Roundtable: The Turkish Model of Authoritarianism By Turkey Page Editors

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Jun 4, 2025 Turkey
Protestor Looking at Fellow Demonstrators in Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality building via Wikimedia commons Protestor Looking at Fellow Demonstrators in Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality building via Wikimedia commons

Roundtable: The Turkish Model of Authoritarianism By Turkey Page Editors

By : Turkey Page Editors

[The following is a roundup of short-form pieces by Jadaliyya's Turkey Page editors, assessing the Turkish model of authoritarianism and marking the twelfth anniverseary of the Gezi Uprising.]

Introduction
By Anthony Alessandrini


On 20 June 2013, Jadaliyya launched the Turkey Page. As the Page Editors noted at the time, we set out on our work “in the midst of ongoing violence unleashed by municipal and state authorities in Turkey against protesters” throughout the country—but also, as one of the page’s founding editors, Nazan Üstündağ, noted in an interview with Democracy Now!, at a moment when people across the country were “finding new ways to protest." 

Addressing the themes of repression and resistance has been at the center of our work over the past twelve years; in fact, a collection of articles from the Turkey Page was published in 2014 with the title “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. The history of our page is closely intertwined with the Gezi Park protests, one of the global uprisings that shook the world at that time, so it is appropriate that we are marking the twelfth anniversary of the Gezi Uprising by relaunching the Turkey Page with this roundtable on “The Turkish Model of Authoritarianism.” 

Then as now, we work in the midst of ongoing state repression against popular uprisings: most obviously, the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mass protests that have followed, and the subsequent repression of these protests (reports indicate at least 1000 protesters were arrested in the week following İmamoğlu’s arrest). One major difference—or, at least, one relevant context that has emerged over the past decade—is the rise of a global authoritarianism that both reflects and is inspired by the authoritarian model perfected in Turkey since the Gezi protests. To single out the advance of fascism in the United States between Trump’s first term and his current one would be to play into the tendency towards American exceptionalism, but certainly what has been called “the Trump effect” both mirrors and advances a pernicious global trend.

In this context, it seems apt to re-launch the Jadaliyya Turkey Page with a roundtable focusing on “The Turkish Model of Authoritarianism,” featuring contributions from four of our page editors. In her piece, Aslı Iğsız looks back to her 2013 article “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism, Law, and Neoliberalism,” noting that today Turkey emerges as a model, not so much for neoliberal democracy but for authoritarianism, in a global context “where political leaders with authoritarian tendencies and social movements advocating authoritarian measures…seem to learn from each other’s playbook.” Similarly, Fırat Bozcalı locates in the context of Turkey a pattern that is ominously pervasive globally today: “the instrumentalization of legal institutions to secure authoritarian rule” paired with “colonial strategies of containment.” 

Aslı Bâli also focuses on “the global conjuncture” in her contribution, drawing out some of the continuities and differences between the ongoing resistance to repression in Turkey today as compared to the Gezi uprisings but noting also a larger context in which Erdoğan has been actively embraced by Trump; meanwhile, European leaders, dependent upon Erdoğan’s regime to help maintain their own “nativist, anti-immigrant politics,” provide their tacit, if silent, approval. Finally, Nicholas Glastonbury zooms back from the international context—more specifically, the fraud and bribery indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which includes allegations of multiple bribes from Turkish government officials and prominent businesspeople over the course of a decade—in order to offer a picture of the political economy of Turkey under the current economic crisis, and, relatedly, “an altogether different conception of Turkish foreign policy in what we might call the late AKP era.”

We will continue to address these and related issues in long-form articles over the next few months. As always, we invite contributions in multiple languages that will help us to provide analysis, fuel discussion, and contribute to new dissident visions of Turkey. 


