Critical Junctures of Securitisation: The Case of the AK Party in Turkey

Abstract

Authoritarian leaders try to create an environment conducive to the maintenance of their own ontological security. In this study, we advance a theory of tripartite securitization marked by critical junctures that shed light on how authoritarian actors establish a sense of security for themselves when they govern. Using elite interviews with actors from Turkey’s different political parties, we argue that the three major steps towards authoritarianism in Turkey involved restructuring core institutions and ‘cleansing’ them of the perceived hostile elements; doubling down on securitising existing internal and external ‘enemy’ identities; and securitising rivals that cannot be co-opted in the political process. This tripartite securitization starts with what we call ‘desecuritisation of the self’ in cases where the party in power itself was once the target of securitising acts. We trace how tripartite securitisation has unfolded in Turkey under the AK Party government, and we identify three critical junctures associated with this securitisation process: The Ergenekon and Balyoz Trials, the KCK Trials and the 2016 Failed Coup Attempt.

Keywords

securitisation critical juncture authoritarianism Turkey AK party ontological security

There is a rich literature on authoritarianism, semi-authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism and illberalisation. With the turn of the century, scholars continued to investigate the definitions (Levitsky & Way, 2010; Brownlee, 2007) and classifications (Bogaards, 2009) of authoritarianisms as well as how these concepts relate to institutions (Przeworski et al., 2000) and identity (Fish, 2002; Öztürk, 2019). The question of how a regime devolves from democracy to authoritarianism, or from one kind of authoritarianism to another, still needs further investigation. In this article, we argue that there is a tripartite securitisation process through which authoritarian agents attempt to maintain ontological security or ‘a consistent sense of self and having that sense affirmed by others’ (Zarakol, 2010). We focus particularly on Turkey, a country that has moved increasingly to a more authoritarian system (Esen & Gumuscu, 2019) under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the AK Party). During their rule, the AK party elites (1) have restructured institutions key to their survival, (2) (re)securitised select identities and political movements that had already been securitised in the country’s political culture and (3) securitised their domestic rivals and political competitors to protect the AK Party’s identity and legitimacy while governing in a political culture that once saw political Islam as a major source of ontological insecurity.

The logic behind this tripartite chain of securitisation is that authoritarian leaders first try to create an environment conducive to their own survival. As Mitzen (2006) says, ‘states might actually come to prefer their ongoing, certain conflict to the unsettling condition of deep uncertainty as to the other’s and one’s own identity’. We argue that authoritarian actors will try to align their own ontological security with state institutions. In other words, they will try to justify their own existence through how their leadership furthers the country’s interests by using various strategies that might include legitimation, repression, and co-optation, which Gerschewski (2013) calls ‘three pillars of stability’ in authoritarian regimes. In this spirit, they try to restructure any institution – military and/or political – by ‘cleansing’ them of the established elite and by installing their own supporters. Second, they further securitise existing internal and external enemies and ‘rally around the flag’ (Mueller, 1970) to gather wider support under emergency measures, using the traditional sources of ontological state insecurity. Third, they securitise their own rivals, which might be other religious or political leaders. Here, rivals are not necessarily the ‘enemies’ that the authoritarian actor views and represents as an ‘outsider’ but the political competitors which are seen as a threat to the leader’s legitimacy. This process starts with what we call ‘desecuritisation of the self’ in cases where the political actor in power was once a source of ontological insecurity for former political elites, and therefore needs to normalize its own identity and existence before securitizing other institutions and identities.

Securitisation refers to the elevation of political issues and identities to the level of a substantial threat using speech acts and policies (Wæver, 1993) such that extraordinary measures can be implemented to address the challenges emanating from them. Political actors that are pushing a country towards authoritarianism are expected to start an institutional change (Yilmaz & Shipoli, 2022) and to modify the regime’s relationship with political rivals and enemies to a level of urgency to justify actions to suppress them. The trio of securitisation – sometimes preceded by self-desecuritisation – is not confined to full-fledged autocracies; authoritarian-leaning leaders who try to establish power within relatively democratic structures (Bilgic & Pilcher, 2022) can also produce instances of securitisation. Turkey embodies such a case since it can be described as a competitive authoritarian regime in which ‘formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority’ (Levitsky & Way, 2010; Esen & Gumuscu, 2016). The dynamics of the tripartite securitisation of institutions, enemies and rivals are evident – albeit to different extents – in cases ranging from authoritarian states such as Iran and Venezuela, to authoritarian moments in democracies such as those in India, the United States and Brazil.

In this article, we employ a case study methodology, which enables us to engage in theory-testing by relying on deduction and within-case analysis. We pursue this method in order to identify causal pathways to authoritarian governance. We rely on a close analysis of primary and secondary sources in English and Turkish to identify Turkey’s critical junctures under the AK Party rule. We also conducted 20 semi-structured elite and expert interviews between February 2021 and January 2022, with various socio-political actors from Turkey’s different political parties and of different opinions. The interviewees included current political actors, former members of the Turkish Grand Assembly, experts from various think tanks, former columnists, and journalists. While five of the interviews were conducted face to face, the rest of the interviews were conducted via online platforms. The interviews included questions regarding the critical junctures of Turkey under the AK Party rule and how the political elites interpreted these processes.

