Secular risk governance and the Turkish military’s battle with political Islam,1980s–2000s

Introduction

Neither the failed coup attempt of July 2016 nor the increasingly harsh trend of authoritarianism in Turkey in the past few years can be understood without a meaningful engagement with the security politics of the Turkish state and its relationship with secularism. Configured as an unassailable pillar of modern Turkey, secularism has been articulated as under threat since the early days of the republic. Yet such threat has been emphasized much more profoundly with the rise of Islamist politics in the 1970s, which challenged not only the so-called separation between religion and politics but also the import of Western cultural and political forms. As the self-proclaimed protector of the secular republic, the Turkish military staged various political interventions against the risk of Islamism from the 1980s until the 2010s. This was a defining period in the trajectory of political Islam and the backdrop to the AKP’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, The Justice and Development Party ) current authoritarian and revanchist politics, a period in which a unique intertwinement of national security politics with secularism took place, and did so in gendered ways. The Islamic headscarf has been at the center of debates as the intrinsic symbol of Islamization of politics and public space, and brought women’s bodies and sexualities to the forefront of the national security discourse. The Turkish military stood firmly against the removal of headscarf bans in public employment and education, and at the same time it tried to prevent the spread of radicalization within its own structure by closely monitoring military officers and their families to safeguard secularism as a gendered and cultural practice (Arik, 2016).

This article examines the Turkish military’s security discourse in relation to political Islam with a particular focus on the gendered and sexual construction of the Islamic headscarf as a risk through a study of the everyday and corporeal experiences of women in military families. It focuses on the period from the 1980s to the end of the 2000s, when the military defined political Islam as a primary threat to national security and mobilized broad-based surveillance mechanisms that primarily pivoted around women’s headscarves. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in military bases and interviews with women in military families in 2011, this research discusses how religion is governed as an embodied risk through a merger of official security measures and disciplinary mechanisms in everyday life. A focus on women’s bodily experiences delineates the unique intertwinement of security and secularism, as well as the incorporation of the distinct categories of the secular and the religious into a political idiom in sexually and corporeally specific ways (Arik, 2016). Women’s lived experiences in a security environment that actively pushed them to the polar ends of a ‘secular/religious’ divide provide unique insights for understanding how secular risk governance works.

The research builds on the security studies scholarship that critiques the normativity that secularism holds in security politics and the Western epistemic framework based on taken-for-granted conceptualizations of ‘religious violence’ or ‘Islamic terror’ (Bilgin, 2008; Gutkowski, 2011; Hurd, 2007; Mavelli, 2013). Drawing on risk-based research that examines the post-9/11 Western security paradigm, this research incorporates the Foucauldian notion of modern power and governmentality to critically analyze how risk is constructed as a form of social governance (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau et al., 2008; Dillon, 2008). Through the bridging of critical approaches to security and secularism, the article discusses the culturally specific co-construction of security and risk along with the categories of the secular and the religious. Defining secularism as a central discursive mechanism in the exercise of modern state sovereignty (Asad, 2006; Mahmood, 2015), this research draws concrete links between secularism, modern governance, and national security.

A study of women’s lived experiences of securitization of religion enables a ground-up analysis of security and risk in Turkey and contributes to studies on the post-9/11 Western security agenda through an empirical study of religion as risk. Empirical findings demonstrate how discourses of secularism and security are intertwined through gender and sexuality, and present an example of the lived experience of secular risk governance. The military base constitutes a proxy to the broader tensions and conflicts over the public representation of religion in Turkey as a place where these conflicts are lived in more heightened ways. By discussing the sociocultural dynamics involved in security agendas and securitization processes that characterize a particular and formative era in Turkish politics, this research throws light on the backyard of the AKP’s current political discourse, its efforts to revamp the state apparatus, and the conditions that prepared the grounds for the failed coup attempt of July 2016. Conceptualizing secular risk governance also offers a renewed analytical perspective to further investigate how the Western security agenda takes form against the backdrop of secularism and the broader sociocultural discourses involved in governing risk and performing safety. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of the construction of secularism as a security referent in Turkey and the civil–military relations from the late 1980s onwards.

