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• Co-opting religion

  2018. Bilge Yabanci, Dane Taleski. Religion, State and Society 46 (3), 283-304

  Artikel

  Despite the remarkable scholarly attention to populism and populist parties, the relation between populism and religion remains understudied. Using evidence from two long-term ruling populist parties – Turkey’s Justice and Development Party and Macedonia’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity – this study focuses on how and why religion can be an instrument for populist politics at three levels: (i) discursive, (ii) public policy and (iii) institutionalised alliances with religious authorities. The study highlights that religion comes into play at these three levels once populists attain comfortable electoral margins but encounter mounting political and economic challenges that can potentially weaken their grip on power. Ruling populists co-opt and monopolise the majority religion in the name of ‘the people’s will’ as they increasingly undermine democratic legitimacy but they need to justify their systematic crackdown on dissent, the system of checks and balances, the rule of law and minorities. The empirical findings of the study also demonstrate the dual function of religion for populists: its catch-all potential to create cross-class and cross-ethnicity popular support, and its instrumentality to discredit dissent as ‘religiously unfit’ while constructing an antagonism of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elites’.

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• Turkey’s tamed civil society

  2019. Bilge Yabanci. Journal of Civil Society

  Artikel

  Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule, Turkey’s civil society has enlarged both in size and diversity of civic engagement. This development is puzzling since Turkey’s weak democratic credentials do not allow an enabling political and legal setting for civil society’s expansion. This study argues that the expansion can be explained through a particular dilemma of rulers in competitive-authoritarian (CA) regimes. The AKP is caught between the conflicting interests of appropriating and containing civil society. While the government needs to cherish civil society to sustain CA regime, it also needs to repress it, as civil society is the only arena where dissenting social forces can still carve pockets of resistance and challenge the dominant paradigms of the regime. Based on extensive fieldwork, this study discusses the patterns of containment and appropriation that have led to the steady expansion of civil society under pressure. The AKP’s dilemma has also rendered Turkey’s civil society ‘tamed’, namely politicized, disabled and segregated. The study broadens the understanding of relations between civil society and the state in CA regimes by offering essential insights into how these regimes are sustained, entrenched and also contested through and within civil society.

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