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ID:
178541
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the early morning of September 6, 2019, two rap videos expressing frustrations with Turkey’s socio-political condition coincidentally dropped together and quickly went viral. Although one was more overtly political, both videos crystalized the rage, grief, and hopelessness many had been feeling under the 17-year rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The dual release catalyzed a groundswell of online mobilization at a particularly tumultuous moment – one at which mass protest in the form of organized street demonstrations was effectively off the table. As this article argues, however, pushback against the AKP was alive and well in alternative spaces. From rap collaborations challenging corruption and rising rates of femicide to social media users repurposing familiar memes of TV shows with witty political critique, pop culture-themed acts of resistance signalled to others in Turkey’s fractious opposition that they were not alone. This articles addresses an interdisciplinary body of literature that examines the AKP’s deployment of entertainment media to extend its soft power abroad and cultivate a conservative society at home, but turns it around to explore how various opposition actors strike back by taking pop culture into their own hands as a tool of expression, mobilization, and subversion.
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| 2 |
ID:
165758
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| Summary/Abstract |
Turkish diplomacy vis-à-vis Germany as well as Russia and Israel appears to reflect a transactional trend in Ankara’s foreign policy.
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| 3 |
ID:
188893
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| Summary/Abstract |
Turkey’s 2019 acquisition of Russian S-400 missile batteries is puzzling. Despite repeated threats of sanctions by the United States, North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Turkey purchased a multi-billion-dollar Russian air defense system that remains nonoperational, fails to cover Turkey’s air defense gap, and led to Turkey’s costly expulsion from the F-35 program. We argue unexpected domestic constraints created by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s symbolic diplomacy raised the political costs of backing away from the deal. Collecting data from media reports and interviews, we analyze how Turkey’s AKP wielded the S-400 as a weapons system legitimating an identity narrative of Turkey as regional counterhegemon, facilitating the cultivation of coalitions with multiple, often competing, constituencies. We demonstrate via process tracing how the inherent ambiguity of symbols allowed nationalist constituencies key to the AKP’s hold on power to amplify the S-400 as symbolic of Turkey’s sovereignty, trapping Turkish officials in a costly policy corner. In unpacking Turkey’s S-400 purchase, the article contributes to the literature on symbolic diplomacy, audience costs, weapons procurement, and deterrence failure.
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