Constructing risk through excess (aşırı) and deviance (çarpık)

Turkish secularism’s normative construction of femininity and sexual morality constitutes the backdrop to configurations of risk and security through the Islamic headscarf in this research. While women are expected to adopt Western forms of attire, traditional values of honor and chastity are at the same time imposed by means of sartorial modesty (Ozcetin, 2009, 2015). It is in this discursive framework that the headscarf and religious dress are constructed as psychological, sexual, and social mutilation of femininity and a threat to the construction of modern and liberal subjectivity (Fernando, 2013). To this end, this author’s study on the headscarf regulations in the military discusses how women’s bodies were extensively policed through a ‘traditional/safe’ and ‘political/risky’ dichotomy, on the basis of which women were respectively profiled as either secularist or Islamist (Arik, 2016). My earlier research shows that risk is identified at the scale of the female body, primarily on the basis of whether or not a woman wears a headscarf, and, subsequently, in accordance with the style of the headscarf worn, which is evaluated in relation to the woman’s social class, age, and level of education. In this framework, a woman who tightly secures her headscarf with a pin and uses a bonnet to cover the hair underneath is deemed ‘irrational’, thus risky, as her behavior is read as ‘too literal’ and an ‘excessive’ practice of religion. According to the military’s secularist discourse, such stylizing of headscarves ‘exceeds’ the purpose of sexual modesty in public, which could be fulfilled just by a modest-but-modern outfit and a loosely worn scarf that does not ‘shy away from showing a little bit of hair’ (Arik, 2016). The tightly worn headscarf is considered risky as it deviates from the republican regime of visibility and brings religion out to the public through embodiment. Particularly younger, educated, and headscarved officers’ wives come under scrutiny as they contradict the expected decline of religiosity in the meeting with upward social mobility and secular education.

Following from my earlier research (Arik, 2016), I argue that notions of excess and deviance are central to the military’s security discourse and the securitization of social life on the military base. The military not only mobilizes broad-based surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms to control different forms of deviance and excess on a daily basis, but also tries to identify the potentials for such risk. Publicly pious or not, the fact of being Muslim, which a great majority of the military families are, constitutes the potential for radicalization that needs monitoring. While considered safe in the private sphere and the conscience of the individual, religious faith is perceived as the potential that can pose a risk in a moment of seepage across the public/private border. Therefore the military policed and monitored such crossovers by means of social pressures and incursions into individuals’ everyday lives, which I conceptualize as secular risk governance.

In what follows, I examine how secular risk governance operates across various spheres in the military. The starting point is my interviews with women in military families who pointed at six main spheres of risk management that compartmentalized their bodies, lives, and social conduct to monitor whether they: (1) wear the ‘political’ headscarf (as determined on the basis of the aforementioned criteria); (2) strictly observe daily prayers and fast; (3) socialize in segregated spheres as men and women with reference to Islamic principles (in education or social spheres); (4) have a preference for ‘Islamic’ art (such as Quranic calligraphy, illumination, miniatures) and read religious texts or watch religious/Islamist TV channels; (5) strictly consume helal food and avoid alcohol; and, finally, (6) predominantly socialize with other religious people or hold gatherings to read and discuss Islamic texts, and have connections to a tariqat or religious community. Secular risk governance works across these spheres to identify and connect evidence of excess and deviance. Risk technologies navigate blurry boundaries between everyday life and official spheres on the basis of often-vague notions of the secular and religious to connect the dots and identify ‘deviations’ from secular norms.

Background security checks

The background security check is the most frequently reiterated security practice, which, as a holistic procedure, aims to capture every single familial and private aspect of a person’s life to determine whether they constitute any danger to the military. This procedure begins at the time of application to military schools and continues throughout the career of the military officer. Conducted across broad social spheres and connections that surround the life of a candidate, as well as his/her family and acquaintances, background security checks lead to significant decisions over the career of the officer that might range from promotion to demotion and expulsion. ⁴

When I inquired about what constitutes a background security check during my conversation with ‘Merve’ (35), ⁵ who is the ‘secular-identified’ wife of a serving commissioned officer, she defined it as a routine security process that takes place every seven years, involving intensive interrogations about the officer and his family. From her experience, she recounts: ‘I heard that they questioned even the janitor at my parent’s place. If my mom is headscarved or not; if we belong to any tariqat…. Do we drink excessively? Do we use guns? Questions like that’ (Interview 1). These checks skim over all aspects of an officer’s life to inspect for any liabilities that might compromise the officer’s loyalty to the military. In this account, being part of a religious community, a tariqat, is perceived as a form of ‘deviance’, one that is comparable to gun violence or gang membership and poses a high risk to the military. The military perceives close connections with religious groups as a character trait of a person who would potentially not adhere to secularist principles, not fit into the cultural and social norms that the military aims to establish, and, importantly, not follow the chain of command. Similar to the danger of the Islamic headscarf, prioritizing religion in one’s social life is taken as an indicator of a form of subjectivity that is not ‘secular’, not ‘rational’, and not compatible with modern democracy. These security checks operate across the blurry boundaries of public and private, to search for lifestyle and embodied traits that do not fit in with the desired ‘modern’ and ‘secular’ subjectivity.

