Post-Post-Kemalism? Why Is Studying the Turkish Far Right More Relevant Now Than Ever? - İ. AYTÜRK by IISMM

Conférence d’İlker Aytürk (Bilkent University) - Le 16 mai 2018
Chaire sécable de l'IISMM/EHESS

Since the 1980s, the field of modern Turkish studies (including historiography, sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, and gender studies) is dominated by what I call the post-Kemalist paradigm. Post-Kemalists blamed the CUP and the Kemalists for many of Turkey’s contemporary problems and initiated a process of catharsis to overcome the residues of the policies of the 1913-1950 period. This lecture is not a neo-Kemalist critique of post-Kemalists. However, it does argue that post-Kemalists, with their overemphasis on Kemalism, have blinded us to the rise of the far right in Turkey and authoritarian tendencies in the AKP. It will conclude with an invitation to shift the temporal focus of modern Turkish studies from 1913-1950 to the Cold War years, where we have better chances of discovering root causes what is happening in contemporary Turkey.