Brand Turkey and the Turkish Model of Authoritarianism
By Aslı Iğsız


In an article published in two parts in Jadaliyya in 2013, “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism, Law, and Neoliberalism,” I discussed the rise of civilian authoritarian tendencies in Turkey, explored as part of high-securitarian neoliberal states. Examining the concentration of power and its related patterns at the time, I focused on various facets of these tendencies, including—but not limited to—rule by decree, the weaponization of law to promote authoritarian (and often capitalist) encroachment on relatively independent institutions, and the criminalization of dissent. This included the targeting of professionals merely for practicing their professions, as well as an excessive preoccupation with “image,” which was part of a broader branding initiative that arguably pushed officials to crack down on protests to protect the national brand. At the same time, this approach to protests reorganized the citizen-state relationship, assigning citizens the national and patriotic duty of safeguarding the country’s image—implicitly tied to its economy.

To be clear, far from being a mere metaphor for “image-making,” country branding is a structured system with its own institutions, measuring metrics through indexes (such as world happiness, competitiveness, and more), and consultants who assess and score different countries, while generating campaigns to improve their branding scores.[1] Despite the claims of brand-image consultants, “nation branding” functions as an initiative to change perceptions for capitalist gain—presumably, a win-win scenario. Branding, therefore, ought not to be confused with a simple concern for image.[2]

When “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests” was published in 2013, Turkey was still positioning itself as a model of democracy and neoliberalism in the region, though its official responses to the Gezi protests clearly exhibited civilian authoritarian tendencies. Scholars Begüm Adalet and Cihan Tuğal have thoroughly examined the problems embedded in the idea of the Turkish model—whether as a modernization-theory-driven development model during the Cold War or as an ultimately failed model of Islamic liberalism. Nevertheless, Turkey arguably emerges today as a model in a different sense—one that embodies authoritarianism, a prospect increasingly drawing international attention. In a global context where political leaders with authoritarian tendencies and social movements advocating authoritarian measures (such as white identitarians) seem to learn from each other’s playbook, Turkey’s trajectory remains significant.[3] 

Admittedly, the world we see today differs from what might have been imagined fifteen years ago, when the first decade of the new millennium transitioned into the second, marked by numerous urban uprisings and acts of civil disobedience across the globe. Often discussed in relation to this broader phenomenon, the Gezi protests emerged within a particular conjuncture of cautious optimism. This does not mean that bloodshed, oppression, and brutal counterinsurgencies ceased in various parts of the world, but rather that it was a moment when the "public(s)"—composed of heterogeneous groups—briefly united to raise their voices and organize against various state policies. 

We can all agree that the second decade has proceeded on a less optimistic note—marked by the pandemic, the collapse of human morality, and an ongoing genocide (if not more), treated as little more than a spectacle, stripped of humanity. Additionally, we have witnessed the unapologetic rise of racialized nationalism, expressed through pan-Europeanist white identitarianism as well as neo-Ottomanist pan-Islamism, seeking to cast Turkey as a distinct geopolitical leader with far-reaching implications.

If today's conjuncture demands careful navigation, Jadaliyya's Turkey page once again provides a public space for addressing these issues in both Turkish and English. At this critical juncture—both domestically and internationally—we are relaunching our page and eagerly welcome contributions.

NOTES

[1] In 2006, the World Economic Forum promoted rebranding Turkey and changing foreign perceptions, rising as a model for the region, one that could show Islam and democracy were compatible.

[2] Some of the rebranding the Middle East campaigns reproduced Orientalist tropes. For example, a branding campaign discussion for the Middle East expressed a concern with the instability of the region, and underlined the importance to find a stable image which could not be easily shattered because of the instability. The proposed branding campaign involved flying carpets over the pyramids and modern buildings in Egypt, to show that “modernity” and “tradition” can coexist, demonstrating yet again that if there is something that cannot be easily shattered in the region, it is Orientalism itself. The Turkish campaign incorporated this proposal, and had gondolas with historic-looking figures over a modern bridge and Mehmed the IInd, who conquered Istanbul, on his white horse colliding with the Istanbul metro—the modern as infrastructure and the traditional as historical brought together. See Iğsız, “From Alliance of Civilizations to Branding the Nation: Turkish Studies, Image Wars, and Politics of Comparison in an Age of Neoliberalism.” Turkish Studies. Special Issue, “Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective.” Editors, Sinan Ciddi and Paul Levin, Directors of the Institute of Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the University of Stockholm. 15:4 (December 2014), 689-704.

