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24 Brown J. World Aff. 23 (2017-2018)
Spindle Autocracy in the New Turkey

handle is hein.journals/brownjwa24 and id is 23 raw text is: Spindle Autocracy in the New Turkey JENNY WHITE SINCE TURKEY'S FOUNDING IN 1923, Islam has played an important role in uni- fying the Turkish nation around various nationalist narratives and rituals while simultaneously providing a basis for challenging that unity. Islam has worked to support as well as oppose the secularist vision enunciated by Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, who implemented a series of radical West- ernizing reforms. After his death in 1938, his followers (Kemalists) committed themselves to protecting what they perceived to be his program and values. Typi- cally, scholars have reduced the core of Turkey's conflicts to an Islam-secularism divide. However, this is not a particularly useful lens for understanding political 23 developments in Turkey, which has lurched from political crisis to political crisis on average every decade since its founding. While Islam has been central to the development of what Turkey's current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calls the New Turkey by motivating his conservative followers and intensifying tensions with those continuing to espouse Kemalism, there are other, more fundamen- tally disruptive forces at work, of which competing nationalisms are a symptom rather than a cure. The feud that is currently driving the Turkish descent into autocracy is not, as one might expect, between secularists and Islamists, but is instead between two moderate Sunni Islamic networks, the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) and Fethullah Gillen's Hizmet movement. The dynamics of group formation and competitive networks in Turkey may provide a better explanation of Turkey's cycles of political frag- mentation and collapse than a focus on Islam, which-despite its centrality in JENNY WHITE is a social anthropologist and professor at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. She served as President of the Turkish Studies Association and of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section. Relying on over thirty years of field research, interviews, textual data, and surveys, her research applies insights from cultural anthropology to the study of politics, nationalism, and Islam in Turkey, with a particular focus on group formation and competitive networks. Copyright © 2017 by the Brown journal ofWorldAffairs FALL/WINTER 2017 * VOLUME XXIV, ISSUE I

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