Several participants who were labelled as ‘Islamist’ through the military’s securitization processes also referred to the routine background security checks that their families went through and the cloud of judgement that surrounded their lives owing to the reports that were sometimes leaked to the community. ‘Nesrin’ (50), the wife of a commissioned officer who was forced to retire, described how security reports created a preconceived suspicion and negative views of their lives even before new colleagues could get to know them at a new deployment site:

Once something is put in your background security report, it follows you everywhere. People judge you before they even know you…. Because of my headscarf, my husband got discriminated against a lot. I was even worried because the security report would even cause trouble for my sons when they seek employment in government later. (Interview 2)

As Nesrin suggests, the background security report constitutes a major force in securitization of religious identities within the military. It is the main official document that compiles all the information on an officer’s personal and family background in relation to his ‘reactionary’ behavior or tendencies. The information gathered in these reports stigmatizes these individuals and affects their social relations and the career prospects of the officer and his family. The evidence of excess and deviance are sought by combining official intelligence reports with social surveillance mechanisms that require infiltrations into various aspects of the everyday life and privacy of an officer primarily in the aforementioned spheres of surveillance. The evidence is mainly shaped around the religious embodiment of officers’ wives and daughters, and involves monitoring of their religious practices across a wide range of social spheres.

Monitoring religious practices

Studies on Turkish secularism indicate that secularization processes, in both cultural and institutional spheres, have defined religion as a personal and individual form of conduct and allocated it to the confines of the private sphere. The falsity of such a public/private divide has been apparent in the military’s security actions. Many respondents suggested that their private and individual religious practices have come under scrutiny. For example, ‘Mukerrem’ (46), the wife of an expelled commissioned officer and the sister of another who also was expelled from the military, said:

My brother, when he was in military school … they start examining people early on. Before, it wasn’t that tight. Later on they started checking even the crease in people’s trousers even: if it is flattened, then it means that person does daily prayers. For example, he goes to the washroom, he is going to roll up his sleeves to wash hands or his trousers to keep clean, if he starts like this [demonstrating with her hands], they say ‘Aha! This guy is used to performing ablution.’ (Interview 3)

The time period that Mukerrem mentions is the mid-1990s, when the Islamist parties gained political power and the military stiffened its security practices to profile potential ‘Islamists’. During this process, military candidates were closely monitored in relation to the form and frequency of their religious practice, to decide whether they had the potential to become an extremist. Even when an officer tried to hide his daily prayers and conducted them in privacy, he was still traced and identified through the bodily and sartorial evidence, while those who openly admitted doing daily prayers would definitely be officially profiled. Likewise, attending the communal Friday prayers (a man-only religious ceremony) at the mosque was subject to close scrutiny, as there would always be an undercover intelligence officer present.

However, my inquiries regarding the reasons why individuals were blacklisted for Friday prayers or their wives’ headscarves were at times questioned by the secularist-identified military officers and their families who argued that there had to be multiple evidence of excess and deviance. They argued that a religious practice (such as daily prayers or fasting) would never be the sole reason for profiling an officer as ‘Islamist’ as that would be unfair, and that ‘there has to be other reasons too’. The narratives of those who were labeled as ‘Islamist’ also suggested that there was sometimes more than one reason for their troubles and that often women’s bodies were at the center of social risk governance.

The military’s risk technologies considered excess and deviance in combination with each other and primarily in the light of women’s headscarves. In other words, women’s religious embodiment constituted a pivotal risk indicator that gave meaning to the entire space and network of people around. If an officer’s wife wore a ‘political’ headscarf, and if that officer was a successful one with the potential to reach higher ranks in the military, if he performed daily prayers and at the same time socialized with other potentially ‘Islamist’ individuals, all these factors were considered together. ‘Aysen’ (48, wife of a forcibly retired commissioned officer) for example, suggested that her headscarf was always a factor that kept them under scrutiny, but surveillance became harsher for her family when she started socializing with other headscarved women owing to their shared experience of exclusion (Interview 4). Thus, while public display of religion was in some cases manageable one way or the other, individuals who carried multiple risk factors were more likely to face pressures and expulsion from the military.

