Research

Dissertation Project

The Appeal of Authoritarianism: Facts, Values, and Intuitions in Turkey

How do authoritarian regimes appeal to the public when standard indicators such as economic performance and state capacity suggest they should lose their popular support? Through the Turkish case, my dissertation analyzes the strategies used by authoritarians to produce and maintain the belief in the appropriateness of their regimes.

While debates on how state violence and political institutions affect regime stability are fairly developed, the question of the appeal of authoritarian politics—which was a central concern for post-World War II scholars—has been neglected until recently. As the research on the appeal of authoritarianism is catching up in response to the vocal support for new authoritarians in the Global North, my dissertation uses the preceding Turkish case to better understand the authoritarian threat we face.

Bridging political theory and comparative politics, the dissertation argues that authoritarianism shapes political judgments in Turkey through three “affective strategies”: first, mobilizing discourses of mutual obligation between citizens and the state; second, reinforcing historically constituted desires, fantasies, and fears to demonize dissent; and third, organizing who can appear in the public sphere so that not only the government’s supporters but larger sections of the population are drawn to authoritarian policies. The three substantial chapters of the dissertation demonstrate how the Turkish regime uses these strategies to justify its policies regarding the economic crisis, the Kurdish and Syrian minorities, and LGBTQ+ politics.

The dissertation builds on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork across these three sites. It uses qualitative data, including participant observation in rallies, protests, and various religious and political communities; archival work across the polarized media landscape; 105 in-depth semi-structured interviews with citizens across the political spectrum; and numerous expert interviews with NGOs working for and against LGBTQ+ and Kurdish politics. It uses computer-assisted qualitative induction and interpretive methods, including affect theory, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy.

Working Papers

“Political Homophobia as Authoritarian Strategy: Organization of Public Appearance in Turkey”

How can we understand the rising anti-LGBT+ politics in Turkey in relation to the country’s simultaneous authoritarian turn? This article argues that the Turkish anti-LGBT+ politics is an example of political homophobia (PH), which becomes an authoritarian strategy at the hands of the Erdoğan government in two senses of the word. First, the article works with Arendt to identify PH as a strategy that operates through the organization of public spaces of appearance. LGBT+ people are excluded from the public sphere by the unequal distribution of state resources, excessive policing, and physical violence. This organization of public appearance shapes the grammar around “the LGBT+ identity” and dominates how individuals think about LGBT+ persons and performances in Turkey. Secondly, the article demonstrates that PH is an authoritarian strategy in its broader effects. The grammar mobilized by anti-LGBT agents situates the LGBT identity at the intersection of the criteria people use to think about collective life, especially, compliance with community norms, the cultural specificity of the Turkish nation, and standards of acceptable public performance. Therefore, PH does not merely wrong the LGBT people; it informs how people think about community membership and state violence more broadly, providing discursive justifications for targeting civil rights and political dissent. The article concludes by considering the modularity of these practices.

“After and Against Empire(s): Self-Determination in the Anatolian Revolution”

Under review in Political Theory

Contemporary literature treats the foundation of the Republic of Turkey as a continuation of the late Ottoman constitutional developments in which the Empire transformed into a secular nation-state. The article argues that this subsumption of this founding moment in world-historical processes of secularization and nation-state formation misses the Anatolian Revolution’s original political thinking. Focusing on the debates in the first Grand National Assembly during the making of the founding 1921 Constitution, the article instead considers the Anatolian Revolution among the anti-imperialist self-determination movements of the 20^th century. This reading demonstrates the real quarrels about the identity of what later became the secular ethno-nationalist Turkish nation and highlights that the movement’s institutionalization of self-determination enacted a critique of Western imperialist states.