Culture, Politics, and Islamist Mobilization in Turkey

FAIN: FT-286164-22

Zeynep Ozgen
NYUAD (Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates)

Research and writing leading to a book that examines the rise of the Islamist movement in Turkey and how it utilized home schools and highlighted popular political issues to be elected to power since 2000.

Turkey’s Islamist movement was heavily repressed by a military coup in 1997, but within five years conquered state power and continues to rule almost two decades later. While Islamists developed a robust political program, the movement’s influence cannot be explained by focusing on conventional politics (public rallies and elections) alone. Their work in the cultural realm (changing how people think and act) has had a formative impact on politics. Drawing on years of multi-sited fieldwork in Turkey, this book explores how movements leverage cultural production to create sociopolitical change. To do so, it moves from a narrow conception of struggles over power as a coercive force to a broader conception of power as the creation of categories to impose particular notions of reality, demarcate normalcy, and marginalize alternatives. The book uses this framework to explain Islamist mobilization in Turkey and the complex relationship between culture and politics in shaping social reality.