Risk governance as social surveillance

As I have so far demonstrated, the Turkish military actively surveilled the ‘reactionary/Islamist’ officer by monitoring deviations from the norms of ‘secular and modern’ Muslim subjectivity. This required a set of security practices that operated in a broad field of conceptual uncertainty and over the entire military community to detect incipient potentials for radicalization. Such forms of secular risk governance opened up the everyday life of an officer to interrogation and observation in more structural ways, and more so demanded incorporation of civilians in the military into broad-based surveillance mechanisms.

The most common surveillance practice was a house visit, which took place both officially and informally to collect information to identify and confirm the status of an officer as ‘risky’. It involved intelligence officers visiting a suspected officer’s house to complete a survey that examined each of the aforementioned six spheres through straightforward questions such as ‘Does his wife wear a headscarf? Do they have religious books and texts?’ (Arik, 2016: 651). However, these visits were not always official. They could also take place within the context of friendly social interactions between neighbors, as well as through use of illegal techniques, such as breaking into people’s houses. For example, Aysen (48, wife of a forcibly retired commissioned officer) said:

I used to make lace work at home. The wife of the regiment commander and the wife of the intelligence officer used to insist on coming to my house just to look at my lace work. I told them, ‘There is no need for you to come. I can bring it in.’ They were like, ‘No, no! We want to come and check your house too.’ They used to search for stuff in the house, you know. If I have trinkets, or praying carpets, or the Quran…. I told them once that I have two Qurans in the library, and praying carpets … everything. They were like, ‘Oh, we really like you. Don’t get us wrong. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you. We cannot control everything. Be careful, they might come search your house.’ (Interview 4)

As Aysen was warned, one day she came home and found muddy boot prints all the way from the bathroom window and around the house. These intrusions into people’s private homes aimed to collect evidence of what are or have the potential to pose risks to the secular construction of military spaces. Demonstrating the extent of the military’s security actions, Aysen’s experience reflects the complexity of the security mechanisms with civilians in the military who were either officially or informally commissioned with a duty. While the ‘secularist’ officers’ wives took up tasks in policing people’s privacy, they also exercised control in deciding who was risky, which demonstrates the fluidity of military security.

Besides material evidence like books and decor, the social interactions of suspected officers and their families are also monitored in order to tease out their capacity for ‘secular’ and ‘modern’ forms of sociability. On the basis of the principle of gender equality, military secularism condemns religion-based gender segregation and demands that men and women socialize together. Sexual relations and morality are maintained in this case through regulation of social interactions and behavior (Arik, 2016). A number of my participants who were subject to such forms of surveillance indicated that when the guests (officers’ wives) came to visit, they paid special attention to whether the headscarved women were able to socialize in mixed-gendered spaces or whether there was any evidence of segregated guest rooms in their houses. For example, in the experience of ‘Sonay’ (47, wife of expelled commissioned officer), when the officials found out that they practiced gender segregation at home, expulsion followed shortly after (Interview 5). This shows that gender equality was a key security referent in the military’s risk technologies that measured Islamic norms against the norms of state feminism endorsed since the early days of the republic.

People were also tested in social settings in terms of their ability to show tolerance towards ‘modern’ or ‘non-Islamic’ forms of clothing or social behavior. Aysen said that another officer’s wife once came to visit her wearing a super-miniskirt just to test Aysen’s reaction based on the directives she got from her husband, as she later admitted. Aysen said that she warmly welcomed her, which was surprising since the intention was to provoke Aysen’s religious sensitivities and her presumed intolerance towards a revealing outfit (Interview 4). In this process, Aysen is tested to reveal whether her religion is an impediment for socializing with those who are not like her; whether religion is a priority. In this case, Aysen’s perceived ‘deviance’, her headscarf, is confronted by another extreme, the miniskirt, which is also frowned upon in military spaces where sexual modesty is upheld.

Aysen also talked about the extra efforts she made to prevent the perception of her family as ‘Islamist’ because of her ‘political’ headscarf. To alleviate the pressures and divert suspicions, as a family they always remained very socially active and maintained good relations within the military community. She and her husband had ‘very good social skills that could win people’s hearts’ and compensate for her ‘flaw’, the headscarf. During their tenure in the military, they always attended dinner parties and socialized so as to demonstrate that they were adaptable guests who were not constrained by religion. In doing so, they also remained discreet about their religious practices and were able to delay expulsion and retire on a military pension (Interview 4).

