By n+1 | Issue 45 : Attachment Issue
TWO MEN LIE ON THEIR SIDES on the cobblestone. A heavy winter boot bears down on the right cheek of one of these men. From behind we hear voices: “Get the uniforms, come,” and then, from whoever is wearing that boot, something indistinct, like a curse. The boot kicks the man in the face — quick, a brush with the cheek and forehead, it seems, just to scare him. These are the plunderers, and now they’ve been caught. The video has been shared 1,220 times; there are others in this vein. Justice has been served.
Next in my Twitter feed: the response. Two young men appear, with round faces, scraggly beards, and bruises and bleeding around the eyes. “We are the youths you have seen in the video that has been making the rounds. . . . We are not plunderers. We went downtown, my cousin and I, to get the medicine that our family urgently needed. On our way back, members of the security forces, seeing my backpack and the medicine in our hands, treated us like plunderers, took us behind a building and beat us, innocent earthquake victims, mercilessly. . . . We are not plunderers. We are Turkish youth who love our country and were there to take care of our needs.”
The day after two earthquakes, 7.7 and 7.6 on the Richter scale, rippled across ten Turkish provinces and a swath of northwestern Syria, affecting as many as fourteen million people on the Turkish side alone, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared a state of exception in the affected region. This measure, he said, would give him the powers needed to combat “plunderers” (yağmacılar) who take advantage of the chaos to rob upstanding citizens.
No one really knows who the alleged plunderers are. Some seem to think they are Syrian refugees. Thus Selahattin Demirtaş, the imprisoned leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which may soon be banned, calls on us to dismiss rumors of refugees “plundering” collapsed buildings. Others, friends of mine, say that the plunderers are real. They have some friends in Kahramanmaraş who now live in a car. A man came and knocked on the window, said that the governor had announced that the local dam had broken, and the place would soon be flooded. Having no passable streets before them, rubble blocking the car, they got out and ran for their lives, and were robbed.
THE CURRENT DEATH TOLL of the two Kahramanmaraş earthquakes — nearing fifty-five thousand — is more than one hundred times the human cost of the failed military coup of 2016 and has now surpassed the number of people who have died in four decades of guerrilla warfare between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). It is a catastrophe that is sadly not without precedent.
Slow violence is not slow in Turkey. Anyone living here over the past decade has witnessed a long train of disasters, some partly “natural” and others wholly human in origin. Fires, floods, train crashes, terrorist attacks, and collapsing mines have flickered across the screen of public attention, a string of massacres uniformly brought on by negligence if not active malice on the part of a state that reacts by burnishing its own emergency powers, cracking down on critical scrutiny, and punishing the victims. Death comes quickly, in large numbers, and without accountability on the part of those in power. On the contrary: the culprits keep winning elections, and not even necessarily by cheating.
For the first several days after the earthquakes on February 6, the government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent. Social media users took issue with the way Erdoğan called only those mayors of affected municipalities who belonged to his own party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Once the president got around to calling the others, one such social media user was contacted by his local prosecutor, who told him he would face legal action for making a claim that had retroactively become slanderous. When a lawyer who had searched in vain for his relatives amid the rubble tweeted “where is the state?,” prosecutors opened an investigation against him on charges of “insulting the state.”
As the death toll grew, AKP leaders’ response went from ineffective to actively harmful.
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It was not until five days after the earthquake that the authorities began to confront the crisis in earnest. On February 11, Erdoğan declared that public university dorms would house refugees from the earthquakes while students would be sent home for a semester of distance learning. The day the president’s announcement was made, a video appeared of officials forcing students out of dormitories, their belongings hastily bundled into trash bags in the hallway. The next day, a nationwide student-housing activist organization tweeted that “dozens of students from the earthquake region who have lost their families and cannot afford bus fare have been abruptly chased out of their dorms.” The decision to commandeer dormitories has drawn criticism from academics discouraged by the decline in learning standards during the Covid-19 era, and one prominent economist has called for the state to house survivors on military bases instead. But of all the institutions that the government could disrupt for the good of the earthquake victims, academia is an opportune one: campuses are bastions of opposition.
