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Governing ethnic unrest: Political Islam and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2019

Onur Günay  and
Erdem Yörük
Onur Günay
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Relations, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 08544; ogunay@princeton.edu.
Erdem Yörük
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Koç University, Rumelifeneri Yolu 34450, Sarıyer, İstanbul, Turkey; Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, Barnett House, 32–37 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2ER, UK; eryoruk@ku.edu.tr.
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Abstract

How can we explain the mass appeal and electoral success of Islamist political parties? What are the underlying sources of the Islamist political advantage? Scholars have provided numerous answers to these widely debated questions, variously emphasizing the religious nature of the discourses in Islamist movements, their ideological hegemony, organizational capacity, provision of social services, reputation, and structural factors. However, one key aspect of Islamist movements has been underexplored in the current literature; namely, Islamists’ promises to resolve ethnic questions that remain unresolved in secularist nation-states. In this article, we argue that the extent to which Islamists govern ethnic unrest significantly shapes their electoral success and ability to establish broader hegemony. Based on ethnographic and sociological data, this article explores one particular recent electoral puzzle that reveals the limits of the scholarly literature on Islamist political advantage, examining the ethnic politics of the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey.

Keywords

Political Islamelectionsethnic politicsTurkeyKurds
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 61 , November 2019 , pp. 9 - 43
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Authors’ Note: We would like to express our gratitude to João Biehl, Elizabeth A. Davis, Julia Elyachar, Burak Gürel, and Ali Sipahi for their insightful comments. We also benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of the article’s anonymous reviewers, and we are thankful to them and to the editors of New Perspectives on Turkey for their editorial guidance. We are grateful to Konda Research and Consultancy for sharing their data with us. This study has been generously funded by the European Research Council, Grant No. 714868.

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