Bilge Yesil, Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Bilge Yesil (BY): Between 2015 and 2016, as I was completing my previous book, Media in New Turkey, I observed a significant uptick in the Erdoğan government’s external communication efforts. The government launched TRT World to reach English-speaking audiences around the world and to promote Turkey in a positive light. Existing organizations, Anadolu Agency (a state-run news agency) and SETA (an AKP-backed think tank), were echoing the government’s preferred narratives about the “migrant deal” with the European Union, Turkish military incursions in North Syria, andErdoğan’s response to the coup attempt.
My interest deepened with the establishment of the Directorate of Communications in 2018. This new body, operating under the presidential office, significantly expanded Turkey’s international activities, aiming to project Erdoğan and Turkey as the leader of Muslims and guardian of oppressed peoples around the world. Moreover, Anadolu Agency was expanding its journalism training programs, especially targeting media professionals from the Global South. During this period, AKP-endorsed historical television series also became highly popular among audiences worldwide, especially Muslims in the Global South. In addition to these news and information related endeavors, SETA and TIKA (Turkey’s aid and development agency) were working to expand the country’s influence and visibility in the global communication order by organizing international conferences and offering journalism training programs and material support to media outlets in the Global South.
Intrigued by all these developments, I began to systematically follow state-run and other loyalist media organizations and their English-language communicative activities. I examined a wide range of media content, from documentaries and television series to news stories and social media messaging. Over time, I noticed a set of recurring narratives that comprised the government’s global communication: Turkey as a benevolent force reshaping the global order; the West as a morally bankrupt and declining hegemon; Muslims as victims of Western hegemony; and Turkish Muslim civilization as superior.
I wanted to understand the underlying factors driving these narratives. My goal was to go beyond the frameworks of public diplomacy, soft power, or information warfare that are typically used to interpret state-sponsored communication initiatives. Much of the literature on this topic emphasizes foreign policy and international relations, often ignoring cultural and historical contexts. I aimed to fill this gap, providing a nuanced exploration of the role of history, religion, and identity in shaping state-led global communication.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
BY: The book explores how Turkey’s global communication apparatus works to justify Erdoğan’s policies, project the country in a positive light, criticize foreign adversaries, and rally Muslims under Turkey’s leadership. Through news media, television series, conferences, forums, awareness campaigns, and journalism training programs, these entities celebrate Turkey’s achievements and portray it as a powerful actor challenging Western hegemony and advocating for justice for “the voiceless”—those who have been oppressed, particularly by the West.
The book engages with the literature on global communication, especially focusing on state-sponsored efforts to influence foreign publics for political, economic, and cultural gains. Traditionally, research in this field has examined state-sponsored communication through the lens of international relations and foreign policy, viewing it as tools of propaganda, public diplomacy, and/or soft power. In this book, I go beyond these conventional frameworks by adopting a cultural perspective. I analyze the core ideas and symbols driving Erdoğan government’s global messaging, examining how Western imperialism, Muslim identity politics, and nationalist-Islamist ideology shape Turkey’s communication strategies.
I analyze news coverage, documentaries, television series, and various other state-led activities as well as official documents, speeches, and statements. Through discourse-historical analysis, I demonstrate that while AKP-backed actors highlight real issues (for example, Islamophobia in Europe, colonialism in Africa, Western military interventions in the Middle East) in their communicative activities, they strategically frame them in binary terms (for example, East versus West, moral versus immoral), aligning with Erdoğan’s narratives while omitting inconvenient truths about his authoritarianism and irredentist foreign policies. This selective presentation, which I term “strategic obfuscation,” aims to convince global audiences that Turkey is poised to reshape the current power structures to create a “fairer world” for marginalized peoples.
It is crucial to understand that Erdoğan’s communication emissaries and the media entities they control are driven not by democratic or humanistic ideals but by the need to legitimize the government’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. I argue that their use of counter-hegemony is anchored in a selective and exclusionary interpretation of “the voiceless”—one that reflects Erdoğan’s policy priorities as well as his nationalist-Islamist worldview.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
BY: In my previous book, Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State (2016), I explored Turkey’s media system through the lens of domestic and global dynamics, such as the neoliberal shift in the Turkish economy, military interventions, rise of political Islam, end of the Cold War, and the country’s engagement with global capitalism. This analysis centered largely on the political economic structures that shaped Turkey’s media landscape since the 1980s.
