Isabel David - Böcker

In May 2013, a small group of protesters made camp in Istanbul's Taksim Square, protesting the privatisation of what had long been a vibrant public space. When the police responded to the demonstration with brutality, the protests exploded in size and force, quickly becoming a massive statement of opposition to the Turkish regime. This book assembles a collection of field research, data, theoretical analyses, and cross-country comparisons to show the significance of the protests both within Turkey and throughout the world.

This research focuses on the period 2003 to 2014, which was exceptional in the history of the Turkish Republic for its radical shift in the official stance adopted towards Kurds. The overall Kurdish policy of the AKP in 2003–14 was part of a wider agenda of refashioning the nation on an anti-Kemalist, anti-elitist, and essentially pro-Muslim basis. This reconstruction of the nation was built on the populist claim to be ending the varying levels of social and cultural exclusion that the religious masses, Kurds, informal employees, and poorly educated rural masses had been subject to as subaltern groups of the Republic. This policy did not work. The AKP failed to establish Turkish hegemony over Kurds and could not suppress the Kurdish national movement. This book looks for an explanation of the failure of the Kurdish policy of the AKP by considering the limits of its social policy in instituting a compliant, cooperative, submissive Kurdish subjectivity. To do this, it focuses on the persistence of patient dissatisfaction in Hakkâri, a small Kurdish province, during the period despite the very considerable improvements to healthcare provision achieved in these years. The empirical findings of this study show that the persistence of patient dissatisfaction in Hakkâri as a mass phenomenon was essentially a daily symptom of an ethnopolitical resistance to being interpellated by the AKP as citizens-in-the-making who would compare past and present, realize the progress, and thus appreciate the current quality of healthcare provision by tolerating any shortcomings as a minor price to pay for relative material comfort. In short, the limit of the AKP strategy was reached in an attempt to carry out a sort of politics of redistribution that tried to convince Hakkârians to be content with a situation that fell short of full respect to their identity and bodies.

Discussions of the recent austerity measures in Southern Europe as a response to the sovereign debt crisis have been usually framed in terms of their economic impact. However, the general impoverishment of these countries has induced other massive social and political changes, a fact which is ignored in the literature. This volume seeks to fill this gap and break ground by analyzing these trends in the Portuguese context. Portugal has been portrayed as the Troika’s good pupil by obediently adopting all prescribed austerity measures. In the process, the nation’s fragile social fabric has been destroyed. Massive emigration, particularly by young people, massive increases in poverty and a foundering economy have triggered a collective framing of the crisis and austerity as unjust and punitive of a collectivity that, at the beginning, naively believed in the neoliberal narrative of the benign effects of the cuts. This reframing unleashed an unprecedented wave of social and political mobilization in an otherwise traditionally apathetic society. This resistance needs to be addressed as a direct effect of austerity policies and properly analyzed for what it really represents: a process of repoliticization and re-democratization sweeping Europe. These mobilizations include direct democracy experiments, the growing influence of social movements (the massive March 2011 demonstrations were a direct inspiration for the creation of the Indignado movement in Spain, attesting the contagion effect), solidarity economy and the major political change in the country’s 42 years of democratic rule: an alliance of the left parties, unthinkable before the crisis, and which is reframing relations with the European Union. This volume offers a first approach to the massive political, social and cultural transformations taking place in the country that make Portugal, in certain aspects, a lab for innovative practices (e.g. participatory budgets and the alliance of the left parties) that may be used elsewhere as alternatives to current understandings of economic and political orthodoxy

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been playing the authoritarian’s game for some time now. Under the polarizing, tense and uncertain conditions of this regime, segments of society in Turkey are still actively resisting to the onslaught of authoritarian measures, coalescing at diverse sites of repression, and protesting against the lack of transparency, arbitrary state actions against citizens, or outright extractivist practices against humans and nature. In this volume, we continue with our critical task of both documenting this resistance and detailing, examining, and analyzing the backsliding of one of the democratically elected governments of the twenty-first century into an authoritarian regime that is domestically punitive and regionally aggressive. By doing so, as academics, we become critical agents in determining the nature and meaning of the legacy of the A.K.P. regime.