[3] While I am currently authoring a piece on the Turkish model of authoritarianism for elsewhere, because of the importance of the subject, I proposed a similar title for our roundtable—finalized and perfected with Nick Glastonbury’s eloquent touch.

 

Authoritarianism, Coloniality, and the Kurdish Question in Turkey
By Fırat Bozcalı

 

I take two recent political developments in Turkey as a lens to reflect on the nature of Erdoğan’s authoritarianism and the prospects for anti-authoritarian politics: the criminal investigations into opposition-run municipalities, culminating in the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, and the “Terror-Free Turkey” initiative, an opaque disarmament process between Turkish authorities and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK leader. 

At first glance, these developments may seem contradictory: how can a peace process unfold alongside a crackdown on opposition alliances? In fact, both reflect the same political logic: the instrumentalization of legal institutions to secure authoritarian rule while managing the Kurdish question through colonial strategies of containment.

The operations targeting CHP-run municipalities rely on dual criminal investigations: one for corruption and the other for terrorism. The latter has criminalized the informal electoral alliance between the CHP and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, portraying it as a national security threat. On 19 March 2025, İmamoğlu was detained one day after his university diploma was annulled under political pressure. His arrest triggered mass protests and raised fears that he would be suspended from office. A key question emerged: would a trustee (kayyum) be appointed in his place?

It was expected that a trustee would be appointed if İmamoğlu were arrested on terrorism-related charges, while the municipal assembly would select a replacement in the case of corruption charges. In principle, even under terrorism allegations, constitutional norms require assemblies—composed of elected members—to elect an acting mayor. Yet Turkish authorities have routinely bypassed this, appointing governors as trustees during anti-terror trials or even investigations. This practice, enabled by a presidential decree during the 2016 emergency rule, was initially used against mayors elected from pro-Kurdish parties.

While many states impose harsh, extra-legal measures on those accused of terrorism, what is specific to Turkey is the equation of “terror” with Kurdishness. In this context, terror allegations have become a code for criminalizing Kurdish political participation and sustaining unofficial colonization. This dynamic is evident in recent charges against CHP municipalities, which target the CHP–DEM electoral alliance and accuse the CHP of advancing the PKK’s goal of “incorporating the Kurdish population into local administrations in western Turkey.”[1] The first CHP mayor replaced by a trustee was Ahmet Özer, a Kurdish sociology professor long engaged in Kurdish politics and seen as a key figure in facilitating the CHP–DEM alliance. His suspension exemplifies how terror allegations function as a colonial instrument to police and suppress Kurdish political subjectivity—even when expressed through Turkey’s own democratic institutions. 

If the suspension of democratically elected mayors and the appointment of governors as trustees is understood as a colonial legal technology, the extension of this technology to CHP-run municipalities can thus be read as the transfer of a colonial technique from the periphery to the metropole. This pattern, where technologies of domination are developed in colonies before reaching metropolitan centers, is well documented in studies of fascism and Nazism. Following this line of analysis, anti-colonial struggle and decolonization appear not only relevant but essential to broader anti-authoritarian politics.

The second development, the “Terror-Free Turkey” initiative, can also be understood through the lens of colonialism. The idea that Kurdish homeland is a colonized geography is not new; it has been theorized and debated among Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals since the 1960s. One of the most influential articulations of this perspective comes from Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi who has identified two defining features of this colonial condition: (1) the denial of official status to Kurdish homeland and its people, rendering their colonization unofficial and unspeakable; and (2) the tacit collaboration among non-Kurdish states to rule Kurdish lands and maintain this condition, despite temporary conflicts or tactical alliances.[2] 

These two features of the Kurdish colonial condition have been partially challenged by developments such as Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI)’s official recognition and de facto Kurdish self-rule in Rojava and northeastern Syria. Yet these developments do not necessarily indicate a straightforward process of liberation. Rather, they may signal a deepening crisis of the colonial condition—one that could lead to decolonization, but also to its rearticulation and consolidation in new forms. In this light, the “Terror Free Turkey” process can be read as the Turkish state's response to this unfolding crisis, an attempt to stabilize and recalibrate the colonial condition by selectively recognizing Kurdish identity and political participation without relinquishing colonial control. The asymmetric relationship between the Turkish state and the KRI offers a preview of what such a recalibration might look like. 

