The January 24 Decisions of 1980 and the subsequent Özal era marked a profound rupture, carrying Türkiye from an import substitution economy to an outward‐oriented, “free‐market” order. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of neoliberal governmentality, this study conducts a qualitative, interpretivist discourse analysis of Turgut Özal's official speeches, the period's press, party documents, and legal regulations: the new human type projected by neoliberal values and arabesk music as an index of changing taste. The central argument is that this cultural transformation was not a spontaneous market outcome but a governmental strategy constructed through the state's own steering interventions. The findings show that the governmental discourse of the period programmatically summoned an entrepreneurial subject along the axes of depoliticization, individualization, and consumption, whereas arabesk, passing through legitimation, marketization, emotional privatization, and identification, was reconstituted as a field of experience in which this subjectivity was rehearsed in everyday life. Despite the state's failure in its direct design, transformation through the market reveals a logic of “governing without governing,” turning culture into a functional apparatus for reproducing hegemony.
This study aims to dissect the epistemological roots of political stagnation in Afghanistan by examining the dialectical tension between “modern posited rationality” and “premodern traditional legitimacy” during the period from 2001 to 2021. The central research question is based on the proposition of how the “regime of truth of tradition” was able to assimilate and transform the modern signifiers of modernization within civil and legal institutions, thereby generating “discursive entropy” in the state-building project. The research employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), drawing upon Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach. The findings indicate that political modernization in post-2001 Afghanistan was reduced to a formalistic and artificially sustained process due to the incongruity between the “text of modern law” and the “traditional habitus of social agents.” The analysis demonstrates that civil and educational institutions, such as universities and the judiciary, rather than functioning as centers of transition toward Weberian rationality and a Habermasian public sphere, became arenas for the reproduction of ethnic solidarities and rigid jurisprudential interpretations. This functional transformation caused democratic concepts to be absorbed into the black hole of “neopatrimonialism,” resulting in a profound crisis of political legitimacy. Ultimately, the article concludes that the collapse of the Afghan political order in 2021 was the outcome of the dominance of “rigid traditional legitimacy” over “corrupt posited rationality,” a failure that reflects the inevitable consequence of imposed modernization undertaken without the reconstruction of the cultural and identity-based foundations of Afghan society.
Abaidollah Hekmat Burhan, M. Maghsoudi, Katayon Sarlak· Journal of Historical Resear...· 0 citations
The article examines Russian “civilizing mission” concepts in Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of four key experts: V. Grigor’ev, N. Petrovsky, V. Nalivkin, and N. Ostroumov. The aim of the study is a comparative analysis of the views of these four imperial experts, whose writings represent distinct and influential voices within the civilizing discourse of Russian Turkestan. The methodology includes contextualizing their texts (letters, memoranda, and journalistic writings produced between 1867 and 1916) as they appeared in the Imperial press and in archival collections. The article’s contribution lies in presenting the first systematic comparative reconstruction of the civilizing discourse. It contrasts their positions across a spectrum ranging from “soft” models (nonintervention, cultural pessimism) to “hard” ones (legalist governance, Russification), a perspective absent from existing biographical or thematic studies. Unlike postcolonial interpretations that focus on elites or Orientalism, this study introduces the archival correspondence of Petrovsky as an underutilized source of criticism of administrative failure, highlighting the gap between discourse and practice. The comparative method juxtaposes “soft” (Grigor’ev’s noninterventionism, Nalivkin’s cultural pessimism) and “hard” (Petrovsky’s legalism, Ostroumov’s missionary agenda) models, revealing the persistent mismatch between discourse and practice, particularly visible in the crises of 1898 and 1916. The study concludes that the Russian civilizing mission remained largely a theoretical and contested construct among Orientalists, never fully implemented in practice due to administrative disorder and local crises, and ultimately laying the groundwork for later Soviet experiments.