THE COUNTRY’S DISASTER RELIEF APPARATUS, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD), is one of several government bodies to see its share of the state budget decline in recent years, as funds have been redirected to the Presidential Directorate of Religious Affairs. Initially established in 1924 to channel Sunni Muslim piety into paths compatible with the authority of the secular state, the directorate has ballooned under the AKP government, becoming its main propaganda organ and an instrument of its agenda of “raising a religious generation.” Alongside its traditional duties of maintaining mosques, employing imams, and publishing devotional literature, the directorate now makes its voice heard in the religion classes that Erdoğan has spread to all educational levels and in televised advertisements for anti-LGBTQ rallies.
From 2022 to 2023, the government shrank AFAD’s budget by one third, from 12.1 billion to 8 billion Turkish liras (TL), while expanding the directorate’s funding by 56 percent, from just under 23 billion to almost 36 billion TL — more than the Foreign and Culture Ministries combined. The directorate’s budget is projected to rise by an additional 60 percent by 2025, reaching 49.8 billion TL, while AFAD’s is likely to reach 10 billion: higher than its budget for 2023, but still lower than its budget for 2022.
What relatively little money is spent on AFAD does not necessarily go toward disaster relief. Though Turkish citizens pay a telecommunications tax officially meant to solidify buildings to withstand earthquakes, Erdoğan and his ministers have revealed on multiple occasions that the money has largely been spent on unrelated infrastructure projects and paying back an IMF loan. At the request of oppositional parliamentarians, the state’s court of accounts reported that some 7.7 billion TL of the agency’s 10.8 billion TL budget for 2021 had been spent on “capital transfer.” In response to the parliamentarians’ questions, AFAD claimed that it had passed the money on to the state’s Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOKİ) for “building housing.”
Religion in Turkey is a state monopoly, a fact that the government’s response to the earthquakes has clarified. AFAD’s “general director of disaster intervention,” Ismail Palakoğlu, is a theologian who had no career experience in disaster relief before being appointed to the position in 2018. The staffing of the agency with people chosen for their proximity to the ruling party, not professional qualifications, has not escaped notice. In an internal document reported on by the newspaper BirGün on February 3, AFAD employees even alluded to this weakness in criticizing their own agency’s response to a much smaller earthquake near the Black Sea coast in November 2022, noting that “instead of civil engineers, we have assembled teams of teachers and imams.”
In the critical first forty hours of rescue efforts this time around, AFAD was clearly overstretched, reportedly sending nine thousand people to a part of the region where five million needed help. Social media and the few remaining oppositional newspapers swam with reports from locations where people were trapped under rubble and AFAD personnel had not been seen. Yet the state has not been passive. The day after the earthquake, the directorate announced that it had mobilized twenty-five hundred “spiritual advisers” to console the victims. Pictures of “mobile prayer rooms” sent to the region inspired mockery from the irreverent, who thought they looked like porta-potties, while an acute shortage of actual toilets made life even more difficult for survivors, an untold number of whom froze to death in the winter night.
As the death toll grew, AKP leaders’ response went from ineffective to actively harmful. Noting that AFAD had not yet appeared at sites where relatives were buried under the remains of their homes, people in the region turned quickly to Twitter to organize relief on their own. As desperate survivors posted the coordinates of their lost friends and relatives, makeshift rescue and aid instructions mixed with criticism of the state response. On the third day of the crisis, the authorities blocked access to Twitter in Turkey.
Not wanting to see AFAD upstaged, government spokesmen have mounted a propaganda campaign against private charities. Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said that donating to any organization but AFAD was a “provocation,” a word customarily used in reference to political gestures that threaten public security. A particular target is the nationally famous aging rocker Haluk Levent, whose charity Ahbap (“Buddy”) has mobilized hundreds of millions of liras to collect supplies for survivors, and to repair damaged schools and medical facilities.
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
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From the first day of the crisis, the question “AFAD or Ahbap?” became a popular entry on Turkish wiki sites. Under the rhetorical onslaught of AKP media, Levent has assured the government that he means no harm to AFAD, pleading with his own supporters to say that “both AFAD and Ahbap are ours,” and underlining that he had already signed a protocol of cooperation with AFAD. This was not enough for Soylu, who threatened legal action against “those who think they can go step for step with the state.”
