoritarian regimes become resilient in the face of strong resistance of counter-hegemonic forces to neoliberal social and economic projects. The discussion is illustrated in the case of Turkey. The political subjectivities produced by authoritarian neoliberalism and the AKP government’s attempt to reassert its hegemony through consent production are analysed by revisiting the Gezi Park protests and the ‘National Will’ meetings in 2013. I argue that once the AKP’s neoliberal he-gemony was challenged by the Gezi protestors, the government appropriated the Turkish right’s existing ‘national will’ narrative with a neo-Ottomanist and neoliberal makeover. To unpack this argument, the article (1) retraces the Gezi protestors’ own accounts to explore how the resistance to authoritarian ne-oliberalism materialised; (2) examines how the AKP government attempted to reproduce its hegemony through consent generation at the ‘National Will’ meetings through analysing discursive strategies of the government and pro-government media.
Funding
The article is based on the author’s research conducted as part of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project ‘Exploring Civil Society Strategies for Democratic Renewal’ (ES/N00874X/1).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
South European Society and PoliticsVolume
23Issue
2Pages
259-280Citation
BOLGIC, A., 2018. Reclaiming the national will: Resilience of Turkish authoritarian neoliberalism after Gezi. South European Society and Politics 23(2), pp. 259-280.Publisher
© Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in South European Society and Politics on 07 Jun 2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2018.1477422://www.tandfonline.com/[Article DOI].Acceptance date
2018-05-11Publication date
2018-06-07Copyright date
2018ISSN
1743-9612Publisher version
Language
- en