Rather than viewing the crackdown on CHP municipalities and the “Terror Free Turkey” initiative as conflicting, we may see them as complementary strategies. The first illustrates the extension of colonial technologies from the Kurdish periphery to the Turkish metropole, while the second reveals the ongoing refinement of those technologies to manage and contain Kurdish political agency. 

What does this reveal about authoritarianism in Turkey and how it can be challenged? At its core, it shows that any meaningful anti-authoritarian politics must take the colonial condition in Kurdish lands seriously. Without an anti-colonial orientation and commitment to decolonization, struggles against authoritarianism risk reproducing or ignoring the colonial foundations on which the regime’s power rests.

NOTES

[1] The statement appears in the indictment against Ahmet Özer, a Kurdish professor of sociology who was elected mayor of Esenyurt, a district in Istanbul with a significant Kurdish population.

[2] İsmail Beşikçi, International Colony Kurdistan. London: Parvana, 2004.

 

Anti-Authoritarian Uprising in the Shadow of Trump
By Aslı Bâli


This roundtable marks the passage of the twelfth anniversary of the Gezi Park protests last month and nearly three months since the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, which sparked a new set of protests beginning in March of this year. The parallels between the anniversary of the 2013 uprising and the birth of a new resistance movement inevitably invites comparison. But while there are obvious continuities, much has also changed in Turkey’s internal politics, its regional position, and the international context over the ruinous intervening years that separate the two waves of protests. 

Plus ca change?

Beginning with the continuities, the demands on the streets following İmamoğlu’s arrest echo earlier moments when students led protests against democratic erosion, economic mismanagement, and repression. The Gezi protests may have begun in response to neoliberal urban planning but soon became an anti-authoritarian uprising driven by many of the grievances now mobilizing a new generation of students. Echoing across fifteen years are civil society voices decrying the collapse of the rule of law, escalating inflation, market turmoil, economic decline, rights violations, arbitrary policing, political repression, and ethnic discrimination. Official claims that protesters are malcontents engaging in looting or “street terrorism” and endangering public order, safety, welfare, and morality have the same ring of familiarity. And repression of such “terrorism” among protesters is once again unfolding against the backdrop of an uneasy “peace process” with respect to the Kurdish conflict. Once more Kurdish political agency has been decentered in protests that never manage to quite link anti-authoritarianism to a deeper anti-colonial anti-racism. Finally, then, as now, the protests are being presented as the “last chance” to reverse Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism. The eerie resemblance underscored by the Gezi anniversary haunts this year’s protests with the specter of repression, demobilization, and defeat.

Divergences

But there are also divergences. The scale of the Gezi protests, which at their height drew millions of participants into a nationwide revolt, has not quite been matched in this year’s protests when measured in terms of numbers in the streets at any given moment. But a different and more sustainable momentum has been an organizing goal. In the first week after İmamoğlu’s arrest there may have been as many as a million protesters in Istanbul and beyond (and more than 1000 arrests), but numbers have fallen in subsequent weeks. 

