English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) is linked with power and dominance; however, what Critical EMI might look like requires further clarification and illustration. In this chapter we offer one such example of a critical approach to EMI by presenting emerging findings from our project, ELEMENTAL – English as the Language-of-Education Mechanisms in Europe: New Transdisciplinary Approaches in Linguistics. ELEMENTAL borrows tools and concepts from political science to re-theorise the rise of EMI in European higher education (HE) as linked to governance reforms that have sought to deregulate the market and grant higher education institutions (HEIs) greater autonomy. While this so-called steering at a distance mode of governance differs in form and extent across Europe, it typically relies on steering tools such as key performance indicators, competitive funding formulae, institutional profiling, strategic development plans and other means of incentivising HEIs to enhance their performance. Presenting evidence from Turkish HE, we argue that steering at a distance may have played a role in paving the way for EMI or, at the very least, created a climate in which it can emerge and thrive. We conclude by considering the potential of transdisciplinarity as a way forward for a Critical EMI.

This chapter investigates the logics of punishment that animate the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. Examining the different yet recurrent tools with which academics in Turkey have been historically expulsed from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected yet changing forms of punishment directed at academics as knowledge producers from the early Republican period to the first two and a half decades of the twenty-first century. In keeping with the literature on changing regimes of punishment, I conclude that the logic for penalising those targeted has shifted from compensation in the early Republican era to a securitised logic of retribution (following the 1980 coup), to a cruel form of retributive securitisation in the form of subjection to civic death in post-2016 Turkey.

This chapter investigates the securitisation logic of control animating the AKP’s new securitisation technologies by enumerating the impact of four relevant factors on society: authoritarian lateral surveillance; centralised digital politics; shared contingency governance; and extra-legal and religious over-reach into domestic life. By focusing on these four factors in each section, I argue that under the sway of an authoritarian politics of securitisation, the AKP government combines the technologies of lateral surveillance and centralised digital politics to transgress the principle of individual criminal responsibility in favour of ‘shared responsibility’, a familial ‘sharing in the referent object of securitisation,’ and participation in the maintenance of security. I further suggest that this new development marks a shift away from state of emergency rule to an authoritarian securitisation in which Turkey uses peer-to-peer surveillance pervasively and invasively in the service of state protection.

This chapter reviews how the logic of biosecuritisation animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. It indexes the government’s attempts to reach deep into the population’s domestic life, families, and bodies to target women, LGBTQ+, and disabled people for biosecuritisation. The first section unpacks the theoretical dimension of biosecuritisation. In the next section, the focus is on biosecuritisation as a logic of authoritarian securitisation. The third section unpacks the gendered insecuritisation of women and the exertion of biopolitical control over their bodies and reproductive lives. The next section then turns to biosecuritisation of the already marginalised LGBTQ+ community, and their criminalisation as ‘deviant’. The last section describes the potentially catastrophic consequences of the biosecuritisation of disabled people. I argue that the biosecuritisation of the purges works to further insecuritise and exclude the already marginalised sub-groups of women, members of LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities by trapping them in the vicious circle of biosecuritisation.

This chapter investigates the logic of regulation that animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. The chapter begins by examining the new laws on security vetting and archival background checks. Reviewing the conduct of the OHAL Commission tasked to decide on applications by purged citizens for reversal of their refusal or civic death status, the chapter reveals how ambiguities in the new law allow for the extensive use of informal rule of law based on extra-legal practices. By focusing on several denunciation cases, the chapter’s theoretical and empirical strands come together in an analysis of the impact this new securitisation logic of regulation has both on those targeted and on society as a whole. I argue that the new regulatory technologies of citizen-informants and the perfusion of distrust throughout society an ‘atmosfear of terror’, inducing the population as a whole to self-regulate, perform, and participate in their own securitisation.

This book examines how new AKP authoritarian securitisation practices shape and reshape the daily lives of people purged by emergency decree. The Introduction defines key concepts such as authoritarianism, securitisation, and civic death, as well as describes the methodology. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical ethnographic and historical research with theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the political, the book highlights the new forms of citizenship deprivation, security, and punishment that have emerged under the AKP. It argues that new methods of securitisation are designed to reduce those targeted for civic death, a type of disposable citizen who is denied the opportunity to reclaim their social, economic, and political rights even after they have been acquitted or the state of emergency has been lifted.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.