This article begins with the introduction of a novel theoretical framework that brings together critical junctures and the securitisation processes that help protect an authoritarian agent’s ontological security, which might sometimes be at odds with the state’s own ontological security. We argue that authoritarianism cannot be studied without identifying the critical junctures through which institutions, identities and rivals are securitised to align with the authoritarian actor’s goals and sense of identity. The second section scrutinises Turkey’s domestic political transformations through various critical junctures and the AK Party’s securitisation policies, taking into consideration the interdependent nature of these processes and their instrumentalisation for authoritarian consolidation. The subsections examine the critical junctures associated with the securitisation of the institutions (Secular/Kemalist), identities (Kurds and other oppositional identities), and religio-political rivalries (the Gülen movement). In the conclusion, the article provides additional insights regarding the utility of the model.

Critical Junctures of Securitisation: Reframing Institutions, Identities and Competition

Ontological security is intertwined with the securitisation processes. Mitzen and Larson (2017; 35) identify ‘whose ontological security?’ as one of the key questions in the relevant research agenda. In our article, we show how a political leader’s (Tayyip Erdoğan’s) ontological security has been manifested through his own party (AK Party)’s ontological security. In cases where it is almost impossible to separate the party identity from its charismatic leader’s, the ontological securities are closely tied to each other. It is difficult to imagine the AK Party’s ontological security being threatened without damage to Erdoğan’s reputation, and vice versa. Hence, every move that advanced AK Party’s ontological security consolidated Erdoğan’s power by default. Successful securitization processes also exploit the existing threats and societal concerns. This is what happened in Turkey under the AK Party as well. In a desire to maintain the party’s and the leader’s ontological security, traditional Turkish threat perceptions have been carefully blended with new threat perceptions that serve the AK Party’s parochial interests.

‘Turkey has moved to the authoritarianism step by step (Kutlay & Öniş, 2022). Every single turning point has made us more repressive, more hardcore and stricter. Therefore, I cannot tell that which critical juncture has pushed Turkey in that situation. It should be a collective process under Erdoğan’s leadership’, says Can Dündar, who is a widely known journalist currently living in exile (interview with authors, April 2021). It is precisely these steps we study in this article. We argue that to better understand the strategies of authoritarian leaders and their political processes, one must identify the critical junctures that precipitate the kind of securitisation that paves the way towards authoritarianism. Securitisation is a speech act through which a politician can claim ‘special rights to use whatever means’ within the realm of a certain issue (Wæver, 1993). In other words, it is an ‘extreme version of politicisation’ (Buzan et al., 1998). Bourbeau (2014) notes that securitisation includes policing and defence as well as the logic of exception through the utilisation of exceptional measures against existential threats, and logic of routine, through the collection of routine practises employed by bureaucrats and security officials. What defines an authoritarian agent’s journey towards changing a country’s political landscape involves the securitisation of three objects: (1) political institutions, (2) the ‘enemies’ of the country through exploitation of the prevailing political imagination and doubling down on existing securitisation dynamics and (3) the political rivals, who are transferred from the sphere of politics to that of security. Although we do not have the space to investigate cases other than Turkey in this article, these dynamics are evident in cases ranging from Peru’s Fujimori to Egypt’s Sisi. One can even observe – albeit to different extents – aspects of these securitization moves in countries that are not necessarily autocratic but are undergoing ‘authoritarian moments’ such as Bolsonaro’s Brazil (Hunter & Power, 2019) and Modi’s India (Rogenhofer & Panievsky, 2020).

Securitisation theory and authoritarianism have already been studied together. Fisher and Anderson looked at authoritarianism and securitisation in Africa. Various researchers have also investigated single-group securitisation (Fisher & Anderson, 2015). Pratt and Rezk (2019) explored how Muslim Brotherhood was securitised after the Arab Uprisings. Sandal (2021) studied how the securitisation of the Alevi/Alawite identities in the aftermath of the Syrian Civil War brought these two communities together. Looking at the cases of the 2015 elections in Tanzania and the 2016 election polls in Zambia and Uganda, Jenkins (2020) studied strategic efforts to frame elections as a threat to peace and security. In this article, we seek to bring together the securitisation of institutions, identities and political competition to tell the story of authoritarianism from a novel perspective. We explicate the moments when the decisionmaker is presented with an expanded menu of options, and when, with the selection of one such option, new choices are created along an institutional path.

