H2020Индивидуална стипендия2019–2021

MESSIAH · Authoritarianism and Messianic Conceptions of Politics in Turkey 1850-2015

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2019-09-01 → 2021-08-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 202 159 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Накратко на български

Авторитаризмът в Турция се анализира чрез образа на лидера като „спасител“, който обещава връщане към минало величие. Това помага да се разберат механизмите на популистичните режими и как те функционират в различни културни контексти по целия свят.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Authoritarianism and Messianic Conceptions of Politics in Turkey 1850-2015

Project MESSIAH addresses one of the most pressing questions of contemporary global politics: namely making sense of the resurgence of authoritarian populist regimes. The project focuses on Turkey, one of the iconic cases of strong man politics, to uncover a previously ignored aspect of authoritarian politics: temporality, that is, the different modes political actors imagine the past, present and the future. The main hypothesis of the project has been that the contemporary political regime in Turkey is better understood as a Messianic project whereby the leader appears as a savior type sanctioned and prophesized by local traditions in his role of restoring the community to its imagined past grandeur. The project argues that by focusing on this particular form of legitimation and attending narratives, we can understand the pathways to populist authoritarianism better. While the project focuses on Turkish politics, it also proposes that Turkey is not a sui generis case, and that we can come up with an ideal-type of Messianic regimes and leadership to be applied in other cases. Additionally, the project sheds light on how politics is understood and practiced in different cultural contexts while maintaining that such cultural differences still allow for comparison and theorizing rather than insisting on "essential and insurmountable" differences between political cultures. This project is highly significant for contemporary global politics considering the acceleration of authoritarian politics and draconian measures adopted by many governments around the world. The focus on Messianic dimension is also a key point since apocalyptic scenarios are gaining purchase in popular culture. While it is common to label political leaders as Messianic figures in public debates, this project points to the necessity of taking such labels seriously in scholarship and achieve a more complete understanding of the process we are going through. The situation also calls for an analysis of how the liberal values and principles that has governed international society for some time began to lose its hegemony to be replaced by indigenous narratives and projects.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

The literature approaches the authoritarian turn in Turkish politics either as an example of political Islam gone wrong or as part of the competitive authoritarianism that sweep across the globe. But even a cursory glance reveals the persistence and recurrence of authoritarian themes in Turkish political discourse regardless of religious leaning. How, then, can we talk about cultural underpinnings of authoritarian rule in Turkey without succumbing to cultural essentialism or presenting it as a sui generis case? Accordingly, this project aims to explore the historical transformation of an authoritarian and messianic concept of leadership in Turkish context from the mid-nineteenth century to present. Parallel to this the project will look at how such concepts are tied to the various temporalities, that is, alternative ways the past, the present and the future are represented and imagined politically. Employing a conceptual historical approach with an innovative research design, this project will be a cultural archeology of the authoritarian turn in Turkish politics and follow the Islamic and secular political theologies both of which imagine the leader as a savior figure in a state of crisis and exception. The project uses the word Messianism to define this authoritarian concept of leadership, because besides the obvious savior image of the ruler and attending concepts, the project will focus on religious and secular temporalities that are implied by, or built into, such concepts. These temporalities include national liberation, Muslim revival and material development all of which propose different narratives of Ottoman decline and fall, posit a set of enemies and threats and imagine a future where these threats are thwarted and community reaches a state of peace and security. Within such temporalities the leader emerges as a supreme agency which is able to interfere in the history and change its course.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO · OsloКоординаторНорвегия