While Erdoğan’s opponents noted survivors’ complaints about AFAD’s absence at sites where their relatives had gone missing, his supporters hounded rescuers who do not enjoy an AKP-sanctioned identity. When an Israeli rescue team that had saved nineteen people abandoned their work upon receiving an intelligence report of a threat to their lives, the pro-government Yeni Akit newspaper made the forcible removal of the “spies in search-and-rescue disguise” sound like heroic resistance to Zionism. When Istanbul mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a star of the oppositional Republican People’s Party (CHP), announced the municipality’s own relief efforts in an outdoor speech, a former AKP parliamentarian heckled him as a “lackey of the British.”
IN SPITE OF THE GOVERNMENT’S ATTITUDE, the Turkish population has shown a heroic readiness to help the afflicted. The student council building of a university where I donated supplies was floor-to-ceiling full of boxes within hours of opening its relief effort, and many students were leaving their studies to volunteer full-time. On the initiative of both local governments and hotel management, more than two hundred hotels in the tourist centers of the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts volunteered, within a day of the earthquake, to take in earthquake victims free of charge; a week later, the Turkish Hoteliers Association claimed that more than one hundred thousand had checked in. Volunteering for service in the thousands, miners have put their lives at risk and their skills to work by digging under the wreckage to extract survivors.
The miners’ intervention is especially meaningful, as it comes from a part of the population already peculiarly exposed to this kind of disaster. Part of the neoliberal program that won the AKP accolades from the world business press after the party’s rise to power in 2002 was an aggressive sell-off of state-owned enterprises, including mines. As a result, the already grievous problem of fatal “work accidents” in the country’s mines got a lot worse.
The worst of several such cases was a fire that broke out in Soma on the Aegean coast in 2014, in a lignite mine whose owner had boasted that “due to the methods of the private sector,” he had been able to cut operating costs by more than 80 percent. In a mine, operating costs are largely safety costs, and when the fire broke out, power outages rendered the elevators that normally carry miners to the surface inoperable, consigning 301 miners to what a mining engineer appearing on pro-government television called “a sweet death” by carbon monoxide. CHP parliamentarians recalled the complaints they had lodged months before on behalf of Soma miners protesting unsafe conditions, which the government had dismissed.
When Erdoğan and his entourage visited Soma following the disaster, Erdoğan’s adviser kicked a man who was protesting the death of his relatives. The president commented that the miners’ deaths were part of the fıtrat (divinely sanctioned lot) of “this job,” just as, in similar mine disasters elsewhere, he has said that related deaths were the miners’ “fate,” and forwarded further questions to his director of religious affairs.
In the mandatory religion classes first imposed on Turkish schools by the military junta, every Muslim child learns that fate (kader) is a pillar of Islam, one of the few nonnegotiable articles of faith. In the popular mind, the concept is strongly linked with the moment of death. One pious former student of mine told me that kader was etymologically connected to kadar, a word meaning “until,” as in “until that date,” and illustrated the concept of fate by way of the Greek figure Atropos cutting the strings of life. Only through such associations can one make sense of the Director of Religious Affairs’s early statement that those killed by the earthquakes were “martyrs” (şehit), or the tweet from one university physicist that “earthquakes or buildings do not kill, God kills those whose time has come. Even if those who died during the earthquake had been on Mars at that moment, they would have died just the same.”
Whether or not Erdoğan’s appeals to “fate” correspond to authentic Islam, I am not qualified to say, but I have met several sincere Muslims who have stopped attending Friday prayer sessions out of disgust with the way the directorate has turned every sermon into AKP propaganda. In any case, fate and other Islamic concepts are very useful to the ruling party. Because they count as religious doctrine, criticism of their rhetorical deployment can be considered hate speech; police are now investigating journalists Merdan Yanardağ and Enver Aysever for commentary that allegedly stirs hatred against the faithful.
TURKEY’S PHYSICAL LOCATION and topography render it rich in renewable resources like wind and waterpower, agriculture, and the coal that features prominently in the AKP’s extractivist policies, but they also make the country vulnerable to a wide range of natural disasters. The Anatolian peninsula — what the ancients called Asia Minor — is surrounded on three sides by seas and not coincidentally is the meeting place of several major fault lines running along the coasts.
