Guest Contributor

Igor Okunev, Professorial Research Fellow at MGIMO University’s Institute for International Studies

It is customary to distinguish between two major territoriality-defined foundations of statehood. These are common territorial identity and mental maps marking the community through awareness of external security threats. In other words, we are talking about an awareness of the “we”-community and the revision of the “they”-community. Nation building connects geographically separate cultural communities with emerging political institutions, which allows the population to act as a source of legitimacy for the future state. 

Common territorial identity is the internal basis for statehood, while external security threats, or rather, the relevant security discourse, constitutes the external basis. External threats create the image of “them”, and it is by opposing “them” that the nation is built. In addition to political borders, a new political entity needs identity boundaries, which among others arise also through the awareness of a danger from the outside. In addition, security threats mobilize the population, thereby significantly accelerating internal legitimation. Thomas Eriksen contrasted the two mechanisms as “we-hood,” the common identity and the common mission, and “us-hood,” opposition to an external foe, real or imaginary. 

This opinion piece was originally published on Al Jazeera

The 20th anniversary of the so-called “war on terror”, which began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, is marked by the withdrawal of United States troops and the “return” of the Taliban to Kabul. In some ways, we are back in 2001, and in others – there is no going back, given that the US war on terror has killed over 800,000 people, and displaced 37 million more.

The events of the past months have forced on us a number of urgent questions. How should we interpret what happened in Afghanistan? How does one express solidarity with Afghans, and what forms of support should be abandoned? (Perhaps, white liberal feminist tears/fears for Afghan women and girls that still yet justify US imperial violence would be a good start.)

Guest Contributor

Arif Akgul, School of Criminology and Security Studies, Indiana State University

As we have passed the 10-year mark of the Syrian conflict, it still remains the largest refugee crisis of our time. The escalation of war and conflict, security concerns, and human rights violations have caused many individuals to leave Syria. Since the beginning of the conflict, according to UN statistics, 12 million people have been displaced and more than six million have left for neighbouring countries. Today, Turkey by far is the top refugee hosting country in the world including 4 million Syrians. In fact, children under the age of 18 make up 47% of the Syrian population living in Turkey. In other words, more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees are children. More importantly, more than one million of these are under the age of 10. Consequently, it would not be misleading to say that women and children continue to pay the heaviest price of this crisis.

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.