Research

Dissertation & Book 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.

Bridging political theory and comparative politics, the dissertation argues that authoritarianism appeals to individuals by producing subjects whose ways of thinking refer to the regime’s authority, rather than the democratic practices that constitute the political community. Developing a practice approach to authoritarianism that focuses on regime techniques of subject formation and individual practices that reproduce, refract, and resist these techniques, the dissertation demonstrates how the significance of pluralism and accountability may erode for citizens. Identifying these authoritarian techniques and how they operate in Turkey, the dissertation considers alternatives and modes of resistance for formations of contemporary democratic authority.

The dissertation uses qualitative and interpretive methods for the analysis. Its novel, highly textured data are gathered through 16-months of fieldwork in Turkey, including participant observation in rallies, protests, and three political communities; 107 in-depth semi-structured interviews with citizens selected in accordance with age, sex, and party preference; and 20 expert interviews with NGOs working for and against LGBTQ+ and Kurdish politics. It uses computer-assisted qualitative coding and interpretive methods, including discourse analysis, affect theory, and ordinary language analysis.

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 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 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.