Turkey is no stranger to massive earthquakes. In 1999 one shook the eastern part of metropolitan Istanbul from its epicenter near the town of Gölcük in Kocaeli province, killing seventeen thousand people. To say that its lessons have not been learned is both an understatement and an oversimplification. Some people have learned the lesson that safety standards in construction are capital; dire warnings by Turkish geologists are not hard to come by, and fears of “the big one” hitting Istanbul are enough of a subterranean premise in Turkish popular culture to furnish the plot of a widely distributed gothic movie. The government even implemented stricter building codes after the 1999 earthquake — setting higher standards for materials and engineering calculations to ensure that buildings would withstand future earthquakes — but it has systematically failed to enforce them. Builders have been allowed to hire private inspectors who sign off on substandard construction, and Erdoğan himself has issued numerous “amnesties,” legalizing unregistered buildings in exchange for a fine. According to the journalist Eray Görgülü, Erdoğan boasted in a 2019 speech of having “solved the problems of 144,556 citizens of Maraş” by forgiving the unlicensed structures built in their name. Görgülü also pointed to a 2021 thesis by the Ankara University researcher Mahmut Şeydanlıoğlu, which concluded that, as of 2017, more than half of Turkey’s building stock was unlicensed. This is significant in a country that has invested in building and construction as heavily as Turkey.
Turkish officialdom has had its reasons for not taming the lawless construction sector. On one hand, it has needed to appeal to a population that relies on cheap and unsafe housing. In the intense urbanization of the past several decades of Turkish development, many small contractors put up houses literally overnight on public land, generally on steep hillsides or on the fringes of cities, for families fleeing failed farms and dying villages in favor of an uncertain life of urban wage labor. The custom is to let these houses “built at night” (gecekondu) stand, though the state does have the right to demolish them and periodically does so. On the other hand, large-scale construction has been a mammoth industry in the past twenty years and a staple of the AKP’s political economy, both in the private sector and through huge public works projects. Not only has construction been one of the main engines of growth, but its tendency to employ workers on short-term contracts has helped shift an already inhospitable labor market even further toward the interests of capital.
The class basis for the AKP’s economic strategies goes back to Turkey’s neoliberal turn in and after the military coup of 1980. In step with the spirit of the age, the junta and its right-wing successors aimed to transform an economy based on import substitution industrialization and marked by high union density. To reorient the economy toward industrial exports, they ended agriculture’s privileged position by cutting subsidies and opening the market to competition from imports, fueling an accelerating urbanization by which cities swelled with migrants from the countryside.
The road leading from neoliberalism to state capture must be understood better if we are to prevent other societies from traveling it.
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In a legal climate increasingly hostile to labor organization, and an economic one characterized by “informal” short-term labor, many of these new proletarians never entered the labor movement but have had to scrape by with help from private religious foundations. The Islamist parties have been able to pin the livelihoods of these nonunionized, informal-sector workers to the specific AKP-affiliated personnel who manage the public welfare programs and fund the private charities the workers rely on. Instead of labor rights won through collective struggle at the point of production, workers have come to depend on periodic relief targeted to specific constituencies and contingent on political loyalty.
This patronage system enabled political Islam to gain a foothold within the working class without interfering with capital’s control over labor. While the petite bourgeoisie is the traditional social base of Islamic conservatism in Turkey and small businessmen are still the class that most reliably votes AKP, the new urban informal proletariat has swelled the ranks of the movement and given it a credible claim to represent “the people.” All the while, the party has cultivated an ever-cozier relationship with the construction magnates, some of whom have been AKP politicians or their relatives.1
The AKP’s first decade in power was a favorable time for Turkish capitalism. With interest rates at historic lows in the West, capital flowed into high-risk “emerging markets,” stimulating what economist Erinç Yeldan calls “speculative-led growth.” Portfolio accounts seeking higher rates invested foreign exchange in Turkish banks, making funds available for lending to business and inflating the lira enough to make import goods affordable to Turkish consumers.