Talking Back to the West is not a direct continuation of that work, but it nonetheless investigates the political economic structures of AKP-backed media and communication organizations, especially those that target global audiences. However, it is primarily concerned with how culture, religion, and identity influence the AKP’s global communication strategies. One of the central goals of the book is to explore how Erdoğan’s communication emissaries utilize religious and identity-based narratives. It specifically analyzes the AKP’s anti-Western ideological framework and its strategic use of Muslim identity politics to shape global perceptions.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
BY: I hope Talking Back to the West resonates with scholars of global communication, especially those interested in counter-hegemony, media imperialism, and media flows and contra-flows. I also hope it is of interest to those in postcolonial studies, since the book analyzes how the Erdoğan government instrumentalizes the language of postcolonial critique to legitimize its actions on the world stage. Talking Back to the West also examines disinformation and misinformation campaigns, conspiracy narratives, and religiously inflected populist discourse, and I believe political communication scholars will find this analysis relevant. Last but not least, I want this book to be a valuable resource for media professionals, particularly those in international news, public relations, and public diplomacy.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
BY: I am currently involved in two international projects. The first is the Stanford-Göttingen Civilizationism Project, where I am conducting a study on how Turkey, Russia, and China shape perceptions of the West through their state-sponsored media, using a civilizational framework. The second project is the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project. For this, I am finalizing a country report on Turkey that examines ownership patterns and market concentration across various telecom and media sectors. I am also beginning work on my next book, which will investigate the relationship between surveillance society, visual culture, and media in Turkey.
Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion, pp. 138-143)
A new communication order? A postcolonial critique?
Erdogan’s emissaries present their communication activities as crucial steps aimed at disrupting Western media imperialism and rectifying the power imbalances within global communication flows. Their perspective is largely influenced by their interpretation of Western journalists, news organizations and social media companies as collaborators with foreign governments in a concerted effort to destabilize Turkey. The AKP cadres perceive Western media as a source of threat to the survival of the state, echoing the anxieties of Ottoman officials regarding the dominant position of the European press and news agencies in the late 19th century.
They accuse Western news organizations and social media companies of displaying bias in their coverage of Turkey and launching disinformation campaigns, all of which they assert are part of a larger imperialistic scheme. Consequently, they frame Turkey’s global communication endeavors as a counter-offensive against the West, and as representative of their efforts to redress the imbalances in global communications.
Turkish officials also position their journalism training programs and media assistance initiatives as endeavors aimed at establishing a more equitable communication order. They frame them as tangible examples of Turkey’s commitment to empowering “the voiceless,” which in this context refers to government representatives and media professionals from the Balkans, Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia who often find themselves marginalized within the international media landscape.
The afore-mentioned narratives and initiatives put forth by Turkish officials evoke parallels with the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) which emerged in the 1960s and 70s in connection to the broader postcolonial movements. During this time, the newly-independent nations raised objections to the hegemonic position of European and American news agencies, Western powers’ disregard for cultural sovereignty of developing nations, and the unidirectional flow of news, entertainment and culture from North to South. Along these lines, in late 1970s countries that comprised the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) put forth proposals to create an equitable communication and information order. These proposals included structural and organizational changes pertaining to telecommunications infrastructure, allocation of radio frequencies, regulation of transnational corporations, facilitation of regional news exchanges, and development of journalist training programs.
In 1976, NAM countries presented their proposals to UNESCO. At UNESCO, the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems was established to conduct comprehensive studies and explore potential solutions to the existing flaws in the global communication system. In its 1980 report, the Commission put forward several recommendations: democratization of access to communication, establishment of self-reliant communication systems in third-world countries, enhancement of international news gathering, and advancement of international cooperation.Regrettably, the realization of a new communication order was hindered by a combination of ideological conflicts among UNESCO members, staunch opposition from the United States and Great Britain to the Commission’s recommendations, and the predominant mindset of the 1980s that prioritized market-oriented solutions over political interventions.
Turkey was not a part of the NAM, but it was represented by journalist Hifzi Topuz at the Commission meetings. Unfortunately, there is no systematic analysis of Turkey’s official position in regards the NWICO other than Topuz’s personal account of his participation at the Commission meetings. Executives at TRT World and Anadolu Agency that I interviewed for this book did not express any familiarity with the NWICO movement. Nor have I come across any references to the NWICO and the UNESCO commission in statements made by Fahrettin Altun, Serdar Karagoz, Ibrahim Eren and other communication executives. Regrettably, my interview requests to these officials have remained unanswered, making it challenging to directly inquire about their perspectives on these matters.
In addition to the parallels between the objectives of the NWICO movement and the communication efforts led by Turkish officials, it is essential to recognize how these endeavors also resonate with postcolonial perspectives. Erdogan’s communication emissaries articulate the necessity to challenge the privileged position of Eurocentric knowledge systems and consistently emphasize the importance of empowering those who have been silenced. Echoing various arguments put forth by postcolonial thinkers, they exhibit a recurring focus on power dynamics and inequality, agency and resistance, voice and representation.
