After decades of progressive reforms, since the early 2010s, Turkey has enacted a series of rollbacks on women’s rights and gender equality. In Deniz Kandiyoti’s terms, masculinist restoration has curtailed legislative gains and hobbled institutions established to fight gender discrimination and support women’s autonomy. Just two months after the ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, and the enactment of its national follow-up law no. 6284 in March 2012, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fueled a debate on abortion that ended with a de facto if not legal ban on abortion in public hospitals. This was followed by pressures on the state’s women’s machinery, the General Directorate on the Status of Women, cast as hostile to the family and therefore as fundamentally anti-Turkish/Muslim. The Directorate’s gender expertise, accumulated through years of partnering with transnational gender policy bodies and local women’s organizations, proved no bulwark against hostile state politics and bureaucracy. Street politics also suffered from increased state repression. Police targeted the LGBTI+ Pride Parade and the Feminist Night March that developed in Istanbul in the early 2000s and attracted significantly higher turnouts in successive years, ultimately reaching tens of thousands of people. The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention through a presidential decision on Friday, March 20 at midnight is only the most recent step in the now nearly decade-long state backlash.

By withdrawing, Turkey became the first country officially utilizing a maximalist conception of gender to legitimize state backlash against gender equality and women’s right to be free from violence for which the Istanbul Convention has become a symbol. The Presidency’s Directorate of Communications justified this decision on the grounds that the Convention attempted to “normalize homosexuality” which is defined as “incompatible” with Turkey’s social and family values. To further locate this decision in the broader changes in the institutional and normative global order and real politics, the Directorate invoked anti-gender mobilizations in Eastern European countries that target the Istanbul Convention on similar terms. The ongoing criminalization of LGBTI+ visibility attests that the Directorate’s justification of withdrawal was not simply a diversionary tactic. Withdrawal is a political move that will further normalize male violence and cast aspersions on supposedly important criminal justice and social work interventions.

Many commentators explain this withdrawal decision by reference to the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) election strategy, claiming that it is a move to expand the voter base by recruiting the Islamist Felicity Party to the electoral alliance between the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party. This explanation, however, misses the fact that a significant number of women within AKP’s constituency, including some influential members of the parliament and pro-government formal women’s organizations, continue to support the Istanbul Convention. When the withdrawal from the Convention first rose on the agenda in the summer of 2020, those women defended the Convention against several senior ultra-Islamist intellectuals. After the announcement of withdrawal, some have even voiced disappointment, if not anger, they share with the AKP’s opponents, including those taking to the streets. Also, a public opinion poll conducted by Metropoll soon after the withdrawal estimates that around three in ten AKP and MHP voters do not support the presidential decision. The same poll estimates only 27 percent of the Turkish public support withdrawal. Except for ultra-Islamists and ultranationalists, the supporters of this decision, who already constitute a minority, only reluctantly defend their position.

To contain women’s disappointment, some supporters of the withdrawal argue that national laws are still in effect and that this indicates the government’s resolve to pursue its “zero tolerance” policy against violence. However, AKP’s establishing of a parliamentary committee to investigate the causes of violence against women and to devise measures to be taken just two weeks before the withdrawal suggests that the national anti-violence law no. 6284 is imperiled. Citing the Convention in its first article, this law is highly likely to be revised, following the report of the investigation committee. Accordingly, the argument that national laws against violence against women remain in place seems spurious.

In this context, one might ask whether this decision will cost the AKP in the next elections. Why should we think that disappointed AKP voters would not turn to the Future Party or the Democracy and Progress Party, both established by alienated former members of AKP? What allows the AKP to afford the highly likely possibility of losing these disappointed voters? What is driving AKP’s willingness to normalize male violence?

A pessimist look might foresee that the rollback will continue unabated. In the recent past, the Turkish electorate had to endure two repeated elections, the general elections in 2015 and the local elections in Istanbul in 2019. Since 2016, many electoral victories of the pro-Kurdish opposition were canceled, through detaining elected mayors and municipality council members and appointing trustees to replace them. Further normalization of male violence through the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention fits into this picture perfectly, if one gives up the otherwise reasonable assumption that the next elections will happen in a peaceful and democratic atmosphere. The AKP might well have consolidated its ties with ultra-Islamist and ultranationalist men who, if mobilized, might drag the next elections into chaos.

Except for the widespread street protests against the withdrawal decision, there appears to be little cause for optimism. Two years ago, when I was interviewing a judge in a Family Court in Istanbul for my research, I asked him whether he thought the anti-violence legislation would be rolled back in the near future since he was extremely critical of its existence. He answered that this would be impossible: “If the government does that, women will smash this courthouse down to the ground, down on our heads.” Hope rests on women’s capacity for protest and resistance.

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