Until the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013, the AKP government has prided itself as a champion of democracy in the region and it was regarded as such by the majority of the international community. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, it had shown conscious effort to project an image of itself as a political movement that is more democratic and modern than any other political group, even and especially its secularist/Kemalist rivals. During the Gezi protests however, this image came crashing down. Erdogan took a relentless and uncompromising stance against the Gezi protestors, labeling them as terrorists who are plotting a “civilian coup” to bring him down and ordering the police to resort to any measures necessary to repress protests. As a result, the protests spread not only all across Turkey but also internationally resulting in supportive protests from Germany to Brazil and the US. It soon became evident that the Gezi protests would become not only a landmark in Turkish history but also a significant part of the globally rising demands for democratization. Yet despite the upmost significance of the movement, its major components are still largely understudied. One such aspect is the dialogue (or lack thereof) between the protesters and the state. In light of this, we ask “How are we to understand the relationship between the protestors and the state during Gezi?” We revisit issues such as patriarchy, state and citizen-formation, and political legitimacy and claim that focusing on the patriarchal discourse used by the state during the protests will help us understand the underlining political dynamics not just of the movement in question but also of politics in general. By examining the ways in which the AKP government and particularly Erdogan addressed and dealt with the protestors, we argue that patriarchy, which presents itself in two forms; paternalism and male-domination, emerges as a key element of the structuring and transformation of the state-citizen relationship so as to create and legitimize the authority of the state by establishing Erdogan as the great patriarch of Turkey. The protestors, on the other hand, have tried to cope with this formulation by challenging and subverting the role assigned to them by the government as riotous, out-of-control “looters” (“çapulcu”) who need to be forcefully disciplined back into being proper citizens as the deserving children of the great patriarch.

Much critical work in development studies have focused in recent years on the depoliticization of development goals around gender equality, individualization of measures of women’s empowerment, and their links with consolidation of neoliberal economic agendas. We argue that the issue cannot always be encapsulated within depoliticization of actual problems, complicity with neoliberal agendas, couched within a complete power inequality between the donors and the recipients. Understanding what makes development programs go awry requires how development funding is utilized and programs are built and steered on the ground, in the everyday workings of state bureaucracy. Thus, utilizing the case of Turkey, we turn our gaze toward the state. We suggest that, often, institutional arrangements within the state mediate the running of these programs and what the programs actually end up doing. The issue, thus, is to follow actual implementation through the institutional arrangements that govern it. This paper is based on research on existing public programs, designed to increase women’s labor force participation, which attract significant international funding. It combines desk study, bringing together a comprehensive record of existing national and international policy documents, legal texts, strategic plans, reports and publications related to the subject; interviews with officers of the relevant ministries, institutions and civil society organizations as well as a descriptive statistical analysis. We use this material to first look at divisions of labor within the state, which isolate all issues related to women’s rights and compartmentalize them in familial terms. Then we explore the format of the programs, which reinforce a residual understanding of relevant social policy by relying on temporary project funding. We finally look at the type of programs, which lock women in informal sectors and areas of activity in which there is a demand problem. We conclude that money spent to promote women’s labor force participation ends up reflecting the government’s increasingly conservative outlook on gender issues, even as it appears to promote gender equality. Once these institutional arrangements are taken into consideration, together with the actual program contents, it becomes evident that internationally specified minimalist and technical goals leave ample room for state policies to work through them. Because the technicalized vision of the international development aid structure is too vague and weak, state politics, which reinforces mechanisms of gender inequality, can continue even as it receives this aid.

This paper aims at offering a feminist analysis of the current working of the neoliberal-conservative politics in Turkey through the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) regulations in the spheres of social policy and internal security. The main argument of the paper is that the JDP governments’ attempts to administer the neoliberal crisis at the national level can be traced in the increasing authoritarian stance of the party, accompanied by neo-conservative discourse. The paper is built on three parts. In the first part, I offer a reading of the JDP’s social policy record with special emphasis on the party’s familial policies in order to demonstrate party’s commitment to conservative values in policy preferences. In this part I analyze the “Family Package”—a set of gender policies initiated by the JDP in early 2015. In the second part, I focus on the party’s recent attempts to initiate authoritarian security regulations. In this part, I analyze the “Internal Security Package”—a set of policies initiated by the JDP almost simultaneously with the “Family Package.” In the third and concluding part, I offer a discussion on the junction between the conservative discourse and security discourse that exemplifies the rise of authoritarian politics in times of crisis.

This paper deals with the authoritarian discursive strategies of political actors in contemporary Turkey with regard to sexuality and morality. The post-2011 period has witnessed significant political contestations over women’s bodies and sexualities in Turkey; the debate over (1) co-ed student housing versus single sex student housing, (2) the lay-off of a female presenter due to her sexually titillating clothing, (3) women’s laughing out loud in public (4) the “negative” effects of TV series on young people’s morality. The ordeal of politics in contemporary Turkey takes up women’s sexualities and bodies as an arena of consolidation of conservative and authoritarian values. The debates presented in this paper indicate that authoritarian political discourses on women’s sexualities and bodies in Turkey serve towards the consolidation of a highly entrenched conservative gender regime that is constantly reproduced by various actors in the public sphere who assertively articulate their patriarchal standpoints. In this vein, this paper portrays the discursive utilization of women’s bodies and sexualities in the contemporary gender regime in Turkey against a background of a complex combination of authoritarianism and the rise of neoliberal and conservative values. As a result, it aims to put forward that current patriarchal discourses stem from a vicious circle where the neoliberal-conservative approach to gender relations contributes to the hegemony of current authoritarian discourses and conversely, the rising authoritarianism further feeds the neoliberal-conservative gender discourses, thereby securing its hegemony.