In light of the Erdogan regime’s calls to de-center the West and to reorient Turkey and Muslim publics from “passive to active, inert to sovereign, represented to representer,” (to use Kandiyoti’s words), can we then assess Turkey’s global communication efforts within the context of postcolonial resistance? For example, can we interpret the regime emissaries’ activities to disrupt the Orientalist gaze as genuinely counter-hegemonic? Are Turkey’s international communication and knowledge production activities representative of an epistemic emancipation? In identifying with and advocating for the oppressed peoples around the world, do regime-aligned communication instruments undertake a genuine humanist critique of the West? Do they offer an affirmation of universal norms and values about human rights? No, is the brief response to these inquiries. Now, let me elaborate further.
To begin, regime emissaries’ criticisms of the global communication order (although generally correct) do not comprise a nuanced understanding of the intricate power-knowledge relationships. Their perspective relies on simplistic notions that portray Western media organizations and professionals either as minions at the service of their respective governments or as inherently Orientalist and biased against Erdogan. They reduce the complex web of relationships among governments, regulatory bodies, media and technology companies, and audiences to a narrative about the West meddling in Turkey’s internal affairs. Is this due to a lack of understanding of these intricate relationships or do Erdogan’s emissaries really believe their own conspiratorial narratives? While providing a definitive answer to this question is challenging, it is worth considering Al-Ali’s perspective on Occidentalist visions of the West. As discussed in Chapter 4, Al-Ali reminds us that oversimplified descriptions of the West are not solely a result of misunderstanding or a lack of understanding. It is because they are part of larger political projects: “Blaming the West for most evils in the world is generally paralleled by a passionate and uncritical embracing of one’s own primordial group without paying too much attention to the social, cultural, economic and political realities inside one’s nation.”
Along these lines, it is important to discuss how the Erdogan regime’s activities are driven by self-interest rather than genuine concerns for the democratization of the world communication order. As demonstrated throughout this book, the regime strategically expanded its global communication tools during the early-to-mid 2010s, motivated by the urgent need to justify its authoritarian policies within Turkey as well as its irridentist foreign policy agenda in the Middle East and North Africa. AKP-aligned communication entities strive to confer legitimacy upon Erdogan’s domestic and international actions, and ultimately accrue (more) power to his personalized regime.
Examining several parallel developments provides a greater clarity on this matter. As the Erdogan regime expanded its political economic, and cultural outreach activities in the Global South, it has opportunistically utilized Islamophobia to portray itself as a champion of justice and a defiant actor speaking truth to power on behalf of the voiceless. In tandem with its intensified political and military involvements in Syria and Libya, it has emphasized the humanitarian dimensions of its foreign policy, and asserted that its expanding diplomatic, trade and media presence in Africa was not driven by colonialist ambitions. While it tightened its control over media outlets in Turkey following the 2016 coup attempt, it has simultaneously projected itself as an actor combating media imperialism.
The Erdogan regime’s strategic leveraging of “postcolonial sensibilities” serves to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. As Nora-Fisher aptly explains, this is an outcome of the “moral injury” Turkey and other post-imperial states such as Russia and China have experienced vis a vis the West in 19th and 20th centuries. Battlefield defeats, political setbacks or near-colonization by Western powers left indelible marks on these successor states. Furthermore, their endeavors to regain control and elevate their standing within a Western-dominated international system in the post-empire era have created additional anxieties. Fisher-Onar explains that to reaffirm their ontological security, post-imperial states craft new narratives that highlight selected glories and traumas from their imperial past. These narratives portray the West not only as a nemesis but also as the norm-setter within an international system where former empires endeavor to enhance their status. At the same time, they seek to persuade interlocutors in South-South, South-East and global governance contexts that imperialism is an exclusively phenomenon even as they themselves pursue post-imperial projects in their near abroads. These narratives summon a sense of world-historic grandeur and help to position the successor states as resurgent great powers which offer alternative perspectives to Western universalism.
There is a deep cynicism in the re-purposing of counter-hegemonic narratives especially when one is engaged in expansionist projects itself. Beyond the hypocrisy, though, this media strategy negatively affects the global public sphere. Turkey has a wide reach among Muslim communities; its popular culture products have huge appeal in the Global South and Muslim diaspora in the North; and the AKP government funds multiple aid and development projects in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This alone should alert us to the risks that emanate from the AKP’s instrumentalization of counter-hegemony.