On the other hand, 2025 protesters have the benefit of hindsight from the Gezi precedent. Notwithstanding Turkish government claims to the contrary, there was no “mastermind” that orchestrated the Gezi protests. They were a spontaneous and leaderless expression of mass frustration with ever more intrusive government repression at a time of economic instability and against the backdrop of waves of regional protest movements from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens. By contrast, the 2025 protests are being led by an organized political opposition party — the Republican People’s Party (or CHP) — and have as their focal point the detention of Erdoğan’s most popular political rival. The strategy of organizing scheduled weekly protests, dispersed across a variety of neighborhoods in Istanbul and other provinces and coordinated with a view to sustaining momentum over a longer period, may enable greater resilience. Media strategies for the digital era have also been well designed to take account of government censorship tactics and have exhibited a sophisticated and creative grasp of the art of protest, deploying satire and arresting visual images to command global attention.

Further, the galvanizing character of the central driver of this year’s protests is distinctive and more durable: Erdoğan has revealed real weakness through his show of force. Of course, this is not the first time he has jailed a political opponent — Selahattin Demirtaş remains detained nearly ten years after he was first arrested on an earlier round of trumped up charges. But while Demirtaş represented an electoral obstacle in some respects, he was never perceived as an opponent who could defeat Erdoğan in a head-to-head competition. With İmamoğlu, Erdoğan has jailed a popular opponent to avoid an electoral contest that he clearly understands he might lose. The public spectacle of coercing the withdrawal of İmamoğlu’s university degree (to disqualify him from presidential candidacy) followed by the arrest has given pause even to Erdoğan’s longtime political allies. 

Regrettably, the most significant divergences may have to do with the global conjuncture. İmamoğlu’s arrest occurred in the shadow of the Trump effect. While there has been international solidarity with Turkey’s protesters at the level of global civil society — including anti-Erdoğan rallies in European cities and the editorial pages of major global newspapers — there has been almost no support from governments that in the past vaunted their pro-democratic credentials. Europe has long since dropped the pretense of a democratic agenda in the case of Turkey, prioritizing its own nativist, anti-immigrant politics and striking a deal with Erdoğan to warehouse migrants. Now, as it struggles to cope with changing American defense and trade policies, European silence over İmamoğlu’s arrest is par for the course.  

In the meantime, the U.S. government continues to double down on its general embrace of autocratic allies, including Trump’s steadfast infatuation with Erdoğan. Regionally, where the Gezi protests were part of a wave of uprisings across the Middle East, there is no regional counterpart to this year’s protests as counter-revolutionary retrenchment and brutal, even genocidal, violence has engulfed parts of the Arab world and Iran has repressed the “women, life, freedom” movement. Moreover, while Turkey’s role in the Syrian civil war was a political liability for Erdoğan domestically twelve years ago, the overthrow of the Assad regime has now strengthened his hand. 

Anti-Authoritarianism Redux

In this year’s protests, a new generation of students has experienced the transformative gauntlet of protest politics. Never having known an alternative to Erdoğan’s more than 22 years in power, this generation has now experienced a political awakening. Threatened with losing the final vestige of Turkish democracy — competitive elections — they took to the streets. Suffocated by tear gas, sprayed by water cannons and arrested by their hundreds, they have demonstrated once more the resilience of Turkish civil society. But the headwinds they face remain overwhelming. Amidst global indifference, regional instability, and the concentration of power in Erdoğan’s hands, İmamoğlu’s arrest will be difficult to reverse in the near term. With his social media accounts blocked and politicized arrests of his associates expanding, İmamoğlu is reduced to leading the opposition from prison through lawyers and proxies. 

But the push to silence İmamoğlu attests to the threat his popularity represents, even behind bars. Erdoğan’s grip on power may be slipping in a country where the median age is 33 and young voters have voted with their feet nationwide against the prospect of a third decade of (increasingly gerontocratic) authoritarian rule. Perhaps, then, the real divergence with Gezi will come if the opposition political party is able to harness the youth vote and translate protest dynamics into ballot box momentum producing an anti-authoritarian electoral victory in 2028.

