Vortrag von Sinem Adar (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin)

Since the end of the Cold War, political discourses within and across nations have been increasingly shaped by identity claims. In Western liberal democracies, especially after 9/11, opposition to Islam has become central to populist discourses seeking to define who does and does not belong to the imagined nation. While many studies have sought to analyze such discourses and their identitarian logic, the responses from states outside of Europe and the US have surprisingly attracted scant attention. Against this background, this talk will focus on Turkey’s AKP government’s practices of combatting Islamophobia in Western societies over the past decade. Since the early 2010s, the AKP government has been deploying ‘diaspora policies’ to gain popular support from not only the Turkish diaspora but also from non-Turkish Muslims. At the same time, it has been building a transnational network of elites across universities, media outlets, think tanks, and lobby organizations to mobilize support for its practices of combatting Islamophobia. Together with the diaspora policies, this network has been an important producer and distributor of a certain form of knowledge that portrays Turkey as the “leader of the oppressed Muslims worldwide”.

Sinem Adar is an Associate at the Center for Applied Turkey Studies, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin. Her research focuses on state- and nation-making practices and on inclusion and exclusion processes of social identity formation mainly in Turkey and the Middle East. Her academic publications have appeared in the Sociological Forum, Political Power and Social Theory, and The History of the Family. She also writes op-ed and policy papers for wider non-academic audiences. So far, her writings have appeared in outlets such as Open Democracy, ReSet Doc, and Jadaliyya.

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