Critical junctures are ‘choice point [s] when a particular option is adopted among two or more alternatives’ and ‘in many cases, critical junctures are moments of relative structural indeterminism when wilful actors shape outcomes in a more voluntaristic fashion than normal circumstances permit’ (Mahoney, 2001, 8). In Pierson’s (2011, 135) words, ‘junctures are “critical” because they place institutional arrangements on paths or trajectories, which are then very difficult to alter’. They can be crises that shape the future of institutions and external shocks that act as catalysts for significant institutional change. When investigating the critical junctures of securitisation in a given country, therefore, one should ask ‘what event provided the ruling the party with a menu of options that involved securitization of an institution or identity?’. These events can range from court cases to crises and uprisings that open a new menu of options to the political actors. The events we identified as critical junctures of securitization not only have been called as ground-breaking/milestone events by political analysts, but also the securitization is evident from the discourses of the AK Party officials who clearly designated the events with the words ranging from ‘emergency’ to ‘blacklisting’. This is also our recommendation for the future operationalization of the concept. Critical junctures of securitization are the events that are widely recognized as emergency acts targeting a clear other and trigger an expanded menu of possibilities for the authoritarian decisionmaker.

The duration of the critical junctures is relatively brief, and, by definition, they should create a new path with long-term institutional outcomes or a novel political trajectory (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007; Slater & Simmons, 2010; Collier & Munck, 2017). The study of these junctures enables us to understand the point at which key processes and transformations start in the political history of a region or country. For example, Ahmed and Capoccia (2014) and Volpi and Gerschewski (2020) applied critical junctures theory to the Arab uprisings, Scully (2017) used it in his study of Chilean politics and Mahoney (2022) employed it to explain regime change in Central America. Öztürk (2021) scrutinised the importance of the critical junctures of Turkish domestic politics through the country’s Balkan relations. Among the works that have employed critical junctures, there remains a gap in the literature in terms of its application to the authoritarian journeys of specific countries and leaders. This article intends to close this gap by investigating the critical junctures in the context of Erdoğan’s Turkey, the AK Party’s attempts to maintain its ontological security through Erdoğan’s leadership, and the process of illiberalisation since 2002.

Although its use in authoritarianism and illiberalisation is almost non-existent, critical junctures approach has previously been applied to explain the change in institutions and democratization (Giersdorf & Croissant, 2011). Kılınç (2014) utilised critical junctures theory in an assessment of the AK Party, asking the question, given Turkey’s extensive history of military dominance in the political sphere, of how Turkey was able to recover and consolidate its democracy in a relatively short period of time. He studies the pre-AK Party period and analyses the 1997 military intervention as a critical juncture that culminated with Islamic actors’ altering their strategies and an eventual democratic consolidation. In this article, we challenge Kılınç’s representation of Turkey under the AK Party rule as a consolidated democracy. To the contrary, our study looks into how the AK Party’s authoritarian outlook has evolved since 2002 with different critical junctures, each of which fed into President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s securitisation of myriad identities and ideologies.

How do processes of securitisation begin, and what exactly authoritarian-leaning leaders securitise? Securitisation is a critical process, especially as a tool of legitimation and mechanism of ontological security maintenance in competitive autocracies, since it grants a ‘procedural’ licence to the ruling elite to implement emergency measures and deviate from routine political practises (Von Soest & Grauvogel, 2017). Below, we analyse the evolution of authoritarianism in Turkey through various critical junctures that resulted in Erdoğan’s securitisation of institutions, identities and political rivals in an attempt to maintain his and his party’s ontological security in a political landscape that was once hostile to any manifestation of political Islam.

The Case of Turkey: The Evolution of Authoritarianism and Tripartite Securitisation

‘Turkey has never been a fully democratic country. If one asks me when it has happened like that, authoritarian, I have to go back to the early Republican area, or maybe late Ottoman Empire period or even earlier times of Ottoman-Turkish history. There are many critical junctures have prepared today’s Turkey, but now we are only focussing today since we are experiencing today’, says a former Gülenist columnist and academic (interview with the authors, April 2021). Turkish political life, much like in other countries, evolves and transforms through a set of critical junctures. Such junctures might matter even more in countries that suffer from certain crises of identity and ontological insecurity (Hintz, 2018; Gülsah and Zarakol 2019). In this article, we argue that we can better understand the increasing authoritarianism of the AK Party through its securitisation moves that were triggered at critical moments of ontological insecurity. In other words, the critical junctures during the AK Party era led to changes in both discourse and policy, and they laid the groundwork for the subsequent transformations. We specifically tease out the critical junctures that enabled the AK Party to securitise and transform key institutions, to securitise identities to garner support from the public and to securitise political rivals to eliminate the competition. Critical junctures are not the points at which the seeds of securitisation were planted but are periods where decisions created a path towards securitisation that defined the near future of an issue.

