The diminishing agency of urbanised Alevis against the raise of political Islam in Turkey

english

2021

volume 26, issue 101/102

agency   AKP government   political Islam   urbanised Alevis

Univerza na Primorskem, Znanstveno-raziskovalno središče Koper
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

This paper critically examines the diminishing agency of the first-urbanised Alevi generation vis- a-vis the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and their sec-tarian agenda mediated by political Islam. The conceptual position is underpinned by Foucault’s concept of governmentality and theory of agency in broader cultu-ral terms. These theoretical frameworks interweave to present a rich and complex set of snapshots that document the first-urbanised Alevi generation’s decreasing possibilities of action in the urban context. Accordingly, the empirical data that informs this piece has been collected by a series of qualitative and semi-structured interviews with the first-urbanised Alevi generation, children of those who migra-ted to urban areas in the 1960s and wittingly or unwittingly kept their identities undisclosed to varying degrees. Those interviewed come from a range of different professional backgrounds, with the only common point being that they have spent their childhoods and adult years in Istanbul, Turkey. Through a close engagement with the empirical material, this paper addresses the effects of the AKP’s Sunnifica-tion process centring around political Islam on the first generation urbanised Ale-vis and to what extent the systemic nature of this process attenuates or takes away their agency in the urban context. The account is focused around three key the-mes including daily life, institutional forms of discrimination and the workplace.

27.02.2023