Guest Contributor

Ceren Şengül, Researcher, Centre Maurice Halbwachs (Ecole Normale Supérieure)

Justice and Development Party of Turkey (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) that has been in power since 2002 has adopted populist policies by positioning itself as the “others” of the Kemalist state, the nation-state that was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk with strict Kemalist principles such as the French-inspired “laïcité” and the Western understanding of modernisation. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the founder of AKP and the current President of Turkey, often mentions the year 2023 as the landmark date to finish his project of a “new Turkey”. As I have discussed elsewhere, the concept of a “new Turkey” is a myth as there are significant continuities between the “ideal Turkey” in Erdoğan’s mind and the “old Turkey” of the Kemalist leaders. One of the significant changes between the “old” and the “new” Turkey, however, is Erdoğan’s blatant use of a populist rhetoric, as opposed to the Kemalist regime that actually thrived on being “above its people”. By internalising the “orientalist” (most famously stated by Edward Said) dichotomies of a “good and modern” West vs. a “backwards and bad” East, the Kemalist leaders were obsessed with creating a “modern”/Western, secular Turkish nation-state. Until 2002, this Kemalist establishment was “successful” in maintaining this order with the help of the Turkish Armed Forces, which was, until recently, considered the “vanguard of the Kemalist state”.

Guest Contributor

Sebastian Ille, Associate Professor in Economics, New College of the Humanities

The protest on 18 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid set in motion a revolutionary wave that swept across Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and the Middle East and significantly changed the political landscape of the MENA region. Almost precisely ten years later, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis policemen triggered protests across the United States and led to worldwide demonstrations against police brutality and institutional racism. In fundamental terms, both social processes exhibit parallels. We observe two critical social systems in which a single incident leads to a cascade of struggle and protests. Within this context, On Revolutionary Waves and the Dynamics of Landslides develops a theoretical model that describes the dynamics of social contention. In essence, the model is an extension of the sandslide model developed by Bak et al. (1987) that replicates how grains of sand slide off the edge of a pile and in so doing create cascades that can lead to large-scale avalanches. Such type of self-organised criticality is what we also observe in social movements and at a larger scale, in revolutionary waves. The extended sandpile model in the paper takes account of the social nature of contention but retains the general dynamics. Instead of going further into details about the model in this blog, I would like to use the opportunity to discuss three broader implications that the extended sandpile model and similar models raise for modelling social dynamics.