Between Identity and Difference Turkey’s AK Party and Its Discourse of Conservative-Democracy
Main Article Content
Keywords
Abstract
Amidst continuing debates whether it is a democratic or an authoritarian political actor, this study suggests a postfoundational view of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party). According to postfoundationalism, society is a contingent but necessary ground for the social, which is open-ended and overrides all social formations with its non-fixable differences. Democracy marks this stubborn character of the social and is antithetical to the idea of society, which entails the fixation of differences and a degree of social closure. On this basis, I argue that the AK Party is, in fact, a hegemonic popular political movement, as opposed to merely a political party, that subscribes to democracy and yet seeks to construct a society. Accordingly, I analyze how it strives to resolve this paradoxical situation by attempting to rearticulate and integrate democracy (and other signifiers) into its conservative/civilizational discourse.
Article Sidebar
Article Details
When an article is accepted for publication, copyrights of the publication are transferred from the author to the Journal and reserved for the Publisher. Permission will be required from the publisher for any work for which the author does not hold copyright and for any substantial extracts from work by other authors. The copyright holder giving permission may instruct the author on the form of acknowledgment to be followed. Alternatively, we recommend following the style: “Reproduced with permission from [author], [book/journal title]; published by [publisher], [year]”.
No commercial reproduction is allowed without the express permission of the publisher.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