The AK Party was founded in 2001 and came to power in 2002; it was born of a branch of the religious-nationalist National Outlook Movement (Millî Görüş Hareketi) (Gumuscu & Sert, 2009). It espoused its own form of ‘Muslim nationalism’, which White (2014, 13) defined as ‘the identity of a pious Turk whose subjectivity and vision for the future is shaped by an imperial Ottoman past overlaid onto a republican state framework but divorced from the Kemalist state project’. This identity appealed to the various segments of the Sunni Muslims. Despite the strong secularism claims, the existence of the Presidency of the Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Diyanet) and the population exchanges in the early years of the Republic indicated a desire ‘to consolidate the nation as a community of Sunni Muslims’ (Sandal, 2013, 643). Working in a system that prioritised the Sunni Muslim identity since its establishment while strictly controlling who speaks for the majority religious identity, the AK Party portrayed pious people as victims of the secular elites throughout the Republic’s history. Just to give an example, Erdoğan strategically used the controversial ban on headscarves as an example of these power dynamics and systemic discrimination. Yılmaz (2017, 487) describes this victimhood vis-à-vis the secular and Kemalist elites as the ‘constitutive element of the hegemonic imaginary of Turkish-Islamist ideology in Turkey’. The AK Party’s initial human rights-based discourse also co-opted human rights advocates, feminists, and liberals (Bora, & Çalışkan 2007).

As part of its first election campaign, the AK Party promised freedom of religion and conscience, a stronger market economy and a resolution to the Kurdish question (our Kurdish interviewees do not consider Erdoğan’s arguments regarding peaceful resolution about the Kurdish issue in Turkey sincere) and it laid the foundation for Turkey’s normalisation, according to some (Dagi, 2008). Nevertheless, Erdoğan and the AK Party’s other leading figures claimed that only by overcoming the Kemalist and interventionist, secular tutelary structures could they realise their goals. Erdoğan appeared, though perhaps not directly, to have historically opposed the organization of the military, bureaucracy and high judiciary, all of which had historically regarded any manifestation of political Islam as a source of ontological insecurity for the secular republic. This opposition signalled the future securitisation moves against the Kemalist military and judiciary establishments, which had themselves previously securitised religious political parties. The AK Party’s path to self-desecuritisation was to stay in power as long as possible through legal means, and, when the opportunity arose, to eliminate the power structures that had once securitised religious parties in the political system.

Turkey ultimately transitioned to a competitive regime that synthesised its own brand of ethnic nationalism and Islam by gradually departing from its pro-democracy and pro-European Union promises of 2002. Heywood (2013, 123) states that ‘conservative nationalism is concerned less with the principled nationalism of universal self-determination, and more with the promise of social cohesion and public order embodied in the sentiment of national patriotism’. In our interview, a former Gülenist academic and columnist argues that some of the repressive policies of Erdoğan could be read as the replication of the previous times’ authoritarian policies (interview with the authors, June 2021). Therefore, one can argue that Erdoğan replaced one form of conservative nationalism with another which was embedded not necessarily in institutions but, rather, in his persona. The AK Party had to first desecuritise its own identity in an aggressively secular Turkish political landscape and then consolidate its power while redefining the parameters of public order and social cohesion. Then, like in many other cases of ‘authoritarianisation’, it would be able to navigate its way through tripartite securitisation by first problematising the core institutions that threatened its legitimacy, then rallying the nation against the already established enemies, and, finally, situating its own rivals in these enemy categories.

2002–2008 Power Consolidation and Self-Desecuritisation

The AK Party, since its establishment, sought to challenge and overcome the obstacles that the Kemalist secular bureaucratic structure had imposed. The desire of the Turkish liberal segments to join the European Union and to curb the influence of the Turkish army in politics enabled the AK Party to use secular language in advancement of its goals and self-desecuritisation. The party elites argued that the understanding of a more participatory and pluralistic democracy must spread throughout Turkey with a new constitution. They created a definition of conservatism that emphasised democracy over religion. ‘We categorised the name of our party not as “Muslim Democrats” but as “Conservative Democrats”, and we set out down this path as such’, Erdoğan declared in a 2005 speech, challenging those who accuse him of overt religiosity (Grigoriadis & Dilek, 2018). Erdoğan was careful not to repeat the mistakes of the previous Islamist parties, as it ‘would mean political suicide’, and the AK Party officials often asserted that ‘the Party had nothing to do with Islam’ (Cavdar, 2006, 481). In order to desecuritise the AK Party’s identity as a religious party, Erdoğan assumed the role of protector of the disenfranchised. One of his most prominent election slogans in 2002 was the phrase, ‘We have come to be someone for those who have no one’ (Heper & Toktaş, 2003). He positioned himself as the representative of the segments of the public whom the Kemalist and secular elites had ignored.

When it first came to power, many had believed that the AK Party government would eliminate the hegemony that the Kemalist and secular elites had maintained in both domestic and foreign policy (Aydin & Dizdaroğlu, 2018) for years, and the fulcrum of this response was the presidential election held in parliament in 2007. The AK Party, with a parliamentary majority, was able to choose the president, meaning that the representation of the state would pass to the religiously devout class that had historically been marginalised in Turkey as a source of ontological insecurity. Just as many had feared, the party nominated Abdullah Gül for president. Gül was the foreign minister and second-in-command of the party. Gül’s wife wore a headscarf, which was a taboo for many staunchly secular circles. Challenging this political nomination, the secular Kemalist bloc surrounded the AK Party from three sides. The army issued a warning to the AK Party by publishing an electronic memorandum. Cumhuriyet (the mainstream Kemalist newspaper), the Atatürkist Thought Association, CHP and other civil society groups organised rallies to challenge the AK Party government, shouting slogans like ‘We don’t want the headscarf in Çankaya’ (Cinar, 2011, 107–112). The announcement by the former Court of Cassation Chief Justice Sabih Kanadoğlu that there must be a two-thirds majority in the parliament to be able to elect the president constituted a stern warning to have the judiciary cancel a potential election.

Under these circumstances, the AK Party claimed that ‘it was in power yet could not be powerful’ and called for an early election in 2007. It secured another single-party government with almost 47% of the vote and successfully elected Abdullah Gül as president. This was a turning point in the Turkish history. The AK Party’s victory delivered a blow to the Kemalist bureaucratic and military institutions. The Chief Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals filed a lawsuit in 2008 to ban the AK Party ‘on the grounds that it is the focus of anti-secular actions’ (Aydın-Düzgit, 2012, 331). Though the Constitutional Court decided against the party’s closure by a margin of a vote, this move consolidated the ontological insecurity of the AK Party vis-à-vis the military, judicial and bureaucratic wings of the state. Erdoğan started to depict himself as the sole and legitimate representative of the disenfranchised public and argued that the secular institutions targeted him in the most undemocratic ways. One of our interviewees said that this lawsuit was ‘one of the biggest traumas’ of the AK Party. This perception was consolidated with the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey where more than 3 million people took to the streets to protest increasing authoritarianism and corruption. The AK Party interpreted the protests as a continuing threat to its ontological security and tried to frame them as the conspiracy of the foreign powers (Nefes, 2017).

2008–2016 Securitisation of Secular Institutions and the Kurds

The events that transpired between 2002 and 2008 – and especially the party-closure lawsuit – made the AK Party realise that it maintained little influence over the military, judiciary and bureaucratic elites. These actors actively desired the AK Party’s abolition despite its electoral victory. As a reaction, the AK Party outlined a new style of conducting politics after 2008, one that would bring into question the legitimacy of the military and judicial institutions that threatened its existence. The party employed a new legitimising concept for this struggle: the National Will. This meant that when the institutions that were supposed to reflect the national will failed to do so, the AK Party would make sure that these institutions would be restructured, and the political elite associated with the old order would be removed from the power positions. The AK Party was aware that it would be unable to accomplish this gargantuan task alone. It had to cooperate with another actor that was relatively organised within the state structure for this battle against the historically powerful and secular establishment. This ally was the Gülen Movement.

The Gülen Movement was organised as a multipartite and multi-layered religious body in the early 1960s by Fethullah Gülen, a Sufi preacher. The organisation was founded to provide opportunities to those with limited resources in Turkey and abroad through the provision of education and charity, and to spread a conservative understanding of Islam with heavy Turkish cultural tones. Starting in the late 1990s, the Gülen Movement organised as a global movement through educational institutions, civil society groups, business networks and the press (Watmough & Öztürk, 2018). While the AK Party’s founding cadre and the Gülen Movement had never seen eye to eye (Turam, 2007), they crafted an informal coalition based on mutual interests, especially after 2007. Their common goal was to end the Kemalist and secular tutelage. The AK Party assisted the Gülen Movement politically both in Turkey and abroad. In return, the movement supported the AK Party through its media institutions, protecting the party and conducting a host of joint operations against the enemies of the party with the help of its members positioned within the state. As a staunchly pro-AK Party author acknowledges (Selvi, 2014), the Gülen movement grew 15 times larger under the AK Party administration.

Critical Junctures of Securitising Institutions: The Ergenekon and Balyoz Trials

The most important operations that the AK Party-Gülen movement jointly conducted were what are commonly known as the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials, which targeted the Kemalist, secular elites in the judiciary, security apparatus, military, press, higher education and civil society organisations, and were called ‘the court cases that changed Turkey’ (Yildiz, 2013). These operations constitute a critical juncture in the Turkish history, as the securitisation of key institutions and the removal of the key members of the establishment elite opened doors for an entirely new institutional path for Erdoğan. Criminal proceedings were fuelled by rumours of the plans for an imminent coup attempt and of the culpability of key secular elites for the extra-judicial killings and attacks against the minorities, the Kurds, and the Islamists. The securitizing tone was evident in the discourse of the critical AK Party officers, who used words ranging from ‘blacklisting’ to ‘disciplining’ when describing the events and subjects. As one AK Party official said at the time, ‘for years, they blacklisted us; now it is us who will blacklist them’ (Milliyet.com.tv, 2010). AK Party Deputy and the senior advisor to Erdoğan, Yalçın Akdoğan, described the court cases as ‘the biggest legal settlements of the Republican history’ and said ‘it is not just that a mentality has been held to account, but this mentality has been liquidated at the same time by the judiciary’; another key AK Party official Egemen Bağış said that with these court cases, they (AK Party) have now disciplined those who created obstacles for them (Sözcü, 2016). The evidence was certainly questionable (Rodrik, 2011, 99–109), but the trial received the approval of a considerable segment of society and of the domestic and foreign policy circles. Defence lawyer Celal Ülgen said that the trial was designed ‘to silence Turkey’s intellectuals, to redesign the Turkish Armed Forces, to ensure the government controls the ways in which it can be opposed’ (Butler, 2012). Likewise, one of the leading figures of the opposition CHP shared with us that this period was very hard for the Kemalist groups since it was the first time in the history of contemporary Turkey they felt existentially threatened.

During this period, the AK Party took advantage of the myriad possibilities the court cases provided, and it prioritised the restructuring of institutions. In 2010, it advanced a constitutional amendment package that delivered numerous judicial arrangements, including modifications to the structure of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors. The party conveyed this as a necessary emergency step towards democratisation and on the path to the European Union. The Gülen Movement, on the other hand, continued to stand behind the AK Party, saying that ‘if necessary, the dead should rise up and vote “yes”’. The Kurdish movement refused to vote in the referendum, declaring that they would not participate in this dirty war. The amendment passed with 55% of the vote in the referendum, and it granted the AK Party-Gülen Movement partnership the opportunity to more comfortably redesign the country’s institutions. Erdoğan’s discourse became even more aggressive, and he articulated that one of the goals of his government was to raise a ‘pious generation’, thus turning to implement changes in youth and education policy (Lüküslü, 2016, 637–649). The further strengthening of Erdoğan’s AK Party after the 2010 referendum created a path that gave Erdoğan an upper hand over the secular establishment. He abandoned nearly all peace and reconciliation initiatives, and claimed that, because his party had emerged victorious in the election, he had the unquestionable right to implement his own policies (Taş, 2015). He continued to strategically deploy the ‘national will’ discourse in his institutional restructuring. The party subsequently embraced its religious identity with a greater degree of confidence and started to employ an Islamist discourse (Shukri & Hossain, 2017) to promote Muslim nationalism, both in Turkey and abroad.

Critical Junctures of (re)Securitising the Kurds: The KCK Trials

Adisonmez (2019, 1375) argues that ‘Turkey’s military apparatus is designed to silence ontological insecurity sources’. Kurds have traditionally been seen as one of those sources in Turkish history. The AK Party initially sought to secure the Kurdish vote through a ‘peace process’ with the PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê/Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the Kurdish militant organization that was established in 1978 and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its allies. In 2009, then President Abdullah Gül announced to the public that critical steps had been taken to resolve the Kurdish question. In 2012, Erdoğan declared that the government officials had met with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, to discuss the resolution of the Kurdish issue. These two developments were the official and unofficial proclamations of what was regarded as ‘the peace process’. The PKK announced that it had officially withdrawn all its armed forces from Turkish territory to Northern Iraq (Gurses, 2020). This action, according to the government, the Kurds and most of the press, had the potential to end the bloody conflict that had persisted for 30 years.

However, the promise of the peace process did not last long. Rumelili and Celik (2006, 279) argue that even ‘during the 2009–2015 peace process in Turkey, ontological (in)security-induced dynamics presented themselves in cyclical patterns of ambitious peace initiatives receiving greater support among the Kurdish public but giving way, at the first sign of crisis, to a rapid and dramatic return to violence, which neither side acted to stem’. With the increasing popularity of a pro-Kurdish political party, and the criticisms that the AK Party received for its compromising stance towards the Kurdish movement, Erdoğan found it politically more viable to securitise the Kurdish issue, rather than pursuing and concluding a sustainable peace process (Özpek, 2019; Geri, 2017). Even though the government and the PKK seemed to be pursuing peace talks, a judicial offencive was launched against the Kurds and the circles that are known to be close to the Kurdish movement, with the full support of the AK Party leadership.

In one of our interviews, ‘every single group has its unique critical junctures in Turkey’s authoritarian drift. We, as Kurds, might have many more critical junctures than the others since Erdogan’s Turkey wants to make Kurds silent against his repression’, said Hasip Kaplan, a former member of the Turkish Parliament from pro-Kurdish parties (interview with the authors, September 2021). A key critical juncture, the KCK operations, targeted activists, academics, publishers and politicians who had alleged links to the outlawed Kurdish Communities Union (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, KCK). More than 500 Kurdish politicians, intellectuals and journalists had been jailed by 2013 with the allegations that they were part of the urban branch of the PKK and, hence, were terrorists. Faysal Sariyildiz, a former member of the Parliament from the pro-Kurdish HDP told us that ‘it was the tactic of the AKP governments to push the Kurdish political actors outside the territories of the civil political arena’ (interview with the authors, September 2021). The PKK and the Kurdish political movement had already been securitised throughout the Turkish history; it was not difficult for the political entrepreneurs to use the counterterrorism argument that had traditionally been supported by the mainstream public, including the secular segments of the society, and rally around the Turkish flag. Securitization discourse was very clear in this case as well. The minister of the interior at the time, Idris Naim Şahin drew a parallel between the jailed writers and journalists to PKK paramilitaries and argued that there was ‘no difference between the bullets fired in [the Kurdish south-east of Turkey] and the articles written in Ankara’ (Letsch, 2012). Volkan Bozkır, a member of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, claimed that ‘They [those who face trial] are part of a terrorist organization’ and that ‘they have been helping those terrorists who are killing young people’ (Welle, 2011). Erdoğan declared that they would not allow a ‘state within a state’; any statement in support of the indicted would constitute aiding and abetting terrorism; and that the crackdown would continue (Turk, 2011).

