Loughborough University
Browse
Bilgic FINAL edited_AB.pdf (408.32 kB)

Reclaiming the national will: Resilience of Turkish authoritarian neoliberalism after Gezi

Download (408.32 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2018-05-31, 08:57 authored by Ali BilgicAli Bilgic
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 Politics

Volume

23

Issue

2

Pages

259-280

Citation

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 & Francis

Version

  • 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

2018-05-11

Publication date

2018-06-07

Copyright date

2018

ISSN

1743-9612

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC