Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony is the latest foray into the growing body of scholarship that examines contemporary Turkish politics in relation to neoliberalism. Following a quasi-Gramscian framework, the editors understand neoliberalism as a hegemonic force that explains the economic, cultural and political transformations of Turkey simultaneously. This useful new collection creatively examines the multiple trajectories of neoliberalism in Turkey in the post-1980 period by paying specific attention to the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) era (2002–2015). Turkey Reframed explores three major themes: (i) a consideration of how neoliberal hegemony has been consolidated; (ii) the entanglements of neoliberalism with authoritarianism, conservatism and populism; and (iii) the reconfiguration of religious, ethnic, gender and class-based cleavages during Turkey's neoliberal transformation. The ways in which the AKP has played a role in the constitution of neoliberal hegemony and the reconfiguration of the relationship between state, capitalism and politics is the book's central concern.
Turkey Reframed is divided into two parts: “Politics of Hegemony” and the “Re-orientation(s) of the Social Questions(s).” The emergence and consolidation of the AKP's neoliberal hegemony is examined through the book's series of analyses of a variety of issues, including the state, capitalism, labor and class relations as well as new directions in nationalism, social policy and the transformation of the Kurdish and Islamic movements. The first chapter on changing forms of authoritarianism in post-1980 Turkey contains an excellent discussion of new manifestations of state power in a period generally assumed to be one marked by democratization. The material on media, urban politics and reconfigurations of class is less well known and is worth reading carefully (Chapters 6, 7, 10 and 11). The discussion on the Davutoğlu Doctrine (Chapter 4) is particularly interesting. Readers interested in changing features of Turkish capitalism and the rise of the Islamic bourgeoisie will especially enjoy Chapters 2 and 12. These 13 chapters are followed by a postscript in which the editors discuss the 2013 #resistturkey (#direngezi) social movement in terms of its potential for destabilizing the AKP's neoliberal hegemony. As such, this book provides a comprehensive overview of neoliberal Turkey and would be a valuable read for those who are interested in the changing features of Turkish politics and economics from the post-1980 era to the most recent political developments and social mobilizations.
The most problematic aspect of this book is its theoretical treatment of neoliberalism. Some of the chapters do a better job of explaining why certain developments can be considered as “neoliberal,” but overall the authors assume the existence of neoliberalism in Turkey instead of explaining the mechanisms, linkages and practices more explicitly. Thus, readers might find themselves wondering, for example, how exactly the AKP's new Kurdish policy relates to neoliberalism (Chapter 5) or might be confused about the exact relationship between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism when it comes to the AKP's gender politics (Chapter 9). This disorganized treatment of neoliberalism is exacerbated by a lack of clarity about hegemony: the authors often refer to “neoliberal hegemony,” “AKP's neoliberal hegemony” or “AKP's hegemony” as if these were part of the same phenomenon. Although these shortcomings partly stem from the difficulties of sharing a theoretical framework across individual chapters within the scope of an edited book, I think the main problem lies in the treatment of neoliberalism as a singular, monolithic and homogeneous force that is seen as imposed upon Turkey by the AKP. In the introductory chapter, the editors mention that “the construction of the hegemonic project . . . is replete with open-ended struggles whose outcomes are uncertain” (5) but the bulk of the discussion disproportionately focuses on the formation of the AKP's neoliberal hegemony instead of examining neoliberalism as a set of contradictory, malleable and dynamic set of practices.
Yet anyone interested in thinking more carefully about neoliberalism in Turkey will find much to gain from Turkey Reframed. One of the key contributions of this book is that it complicates conventional frameworks that have hitherto dominated the study of Turkish politics such state vs. society, center vs. periphery and Kemalism vs. Islamism. By highlighting the class-based and political economic origins of Turkey's neoliberal transformation, the book illustrates how Turkey has been “reframed,” and thereby demonstrates the urgency of developing new analytical and theoretical tools to understand Turkish politics in a new light.