KCK trials constituted another critical juncture of securitization towards authoritarianisation, creating new pathways for the AK Party government to exclude the Kurdish actors from the political sphere and to accuse the prominent Kurdish activists, academics and politicians of terrorism. Under the veneer of a ‘national security/emergency’ argument, one of the main goals of these operations was to silence the Kurdish groups that the ruling party was unable to co-opt (Updegraff, 2012, 122). After the official end of the peace process, the AK Party government initiated a series of military operations against the PKK in the Kurdish-majority cities in the south-east and declared a regional state of emergency under the banner of a ‘war on terrorism’. Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian civil war and the deterioration of the Turkish economy caused Erdoğan to lean further into his embrace of nationalism (Çandar, 2020). In this context, the discourse of coexistence was replaced with the notion of ‘one nation, one flag, one homeland, one state’. Bayülgen et al. note that in the face of the economic challenges, the AK Party turned more to repression and centralisation for its survival in that time period (Bayülgen et all, 2018).

With its nationalist discourse, the AK Party consolidated its political success with victories in the 2014 local elections. Erdoğan won more than 52% of the vote and became the 12th president of Turkey for a five-year term starting in 2014. He continued to lobby for a stronger presidential system, promising that it would increase stability and reduce violence, especially in the Turkish state’s battle against the PKK. Using the fight against terrorism and the securitisation of the Kurdish political movement and hence, and exploiting the Turkish state’s ontological insecurities, he became bolder, more nationalist and less accountable. His firm stance ultimately paid off, and the AK Party secured a majority in the October 2015 elections.

2016–2020 Rival Securitisation and the Authoritarian Consolidation

The AK Party’s pragmatic and interest-based alliance with the Gülen movement eroded. The tensions became especially obvious after the late 2013 corruption scandals, which were criminal investigations run by the Gülenist police officers against the key figures in Erdoğan’s government. To avenge these judicial offensives, the government targeted the core interests of the Gülen movement. The university preparatory schools (dersanes) run by Gülen networks were closed down. During an interview in which he discussed the Gulen community, Erdogan said, ‘[Gulen supporters] practice takiyya [deceit], they lie, they slander. As a result, they are involved in sedition, malice. They are far ahead even of the Shiites. The Shiites cannot compete with them’ (quoted in Tastekin, 2014). Although the tensions had been brewing for some years (some of our interviewees noted that since 2013, the AK Party governments had gradually been securitised the Gülen Movement), it was not until the 2016 Coup attempt that the Gülen movement was fully securitised.

Critical Junctures of Securitising Rivals and Critics: The 2016 Coup Attempt

On July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish army tried to overthrow the government with tanks and fighter jets. The failed coup attempt ended up with the death of more than 250 people. Arguably, the AK Party’s most hegemonic period started after this failed coup attempt, which Erdoğan himself referred to as ‘a gift from God’ since it gave him the reason to justify a relatively permanent state of emergency. Erdoğan, backed by other politicians and media outlets, blamed the Gülen movement for perpetrating the coup attempt, an accusation the movement’s leader vehemently rejected. This extraordinary event created a menu of options for Erdoğan – which he recognized in many of his speeches – and it was a critical juncture which had significant implications for the parameters of political competition and institutions. Five days after the coup attempt, the AK Party government declared a state of emergency until mid-2017. According to a leading Gülen movement member who is in exile now, this was the breaking point not only for the history of the Gülen Movement, but also for the history of contemporary Turkey. Adisonmez and Onursal (2020, 301) show how this coup attempt created an ‘unprecedented political stability’ that created a political space to ‘articulate the state’s survival discourse’.

Under the conditions of the state of emergency, the government began ruling the country through statutory decrees, in which the parliament had no say and over which the government had no judicial accountability. The lingering shock and trauma of the coup attempt meant that the government faced little opposition during the first few weeks of the emergency order. Erdoğan declared repeatedly that the nation faced an existential threat and his government’s measures were essential to their survival. Accordingly, he noted, the extraordinary and extra-legal measures must be evaluated in this context. In the post-coup process, it was not only the Gülenists who were securitised; extreme nationalist circles and ‘rampant Islamist and nationalist feelings’ extended the purge to leftist intellectuals who had no ties to the Gülen movement (Yilmaz, 2017, 496). Almost all pro-Kurdish print and visual media organs were shut down. The judiciary lost its autonomy altogether, and the state prosecutors targeted the opposition. Co-chairs and some municipal governors of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party were arrested. Erdoğan set about seizing, by force, the cities and towns that the AK Party had lost in the elections.

