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Yavuz, M. Hakan and Öztürk, Ahmet Erdi (2020) Guest editors’ introduction: Islamism, identity and memory: Turkey under Erdoğan. Middle East Critique, 29 (3). pp. 237-243. ISSN 1943-6149
We argue that this recent form of Islamist populism has damaged Turkey’s relatively young democratic experiment and the evolution of a public sphere that cherishes constitutional rights of free expression and agency and this has to be scrutinized. In this regard, on April 1, 2019, a group of Turkey experts came together to discuss the transformation of Turkey under Erdogan and organized a one-day workshop at The University of Utah. This special issue evolved out from that one-day intense workshop and focuses on three sets of questions:
1) The Context: What are the major social, ideological, and political factors which have driven the transformation of the AKP? How and in what direction have the objectives and strategies of the AKP changed and how does one explain the divergence between professed ideals and practices? What have been the roles of external factors and powers in the transformation of the AKP?
2) The July 15 Coup Attempt and Foreign Policy: What are the major repercussions of the coup attempt on key Turkish state institutions and policies? How has the coup affected Turkish foreign policy towards regional and international powers?
3) Methodological Issues: How do we account for the current political crisis in Turkey and the government’s moves toward authoritarianism? What have we, as a scholarly community, missed in our earlier studies of the AK Party? Does it make sense to study Turkish politics as just a clash between Islam and secularism or as a more complex set of circumstances?
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