Reclaiming the National Will: Resilience of Turkish Authoritarian Neoliberalism after Gezi

Abstract

This article explores why and how authoritarian regimes become resilient when facing strong resistance from counter-hegemonic forces to their neoliberal social and economic projects. Examining the case of Turkey in 2013, it analyses the political subjectivities produced by authoritarian neoliberalism and the AKP government’s attempt to reassert its hegemony. To unpack this argument, the article first examines the Gezi Park protests, retracing the protestors’ own accounts to explore how the resistance to authoritarian neoliberalism materialised. It then analyses the discursive strategies of the government and pro-government media to show how the AKP government appropriated the Turkish right’s existing ‘national will’ narrative with a neo-Ottomanist and neoliberal makeover and tried to reproduce its hegemony through consent generation at the ‘National Will’ meetings.