The ubiquitous attention to women’s dress and bodily representation resulted in an amalgamation of official and unofficial social pressures upon these women to become more ‘secular’ and ‘modern’. Nesrin (50, wife of forcibly retired commissioned officer) experienced multilayered regulations and disciplinary processes due to her headscarf. When she took off her headscarf, she observed a drastic change in the attitude of her friends and the broader social circle as they became more appreciative and inclusive and started making tacit suggestions for further transformations to her dress: that she should wear knee-length two-piece suits, do her hair in a fashionable way, and so on. In bringing up these experiences, she made the point that removing the headscarf was never an isolated act but part of a larger process that aims to further discipline and accommodate women into a particular secular sexual and moral order (Interview 2). ‘It never stops there’ was a common refrain in similar narratives, suggesting that taking off the headscarf was part of a holistic disciplinary process where women were often pressured to consume alcohol, socialize in mixed-gendered spaces, and dance to prove the genuineness of their transition. As these narratives reveal, securitizing Islam worked through amalgamated mechanisms of social surveillance and disciplinary power both to identify the ‘Islamists’ and to transform and assimilate them into ‘modern’ and ‘secular’ subjectivities.

Conclusion

Critical security scholars have emphasized the centrality of secularism to politics of security and modern governance through risk-based analyses of the ‘war on terror’ (Aradau et al., 2008), and have foregrounded the epistemic credence that secularism gives to the very notion of the nation-state (Gutkowski, 2011; Mavelli, 2011). By analyzing the intertwinement of Turkish secularism with security politics, this article has sought to further demonstrate how secularism informs the concepts of security and risk, and how it enables risk technologies that take the form of secular risk governance. It particularly examined the Turkish military’s security discourse in response to the rise of political Islam from the 1980s to the end of 2000s, a time frame when the military strived to safeguard secularism as a political and cultural practice, both in the political arena and within its own structure. A proxy to the public tensions and conflicts across an Islamist-versus-secularist dyad, the Turkish military undertook various security measures to protect the officers’ cadre from ‘Islamist infiltrations’ and to maintain the modern and secular character of the military base. Through ethnographic research, this article has examined how secular risk governance emerged through the defining of security and risk through a vernacular ‘enlightened’-versus-‘radical’ Islam divide, and the policing of the boundaries of this distinction on and through women’s bodies and in everyday social life.

This research contributes to risk-based security studies that draw on the Foucauldian notion of the dispositif de securité in examining the culturally specific constructions of security and risk as social governance in the exercise of modern sovereignty (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau et al., 2008; Dillon, 2008). The Turkish military’s internal mechanisms are examined through ethnographic observations on military bases and conversations with women in military families to demonstrate the lived experience of secularism beyond a categorical distinction between politics and religion, and to empirically showcase the conceptual intimacy between secularism and security (Bilgin, 2008). The military’s regulations on religious practices and embodiment are investigated across official levels and everyday life to reveal how secular risk governance operates through the political and cultural norms of Turkish secularism. Particularly the official regulations that securitized the Islamic headscarf on the military base and the broader mechanisms of surveillance that surround women’s embodiment attest to how risk is operationalized through the merger of secular governance and social risk governance.

This study has shown that the vernacular configurations of the secular/religious divide between a ‘radical’ (excessive and deviant) and an ‘enlightened’ (proper and safe) Islam emerge as a key point in designations of security and risk. As performed by the Turkish military, secular risk governance monitored the social life and private realms to collect evidence by measuring ‘excess’ and ‘deviance’ against the backdrop of a normative modern and secular Sunni Muslim identity. An idealized femininity, one that adheres to norms of Islamic sexual morality while adopting European dress codes, emerged as the centerpiece of the security discourse that aimed to recuperate risks and regulate the conduct of individuals, their subjectivities, and their intersubjective experiences. By detailing processes that are integral to the military’s security discourse, this research has demonstrated how modern governance addresses the problem of religious difference in social life and politics through secularism. This research argues that secular risk governance operates as a dispositif de securité with the aim of maintaining a constituency that is ‘properly’ secular and that has the capacity to inhabit a political public sphere (Connolly, 1995; Mouffe, 2006).

