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Governing ethnic unrest: Political Islam and the Kurdish conflict in Turkey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2019
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.
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- © New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2019
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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