Amid the resulting retail and credit boom, the construction sector was poised to absorb the lion’s share of an economic growth funded largely by short-term loans. The state pursued infrastructure and housing improvements, aiming to enhance real estate values further. The way this growth was financed resulted in growing current-account deficits and private-sector debt, but even now that the bubble has burst, new contracts continue to enrich businesses with AKP ties. After the earthquakes, many of these new buildings now lie in ruins, including multiple public hospitals; in the province of Hatay, not one hospital was operating at full capacity in the two days following the earthquakes.
The unthinkable death toll — as of early this spring, official sources list 48,448 dead and more than 105,000 injured in Turkey, and at least 5,800 dead in Syria — still falls far short of the 200,000 people whom the geophysicist Ahmet Ercan estimated to be caught under the rubble of more than 6,000 collapsed buildings on February 8. Ercan called on the authorities to release a full list of all the missing, but a response was not forthcoming. If his calculations are correct, the final count is likely to be significantly higher.
Of these dead, how many could have been rescued had AFAD been better funded, or had alternative rescue efforts not been blocked by the state? What would the earthquake-stricken landscape look like if the AKP-connected construction industry had had to abide by building codes?
On March 5, authorities counted 227,027 buildings either heavily damaged or in urgent need of demolition. The presence of sound buildings standing firm in some of the hardest-hit areas demonstrates that the destruction could have been far less severe. In one district of the Hatay province, not one building collapsed and no one died in the earthquake, though on all sides the neighboring districts were ravaged. The exceptional district’s mayor, who had been both admired and mocked for his extreme punctiliousness, told journalists that in all his time in office, he had never permitted anyone to build anything off the record.
Even though the government tried to discredit even the most perfunctory calculation of cause and effect behind so many avoidable deaths with its sermons on fate, it has had to make concessions. After five days of oppositional voices calling for the arrest of contractors who had flouted the building codes, the police finally apprehended one such businessman trying to leave the country. The author of an expensive complex of luxury apartment blocks in Antakya that the earthquake immediately pulverized, he had made himself conspicuous by flippantly denying responsibility for the fact that his brainchild was not up to snuff. The next day, the police started nabbing more contractors.
Yet taking a handful of men into custody does not constitute an acknowledgment of the party-state’s systemic refusal to enforce public safety requirements when its clientelist political economy was at stake. As a Turkish colleague put it to me in conversation, the culprits will not be held to account when the culprits and those holding to account are the same people.
In this lawless environment dominated by unscrupulous contractors, building often proceeds with little or no input from architects or engineers. To the detriment of Turkish urban planning, the architects are also a target of the AKP’s ongoing war on professional organizations, long a vital organ of civil society. Until 2013, the architects’ bureau had the official responsibility of monitoring new construction, and could delay new projects for years in the courts if the plans did not pass muster on the grounds of safety, or even aesthetics. Erdoğan canceled this right in retaliation for the bureau leader Mücella Yapıcı’s political criticism and role in co-organizing the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, for which she is now serving an eighteen-year sentence.
The Gezi Park conflict, of course, also had to do with building: the plan was to clear a public park to make room for a shopping mall in the form of a reconstructed Ottoman barracks. After months of the largest protest movement in Turkish history, Erdoğan opted to let a court ruling take the issue out of his hands. Preserving the park was a rare victory in the resistance to the AKP drive to close public spaces not devoted to either commerce or religion.
TURKEY’S ILLEGAL BUILDINGS include the biggest house of all: a complex thirty times the size of the White House that is home to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Financed out of a secret fund never recorded in parliament, the thousand-room home, erected for the leader even before he made the move from the prime minister’s office to the presidency in 2014, was built despite a court order to halt construction. He has established a presidential national library on the palace’s “campus,” and can now worship in a huge mosque on his own grounds, the directorate’s similarly grandiose mosque being not private enough for him.
One way of reading the AKP’s progress is as a two-step process of privatization. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatized a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has moved to make the state itself the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase — standard neoliberalism — won the AKP applause from the Western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher.
The road leading from neoliberalism to state capture must be understood better if we are to prevent other societies — in the US and elsewhere — from traveling it. There are more than merely economic factors involved. One clue to the Turkish case is available in the aforementioned Erdoğan speech, in which the president praised himself for what now looks like a grave mistake, if not a crime. In 2019, Erdoğan gave his audience the good news that he was releasing them from the rules. A large part of the appeal of authoritarian leaders is their promise to free us from the burden of law. They do not follow it themselves, and we love them for it, wanting to be like them. When Donald Trump said he could shoot someone in the middle of the day on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, that won him votes.