As an analytical frame, secular risk governance can be extended to the continued securitization of religious identities (particularly those of Muslims) in the context of the Western security agenda. Building on the post-9/11 security research on risk governance, this research draws tangible connections between security and secular governmentality to bridge the gap between institutional and sociocultural frameworks involved in securitization processes, and to demonstrate how the modern state power incorporates a security agenda within an epistemic framework of secularism and its cultural (and gendered) entanglements. Besides highlighting the securitization of the ‘racialized/Muslim other’, this research also draws attention to broader norms of modern governance and cultural practices in the performance of safety in the construction of risk. While outside of the immediate focus of this research, performativity of risk and safety – which respectively refer to taking risk as a discursive mechanism that constructs the very conditions of its existence and to understanding safety as the reproduction of sociocultural practices and norms against which risk is marked (as practiced by ‘secularist’-identified women in the Turkish military) – stand out. Rather than a sole focus on the relationship between the security referents and risks, an attention to the discourses that shape the performance of safety and safe subjectivity emerge as a direction for future research. ⁶

Epilogue: What does secular risk governance mean in post-2010 Turkey?

This research presents the background to the ‘authoritarian turn’, a term that is now commonly used to define Turkish politics after 2010 and coincides with the end of military tutelage as we knew it (Caliskan, 2017; Esen and Gumuscu, 2016; Tugal, 2016). From when it came to power until 2010, the AKP systematically worked to curb the military’s tight grip on political Islam, and in 2010 it mobilized substantial legislative and judicial mechanisms that led to the military’s drastic loss of power and authority. ⁷ 2010 was the year of a constitutional amendment, passed through a referendum, that waived the military’s immunity to the civilian justice system and made the decisions of the High Military Council, which set the security decisions discussed in this research, open to a civilian appeal process. In the same year, the ‘Sledgehammer’ court case resulted in the detention of more than 300 high-ranking officers and generals accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the first AKP government in 2003 (Caliskan, 2017). ⁸ Combined, these processes shook the very foundations of the military and revealed its new vulnerability to the civilian political leadership, leading to a massive swing of authoritarian power from the hands of the military to the AKP. While a result of multifaceted developments since 2003 and occurring under the banner of ‘democratization’, the authority and impunity that the AKP currently enjoys can be understood as a consequence of this drastic shift in power and of the vacuum left by the protean military that had been a defining political actor since the early republican days.

The conditions that prepared the grounds for such a drastic transformation can be traced back to the aggressive security agenda that the Turkish military pursued through a combination of institutional and cultural mechanisms that targeted a large segment of Turkish society and a grass-roots movement. The pressure that the military put on political Islam, along with the secular risk governance the military used to shape its own structure as well as the broader political environment under the military’s influence, both polarized society and funneled more support to the AKP. As Kadioglu (2005: 25) suggests, Turkish ‘secularization in the form of a project [of laicism] paved the way to a dialectical choreography that negated itself by generating its own rival’. As a proxy to the public contentions between Turkish secularism and Islam, the Turkish military’s security discourse can be described as performative, as it produced the very effects it named (Amoore and De Goede, 2008: 9).

In other words, secular risk governance was an unsustainable and impossible shaping of politics and identities – an authoritarian process that was doomed to fail in the way it was undertaken within the military and in public institutions influenced by the military. The repercussions of enforcing a militarized secularism can be seen in the conservative religious political agenda that now has currency in Turkish politics. By limiting political representation of religion through diverse mechanisms, secular risk governance inadvertently led to alliances between similarly chastised groups to maintain their own security and gain political power. An example of this was the AKP’s alliance with the Gulen movement – an internationally networked religious movement centered on the teachings of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen (Fitzgerald, 2017; Gözaydın, 2009). A controversial yet powerful religious leader, Gulen channeled his followers to politically and economically support the AKP in gaining political control in state institutions, including the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the military (Caliskan, 2017). In the shrinking space under secularist military pressure, the AKP sought alliances based on religious affinity and personal loyalty. Although outside the purview of this research, it is reasonable to think that the security mechanisms discussed in this article were endured by some officers who put on the right kind of (secular) appearance to avoid expulsion. Today, it is a widely accepted argument that the AKP managed to weaken the secularist structure of the military with the ‘Sledgehammer’ court case, which was carried out with the aid of the Gulenists in the judiciary system and created a significant vacuum in the officers’ cadres. This vacuum was then filled in by the Gulenist officers who were at the time sympathetic to the AKP. After the falling out between the Gulen movement and the AKP, it was allegedly these officers who attempted to conduct the military coup of July 2016.