Over the past decade, Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) substantially increased their market share in Turkey, and demonstrated an impressive growth rate. In promoting this sector, Turkish entrepreneurs also make a moral claim, suggesting that their profit motivations are justified by a religious concern because wealth generated through halal means indirectly helps out the poor and the needy. Yet, though these entrepreneurs frequently invoke religious morals to justify their strategies, Islamic banks are only occasionally engaged in systematic acts of charitable giving. Why do conventional banks in Turkey engage more systematically with social-welfare related philanthropy projects while their Islamic counterparts appear less interested in similar activities? The paper brings the state back in and finds that this variation is an unintended consequence of the current government’s social policy reforms. During the 2000s, AKP government encouraged greater private involvement in public goods provision in return for providing economic privileges to partisan business groups—including Islamic banks. While Islamic banks rely on religious solidarity networks and channel their contribution through Islamic charity NGOs that command a broader geographic outreach in collaboration with local government actors, conventional banks that are not part of partisan social networks carry out independent corporate social responsibility schemes.

The roles of Turkish women in political parties and political campaigns have changed dramatically in the past decade. Prior to the 2000s, women were largely absent from the political sphere. When they were present, it was typically due to nepotism; women in politics were in a “patriarchal paradox” and owed their positions and power to male family members (Arat 1989). And despite many political parties having kadin kolları (women’s branches), these branches had no significant role for their respective parties. Women’s importance to politics began to change in the early 2000s. Women’s positions in parties and as campaign volunteers began to transform due to the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which turned its kadin kolları into the largest women’s political organization in the world, claiming over 2 million members (2010). The party utilized its women to organize events, recruit other volunteers, and canvass during elections (White 2002, Arat 2005). This meant that women’s descriptive representation increased (Ayata and Tütüncü 2008). However, increases in descriptive representation do not always correspond to increases in substantive representation, the ability to represent women’s interests and pass laws that improve women’s lives (Reingold 2006, Reingold 2010; Wangnerud 2009). In this paper, I argue that as women’s descriptive representation increased, structural transformations in the Turkish political system occurred, lowering the likelihood of women’s substantive representation increasing. Based on evidence collected from conducted from 2008-2015, although women volunteer in great numbers, especially with the AKP’s kadin kolları, they are typically pigeonholed in these “women’s” positions in the Islamist-leaning, male-dominated party, and receive little support from the party if they choose to run for office. And although women from the AKP, CHP (Republican People’s Party), and MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) are running for Parliament in greater numbers than ever before, even if they are elected, the pattern of increased centralization in politics means that they are more beholden to the party’s (male) leadership and lack their own authority to affect change. Finally, females in politics are used as tools by the political parties—women’s clothing, families, and jobs are held up as models to attract voters—but the parties’ models continue to be determined by the male party leaders, not women in power.

AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) thirteen-year dominance in Turkish politics was due a successful combination of neoliberal and neopopulist policies, through which the Party has managed to receive votes from the urban poor, as well as conservative business owners. In the process, AKP emphasized a supposed cultural affiliation between these two groups, even though their economic interests radically diverged. Masses were convinced AKP’s neoliberal policies in poverty alleviation, health care, and housing were going to work in their favor. By the same token, in a classically neopopulist move, a cultural wedge was placed between the conservative and secular segments of society. In this paper, using interviews with business people, conducted in Istanbul in 2011 and 2012, we will illustrate how the line along religiosity and life-style that was supposed to distinguish “secular” and “conservative” business people is blurry and socially constructed. During the AKP regime, business people were strengthened or weakened by the regime based on their real or perceived allegiance to the AKP and its leader, not necessarily due to their cultural dispositions. This served to strengthen AKP’s neoliberal hegemony further. Also, through patronage ties with business people, the Party and its leader established almost complete control over the mass media. However, AKP’s hegemony is beginning to shatter. Using Philip Gorski’s insights into social discipline, we will argue that neoliberal forms of disciplining are based on consent-production, and therefore, are more stable than coercive forms of disciplining. Indeed, neoliberalism globally has been successful in consolidating itself through consent, rather than force. However, since 2007, AKP’s policies are increasingly what Gorski would call in the realm “corrective disciplining,” coercive and at the individual level, which tend to be less effective. As the Gezi uprising has shown, these forms of disciplining target the individual bodies of dissenters. We argue that this form of disciplining presents a strong threat to AKP’s hegemony. Moreover, AKP’s poverty alleviation, health care, and housing policies are also shattering. Therefore, the AKP increasingly has to strengthen its emphasis on the supposed cultural divide between the “Muslim masses” and “secular elites.” Their increased emphasis on women’s modesty, Islamic education etc. has to do with the crisis of hegemony they find themselves facing.

Turkey went through a major urban transformation in the past decade, mainly based on the commodification of public land. The AKP government pursued an aggressive urban policy to achieve massive and rapid renewal of the cities through large-scale construction projects, financed through public-private partnerships. Particularly large cities look like giant construction sites where expensive real estate projects, from gated communities to shopping malls and office towers are mushrooming. These developments capitalize on urban nature and other shared space, replacing parks, forests, historical sites, slums, or beaches. This urban policy constituted major discontent among leftist and environmentalist circles who considered the government as an agent of business elites. These perspectives problematized the extensive privatization of public land and emphasized its social consequences, including the displacement of the urban poor, elimination of diversity, or changing life styles. Nevertheless, a critical aspect of the government’s urban policy, namely the extension of the boundaries of the state apparatus and centralization around the executive institution at the expense of rival institutions received little attention, even from critical perspectives. Yet, the enlargement and centralization of the state apparatus in Turkey in the past decade is key to truly understand some of the important political transformations which took place in this period, not only in urban policy but also in the broader political scene. This study focuses on some of these institutional changes and shows the way in which the state extended its resources bureaucratically and economically to promote real estate development. It suggests that this urban policy enabled the core of the state apparatus, namely the executive, to solidify its position, as well as harnessing the interests of particular constituencies, including a selected group of real estate developers.