ERDOĞAN IS SET to face the voters again in May, in a general election that may or may not be postponed. His opponents are in for an uphill battle. The crackdown on opposition since the July 2016 coup attempt and the collapse of the peace process between the state and the PKK has landed major figures from the Kurdish and center-left secularist oppositions in prison. By getting the courts to convict oppositional politicians of promoting terrorism, Erdoğan has managed to depose dozens of elected mayors, whom he has then replaced with his own flunkies, known as “caretakers” (kayyum). In this way, he has all but completely removed the left-wing and predominantly Kurdish HDP from local office, while launching a series of court cases to unseat and jail HDP parliamentarians. Soon the constitutional court will decide whether or not to ban the party.
Some mayors belonging to the center-left CHP have also seen their municipalities stolen by AKP “caretakers,” and now all eyes are on the prize: Ekrem İmamoğlu’s Istanbul. The old imperial capital is of immense material and symbolic importance. From the moment a young Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected its mayor in 1994, it served first his Welfare Party and then its successor, the AKP, as a rich source of both revenue and votes, becoming the primary base for these parties’ distinctive patronage system.
The AKP lost this base when it lost Istanbul to İmamoğlu in 2019. But in December 2022, a court sentenced İmamoğlu to two and a half years in prison for “insulting” some judges — he called them “fools.” Once upheld on appeal, this sentence will suffice to oust the mayor from his post and ban him from politics for life.
Even with the ban hanging over İmamoğlu’s head, many supporters still wanted to see him as the candidate of the main oppositional block, a cluster of six parties centered on Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s CHP. Popularly called “the table of six,” it includes two tiny ex-AKP splinter parties, one small center-right party, and one ultraconservative Islamist party that claims to represent the legacy of Erdoğan’s mentor, Necmettin Erbakan. The only one of the six that rivals the CHP is Meral Akşener’s Good Party, which broke off from the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) when the latter embraced Erdoğan, and owes its name to a play on words involving a pre-Islamic Turkic rune.
That it took this oddball coalition until March 6 to agree on Kılıçdaroğlu as its candidate — having dealt with a brief, abortive revolt on the part of Akşener — tells you how effectively the mainstream opposition operates under CHP leadership. It does not help that the ruling party has commandeered more than 90 percent of the media by volume, sidelined journalists by forcing them into jail or exile, and in some cases seized media companies by court order and handed them over to crony businessmen. The result is a media swimming with tales of foreign conspiracy, vengeful memories of past eras of secularist dominance, and an emphasis on any issue likely to exacerbate the internal divisions within an opposition whose different groups, until recently, had more against one another than they had against the AKP.
Since first coming to power in 2002, the ruling party has ramped up inequality while granting symbolic gifts to formerly marginalized populations. It has canceled civil servants’ privileges in the health system and legalized the hijab in public buildings. In the “peace process” era, it opened public television channels in Kurdish and Arabic. It projects a face and voice with which groups displaced by Turkish modernization feel at home. Some proletarians seem to think they don’t deserve more than this, or that they’re unlikely to get it from the opposition parties. It remains to be seen whether the latter can make a more persuasive pitch at a time when material want will sharpen. Kılıçdaroğlu has at least come to sound like more of a fighter since the earthquake, promising to break with “neoliberalism” and forcefully rejecting the government’s demand that he stop “politicizing” the disaster and its aftermath.
In a time of mourning and chaos, people whose differences over religion, Turkish and Kurdish nationalism, and other issues going back more than a century will have to work together to prioritize the end of AKP rule. The unity with which civil society confronted the earthquake is needed on the political front. Otherwise the plunderers will get away with it again.
For a more comprehensive account of the triangular patronage system involving the emergent AKP party-state, private foundations, and the working poor, see Berk Esen and Şebnem Gümüşçü, “Why Did Turkish Democracy Collapse? A Political Economy Account of AKP’s Authoritarianism,” Party Politics 27, no. 6 (November 2021): 1075–1091. ↩
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