The Appeal of Authoritarianism: A Critical Theory of Citizen-Subject Formation in Turkey

Turkey’s strongman President Erdoğan was re-elected in May 2023 despite the ongoing economic crisis, the extensive corruption and the decline in state capacity made evident by two recent earthquakes, and a fractured ruling coalition. How does authoritarianism appeal to the public when these standard indicators suggest it should lose popular support? How should we understand the graduated traction of these strategies used by the new authoritarians whose appeal is increasing around the globe? The dissertation answers these questions through the Turkish case, arguing that authoritarianism appeals to individuals by producing subjects whose ways of thinking refer to the regime’s authority, rather than their own agency and the collective 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 and resist these techniques, the dissertation demonstrates how the significance of pluralism and accountability may erode for citizens. By identifying these authoritarian techniques and how they operate in Turkey, the dissertation considers alternatives and modes of resistance for the formation of contemporary democratic authority.

After an Introduction that develops the dissertation’s practice approach to authoritarianism drawing from the works of Theodore Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt, each chapter investigates how individuals develop their political judgments on a key issue and discerns the strategies by which the regime transforms the public context of judgment. Chapter 1 focuses on the Turkish economic crisis after 2018. It argues that the regime combines its neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state with redistributive policies framed as “gifts” to instill relations of trust, reciprocity, and indebtedness. It identifies that the individuals who reproduce the regime’s “discourse of the gift” refer to the state’s exclusionary policies before the expansion of welfare in Turkey by the AKP. Chapter 2 analyzes how both the regime and the opposition securitized Kurdish and Syrian politics in Turkey. It approaches securitization as a genre of ordinary life that affects the silent modes of interpreting experience and forming expectations of the future. It demonstrates that despite the differences between the Kurdish and Syrian cases, securitization flattens and silences emergent and alternative collective voices into “the nation” and presents acquiescence to state paternalism as a necessary criterion for membership. The silencing of collective voice and compulsory paternalism subjectifies individuals identifying as Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish in different ways. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the regime controls the appearance of the LGBTQ+ identity in virtual and physical spaces, suppressing queer voices and augmenting anti-LGBTQ+ discourses and agents. This operation shapes the grammar used by people across the political spectrum to understand what the LGBTQ+ identity entails. This technique subjectivizes queer individuals who discipline their public appearance and gets reproduced by all who are not engaged in queer activism or scholarship as they think about community membership and state violence. The dissertation concludes by summarizing the argument and reflecting on the issue and the figure of resistance in the authoritarian context.

The dissertation uses qualitative and interpretive methods for its analysis. Its new and highly textured qualitative data gathered through 16 months of fieldwork in Turkey includes participant observation at rallies, protests, and three political communities engaged in Islamist, Kurdish, and LGBTQ+ politics in Istanbul and Diyarbakır; 107 in-depth semi-structured interviews with citizens selected in accordance with age, sex, and party quotas; and 20 expert interviews with NGOs working for and against LGBTQ+ and Kurdish politics. It uses computer-assisted qualitative coding to identify patterns shared between interviewees across demographic groups, and draws from discourse analysis, affect theory, and ordinary language philosophy for analysis.