B. Alimdjanov· Восток Афро-Азиатские общест...· 0 citations
This article analyzes the US representations of Iran across five administrations (1993–2024). Combining historical institutionalism with discursive institutionalism, the study traces how presidents and senior foreign-policy officials produced and reproduced two foundational myths – the “international community” and the “rogue states” – that represent Washington’s approach to Tehran. Based on detailed analysis of presidential statements and key policy discourse, the work argues that these myths produce a durable path-dependent framing: they simplify complex political interaction into a moralized binary (inside / outside; civilized / outcast) and thereby limit the range of politically plausible options. Although US administrations have oscillated between engagement and pressure, such stylistic and tactical differences remain confined by the underlying myths. Even administrations that pursued negotiations or rapprochement did so while implicitly sustaining the “rogue state” frame. The article therefore explains the puzzle of persistent hostility amid episodic détente: US rhetoric as well as policy towards Iran moves in circular patterns within mythic boundaries. In other words, although “dovishness” and “hawkishness” play an important role in US discourse towards Iran, both are still strictly limited by the “rogue state” framework. Such a state of affairs renders complete and lasting normalization between the two states impossible.
M. Savinykh· Journal of International Ana...· 0 citations
This study examines, through a semiotic lens, how the May 27, 1960 military coup was represented in mainstream newspaper opinion columns and how political legitimacy was produced in the name of democracy. Nine columns published on May 27–28 (and on May 31 in Hürriyet) in Hürriyet, Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, and Akşam are analyzed using Roland Barthes’s concepts of denotation, connotation, and myth. The analysis demonstrates that these texts construct the coup as an “extraordinary yet necessary” intervention and build a “myth of rescue” through signifiers such as “democracy,” “nation,” “freedom,” “law,” “youth,” and “Atatürk.” Within this discourse, the military is transformed into a neutral and constituent subject, while the Democrat Party government is coded as the agent of “deviation” or “degeneration.” Consequently, the coup is naturalized and legitimized through narratives of “punishment,” “purification,” and “new beginning”. Themes such as the “constituent assembly,” “normalization,” and “re-foundation” present the coup as a temporary “bridge,” thereby reinforcing consent, while binary oppositions (order/chaos, law/oppression, nation/government, youth/authority) are repeatedly circulated. The findings suggest that this discursive template provided
Selim Bozdoğan, Mehmet Zakir Sarıkaya· Akademik yaklaşımlar dergisi· 0 citations
The aim of this study is to assess the relationship between the neoliberal economic policies implemented in Türkiye in the post-1980 period and crime, as well as certain social problems associated with crime, within the framework of Robert K. Merton’s Strain Theory. The study examines the economic, political and cultural dimensions of the neoliberal transformation process that became institutionalized following the 12 September military coup; it discusses how the social changes experienced during this process can be interpreted from the perspective of the Strain Theory. The study evaluates phenomena such as the structuralization of income inequalities, the transformation of welfare state practices, the rise of self-centered individualism, and the proliferation of competition- and consumption-oriented values, alongside crime and social problems considered to be linked to crime. In this context, Merton’s Strain Theory is examined as a theoretical framework suggesting that the mismatch between culturally encouraged goals of success and the legitimate means of achieving them can be linked to crime and deviant behavior. However, this study does not aim to test this relationship empirically. In this vein, Türkiye’s experience of neoliberal transformation is examined through a critical interpretative approach, drawing on the existing literature, relevant documents, official statistics and various institutional reports.
The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regime has consolidated as the principal normative architecture of corporate activity in Europe. Academic critique of the phenomenon has been predominantly technical—divergence among rating agencies, agency problems, and empirical ineffectiveness—ethical critique remains pending. This article advances such a critique from the convergence of three traditions: the libertarian ethics of natural law in its Rothbardian formulation; Hayekian spontaneous order theory and its economic correlate in the Austrian theories of dynamic efficiency and synergasia (Ravier); and Catholic Social Doctrine, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate. The principal conceptual contribution consists in coining the analytical category of soft collectivism to name how the ESG regime operates: it subjects the firm through conditioning rather than command, hollowing out the content of rights without altering their juridical form. The mechanics of this subjection operate through soft law, institutional isomorphism, the spiral of silence, and the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition within a state culture that Bagus's counterfactual criterion identifies as indirect coercion. The convergence between Catholic subsidiarity and Hayekian spontaneous order—two formulations of the same formal structure—yields a unanimous verdict against the ESG regime. Against the bureaucratic simulacrum of social responsibility, the article posits genuine entrepreneurial responsibility—voluntary, prudential, subsidiary, and oriented to real service—as the only coherent alternative within the converging ethical demands established by the analysis.