Taking advantage of the wider menu of options the coup attempt provided, Erdoğan also moved ahead with the drafting of the new constitution, which enshrined the transition from a parliamentary to a presidential system of governance. The parliament swiftly passed the constitutional changes with the support of the ultraconservative Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP). The new constitution was drafted without the consent of the other parties in the parliament, and it was aided by the state of emergency, under the pretence of existential threats. Those who opposed the amendments argued that transferring the parliament’s executive authority to the president and affording him immunity from judicial accountability would effectively turn Turkey into a dictatorship. By allowing the president to maintain party affiliation, they asserted, single-party rule would result in the destruction of minority parties and would weaken vital checks and balances. Upon completing the referendum campaign period, Turkish citizens went to the polls, delivering one of the closest results in Turkish electoral history. The referendum narrowly passed, with 24.3 million voters (51.2%) casting their ballot for ‘Yes’ against 23.1 million (48.8%) who voted ‘No’. Erdoğan’s supporters viewed the results of the referendum as the official dawn of the era of a ‘new Turkey’. In short, the coup attempt was a clear critical juncture that provided a menu of opportunities to the AK Party government to securitize both the Gülen movement and the AK Party’s remaining vocal critics in the public sphere. Even the expiration of the state of emergency in Turkey did not end the repressive rule under President Erdoğan since this last critical juncture not only put the regime security to the centre but also designated many critical voices as ‘terrorists’ or enemies of the state.

Conclusion

Authoritarianism comes in many shades. Although some studies investigate moments of securitisation by authoritarian regimes, we still need accounts of how political parties and leaders use securitisation to maintain their ontological security. In this article, we argued that it is important to look at the critical junctures where the political actors start or reinforce their securitisation processes of institutions, ‘enemies’ of the nation and, finally, their political rivals and critics whom they cannot co-opt to consolidate their power.

Tripartite securitisation can be operationalized by asking the questions of when the ruling actor took the most critical decisions regarding the country’s key institutions, the perceived enemies and its own rivals in the political sphere, and when it elevated the policies associated with these to a security and emergency level. There can be multiple critical junctures in the securitisation of institutions, enemies and rivals. What matters is to tease out the moments that provide the governing actor with the opportunities for securitization. These moments can be launched with the support of the actor (political trials) or they can be spontaneous (a coup attempt). When studying the AK Party’s political trajectory, we see a tripartite securitisation through three main critical junctures. The Ergenekon and Balyoz trials constitute the critical juncture that paved the way to restructuring the secular institutions that threatened the AK Party’s political survival. Through the KCK trials – the second critical juncture – the AK Party government brought the Kurdish issue back to the security realm after a period of engagement which the AK Party elites had hoped would produce favourable electoral outcomes. The third critical juncture came with the 2016 coup attempt, which provided the opportunity for Erdoğan to fully securitise not only the Gülen movement but all segments of the opposition.

Our model is useful as a framework to study both authoritarian regimes and moments, and its relevance goes beyond Turkey. Shah Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarianism and ontological insecurity cannot be studied without special attention to the transformation of Iranian institutions, the targeting of the Communists and Socialists as well as political rivals, including the securitisation of religious movements. This, in turn, cannot be fully grasped independently of the associated critical junctures such as the White Revolution, establishment of SAVAK and the Siahkal attack, respectively. Similarly, Venezuela’s descent into dictatorship cannot be studied without the tripartite securitisation of institutions, the economy (and the capitalist ideology) and political rivals, with the critical junctures constituting the 2014 protests, the declaration of 2016 Economic Emergency and the 2017 constitutional crisis. Expectedly, not all transitions and processes of securitisation are completed successfully. Egypt’s Morsi’s rule was cut short by Sisi’s takeover while Morsi was trying to desecuritise Muslim Brotherhood’s long-securitised identity through presidential decrees and institutional transformations.

Another future research trajectory is to study these processes in reverse – how do regimes desecuritise institutions, identities and groups on the path to democratisation? Studies on critical junctures of desecuritisation would shed light on the important moments scholars and policymakers should consider. Such investigations would also have policy implications through showing ways of facilitating these critical junctures and bringing about the conditions under which desecuritisation can take place.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by H2020 Marie SkÃ…Â,odowska-Curie Actions; 89,130.

ORCID iDs

Nukhet Ahu Sandal

Ahmet Erdi Ozturk

Author Biographies

Nukhet A. Sandal is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio University.

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Relations and Politics at London Metropolitan University and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Coventry University in the UK and GIGA in Germany.

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