The Conclusion argues that, taken together, the AKP’s combined authoritarian securitisation state is predicated on five authoritarian securitisation logics:1) repressive protection of the state; 2) cruel retributive punishment; 3) centralised and mass lateral control; 4) self-regulation through informalised rule of law; and 5) biosecuritisation as a doubled form of civic death. I then examine present-day global empirics concerning the global system of securitisation to argue that the differences between democratic and authoritarian governance are increasingly more of degree than kind. Asking the question of what next, I look briefly at signs of democratic optimism visible in Turkish citizen’s capacity for resilience and innovative resistance.

Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule, Turkey has become an autocratic regime. The Turkish case raises questions about how international organizations tasked with upholding the rule of law can not only permit illiberal states to violate rule-of-law norms but also themselves undermine those principles. Conceptually, the rule-of-law/rule-by-law spectrum fails to account for authoritarian contexts. If the rule of law constitutes one end of the analytical spectrum, the other end is lawless rule, not rule by law, and the dual state lies somewhere in between. This chapter analyzes the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concerning Erdoğan’s resort to the law to consolidate his power (rule by law) and his utter disregard of legal rules in repressing democratic dissent and engaging in state violence (lawlessness). The analysis goes beyond ECtHR judgments to examine inadmissibility decisions and strike-out rulings.

As the largest refugee-hosting country in the world, the case of Turkey represents a categorical example that manifests a varied set of legal and governing techniques to monitor millions of displaced people within a broad design of temporality and spatiality. At the intersection of Turkey’s contested gatekeeping role for Europe, an economic downturn, authoritarian rule, and the erosion of the rule of law, the multitude of displaced bodies becomes an instrument of population engineering characterized by remarkable flux. This chapter endeavors to dissect Turkey’s migration regime, revealing a complex legal precarity and temporal lacuna that are distinctly layered. This intricate legal and spatial/temporal architecture is routinely transcended, functioning as a self-failing mechanism aligning with the exigencies of the informal labor market and the prevailing political conjuncture. Consequently, it perpetually begets irregularity and arbitrariness. A set of governing technologies, at times paradoxical, transforms irregularized bodies into floating populations in cycles of (forced) movement.

Chapter 19 provides an overview of Turkish law on the collection of digital evidence stored in and outside Turkey. It explains that while cybercrime offence definitions under Turkish law are generally in line with the Cybercrime Convention, Turkey has largely not transposed the criminal procedure and international cooperation sections of the Convention into its domestic law. It delves into the legal framework for collection of digital evidence in Turkey, including investigative measures, mandatory or voluntary cooperation of internet service providers, and administrative search and seizure methods. It analyses the judicial cooperation between Turkish LEAs and their foreign counterparts, and notes the challenges Turkish authorities face in obtaining e-evidence stored in foreign jurisdictions through mutual legal assistance requests. Noting efforts to overcome such challenges, in part through expanding the powers of the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, the chapter calls for a reform of Turkish criminal procedure and international cooperation law with the relevance of Turkey’s human rights obligations and e-evidence in mind.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

The point of departure of this chapter is the EU’s close cooperation with third countries, especially in the neighbourhood, which has erased a number of perceived boundaries between the EU and non-member states. Whereas within the EU, family members are largely considered to be the natural beneficiaries of the free movement of persons with ensuing residence and social rights, it is less clear whether the same undisputed status of a family also applies beyond the EU’s borders. The EU has concluded a number of association agreements with countries in its neighbourhood which comprise, to varying degrees, access to the EU’s internal market including the free movement of workers. The Polydor-doctrine of the Court of Justice of the EU has, however, established that similarly worded provisions in the EU Treaties and cooperation agreements concluded with third countries do not guarantee identical interpretation. With a focus on Turkey, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, the chapter analyses the conception of family and related rights in the EU’s cooperation instruments, with an aim to establish the extent to which non-EU families can be considered ‘EU families’.