 

Transnational Clientelism and the Economic Crisis in Turkey: The Case of Eric Adams
Nicholas Glastonbury


When New York Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on charges of fraud and bribery last September, virtually all his alleged crimes ran through Turkey. “First stop is always instanbul [sic],” Adams wrote an associate in 2017, about a flight he took from New York to France via Istanbul on a free business class ticket offered to him by Turkish Airlines. For nearly a decade, the indictment argues, Turkish government officials and prominent businesspeople alike showered Adams with gifts, luxury travel, and other “illicit benefits” in order to curry his favor. Among the indictment’s most shocking revelations is the claim that Adams’ Turkish “benefactors” successfully persuaded him to forego the city’s annual commemoration of the Armenian genocide.  

This was, of course, not the first time in recent memory that Turkey has been embroiled in allegations of financial fraud, bribery, and money laundering. There have been many such cases since the Gezi Park protests twelve years ago: Reza Zarrab, who ran a financial scheme to skirt US sanctions on Iran, pled guilty to money laundering and bank fraud; Trump campaign advisor Mike Flynn pled guilty to receiving money from and illegally lobbying on behalf of Turkey; Halkbankhas been in a years-long legal battle over whether it engaged in money laundering, fraud, and conspiracy to evade sanctions. Against this backdrop, the most notable thing about the Eric Adams indictment would appear to be the pattern it proves about Turkey’s desperation to purchase political influence in the United States. Nor is Turkey unique in pursuing bribery as economic diplomacy, nor even the sole country of interest in the ongoing investigations into Eric Adams. Information concerning at least five others – Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea, and Uzbekistan – has been sought in these investigations. And bribery, likewise, is nothing new in the United States; as David Graeber argues, bribery is the “ontological principle,” the bedrock, of American politics (2013, 111).  

But the particulars of these bribery allegations in fact point to a shift in the collaborative relations between the Turkish government and Turkish business in the context of the ongoing economic crisis in Turkey. For the majority of its time in power, the AKP has consolidated its domestic hegemony in part by building patronage networks and rewarding the loyalty of its business clients with lucrative public contracts that attracted foreign capital investments. Megaprojects like the third bridge in Istanbul, dams across Kurdistan, power plants across Anatolia, and the still-ongoing Kanal Istanbul all exemplify the rampant nature of clientelism in Turkey, as mapped by the Networks of Dispossession project. 

The economic model for this Turkish clientelism was built upon what Ümit Akçay terms “dependent financialization,” wherein economic growth is increasingly reliant on foreign capital that cannot be fully metabolized into the domestic economy because of the degree to which domestic capital has been dollarized. These countervailing tendencies have been primary contributors to the ongoing currency crisis, a “crisis of dependent financialization” that paradoxically only deepens Turkey’s dependency on foreign finance. As Turkish neoliberalism becomes increasingly sclerotic, so too has the AKP’s clientelist approach to power become more fragile. 

In this context, both the AKP government and its domestic clients alike have necessarily turned outwards to attract foreign attention and investment, a kind of economic diplomacy that conscripts businesspeople and private interests to do the work of the state. The Eric Adams indictment is replete with instances in which these private interests are made to stand in for the government and vice versa. After Eric Adams was elected mayor, for instance, an Adams advisor of Turkish origin exchanged messages to Enver Yücel, the founder of Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul accused in the indictment of laundering money for Adams’ campaign, stating: “I'm going to go and talk to our elders in Ankara about how we can turn this into an advantage for our country's lobby.” Likewise, the erstwhile Consul General of Turkey to New York, Reyhan Özgür, sent a message to remind Adams, in no uncertain terms, who his benefactor was: “We are the state.”

If we take the consul’s definition of the state at face value – as, essentially, brokering transactions of goods and services to purchase political influence in the marketplace of diplomacy – then we arrive at an altogether different conception of Turkish foreign policy in what we might call the late AKP era. The “state” becomes simply the name for the alliance between business and government. In an earlier phase of Turkey’s neoliberalization, such an alliance would have been anchored in a national optimism; now, however, in the context of Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis, this alliance is driven by desperation for foreign capital to fix the problem that foreign capital produced in the first place. Seeking to internationalize its clientelist logics, the Turkish government has continually run afoul of global financial regulations in the name of its own economic survival. 

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Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.