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Even though Turkey's ruling party's (Justice and Development Party, the AKP) nation-building and desired citizen creation policies have been studied, its use of necropolitical narratives and propaganda in education has not been investigated. This paper addresses this gap by examining how the Turkish state ruled by the AKP has propagated its religious necropolitical narrative through the national curriculum and Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in school textbooks, and magazines and comic books for children. The paper shows that these texts and comics try to indoctrinate children into a religious cult of martyrdom in different ways by encouraging them to view tragic death and getting killed for the nation as a positive event. This paper argues that these propaganda efforts are part of a religious necropolitical indoctrination campaign that seeks to create a new Islamist and jihadist generation of lifelong supporters of the AKP, which portrays itself in the educational texts as the embodiment of Islam, the Muslim Turkish nation and even the global Muslim community (ummah). This new religious generation is expected to believe that dying for the Islamist populist authoritarian regime is the greatest honour a person can bring upon themselves. This paper contributes to the necropolitics literature by showing that not only adults but also children have been targeted by authoritarian rulers' necropolitical propaganda attempts to create desired citizens who are ready to die for the regime, believing this is a religious obligation. Further research is needed to assess if and to what extent this propaganda has an impact on children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to clarify the concept of 'civilizational populism' and work towards a concise but operational definition. To do this, the article examines how populists across the world, and in a variety of different religious, geographic, and political contexts, incorporate and instrumentalize notions of 'civilization' into their discourses. The article observes that although a number of scholars have described a civilization turn among populists, there is currently no concrete definition of civilization populism, a concept which requires greater clarity. The article also observes that, while scholars have often found populists in Europe incorporating notions of civilization and 'the clash of civilizations' into the discourses, populists in non-Western environments also appear to have also incorporated notions of civilization into their discourses, yet these are rarely studied. The first part of the article begins by discussing the concept of 'civilizationism', a political discourse which emphasizes the civilizational aspect of social and especially national identity. Following this, the article discusses populism and describes how populism itself cannot succeed unless it adheres to a wider political programme or broader set of ideas, and without the engendering or exploiting of a 'crisis' which threatens 'the people'. The article then examines the existing literature on the civilization turn evident among populists. The second part of the article builds on the previous section by discussing the relationship between civilizationism and populism worldwide. To do this, the paper examines civilizational populism in three key nations representing three of the world's major faiths, and three different geographical regions: Turkey, India, and Myanmar. The paper makes three findings. First, while scholars have generally examined civilizational identity in European and North American right-wing populist rhetoric, we find it occurring in a wider range of geographies and religious contexts. Second, civilizationism when incorporated into populism gives content to the key signifiers: 'the pure people', 'the corrupt elite', and 'dangerous 'others'. In each case studied in this article, populists use a civilization based classification of peoples to draw boundaries around 'the people', 'elites' and 'others', and declare that 'the people' are 'pure' and 'good' because they belong to a civilization which is itself pure and good, and authentic insofar as they belong to the civilization which created the nation and culture which populists claim to be defending. Conversely, civilizational populists describe elites as having betrayed 'the people' by abandoning the religion and/or values and culture that shaped and were shaped by their civilization. Equally, civilizational populists describe religious minorities as 'dangerous' others who are morally bad insofar as they belong to a foreign civilization, and therefore to a different religion and/or culture with different values which are antithetical to those of 'our' civilization. Third, civilizational populist rhetoric is effective insofar as populists' can, by adding a civilizational element to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of their populism, claim a civilizational crisis is occurring. Finally, based on the case studies, the paper defines civilizational populism as a group of ideas that together considers that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people, and society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, 'the pure people' versus 'the corrupt elite' who collaborate with the dangerous others belonging to other civilizations that are hostile and present a clear and present danger to the civilization and way of life of the pure people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The founders of the secular Turkish Republic, the Kemalists used secular nationalist education to build a secular Turkish nation and to create their own version of modern pro-Western secular Turkish citizens. This paper argues that Turkey's current ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has been using the same system of education to create its own desired citizens with Islamist Populist ideals. This has been done without changing the secular principles of the constitution and laws on national education since there are several constraints that would prevent AKP to have open and declared pro-Sharia changes to the law. Thus, unlike many other Islamists in the other parts of the world, the paper shows that the AKP has chosen to undermine the secularity of the system, constitution, and law in an ad hoc, gradual and undeclared fashion. The paper concludes by noting that no matter the change in political actors and their ideologies, education is monopolized by the state for political purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delves into the intricate relationship between religious populism and the legitimization of digital authoritarianism in Turkey. Specifically, it investigates how the ruling party, AKP, has strategically linked Islamist values to state policies as a means of justifying its repressive control over digital technology. Through an examination of internet governance at multiple levels—full network-level governance, sub-network or website-level governance, proxy or corporation-level governance, and network–node or individual-level governance—the study reveals the instrumentalization of religious populism to consolidate support and validate the government's autocratic agenda. Furthermore, it sheds light on the role of state-controlled religious institutions, traditional media, social media outlets, as well as religious leaders and organizations in shaping public opinion, enabling the government to exert greater control over the dissemination of information. By dissecting the religious populist justification of digital authoritarianism in Turkey, this research provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics at play in the realm of online governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of religion by an authoritarian ruling party to delegitimize political opposition through securitization. The case study presented is the ruling AKP in Turkey, which initially promised to desecuritize the Kurdish issue to co-opt the Kurdish opposition but eventually resorted to the demonization narratives and repressive policies of the secular Turkish state; however, in addition to labeling the Kurdish opposition as terrorists, the AKP deployed religion to legitimize its repressive policies on religious grounds. The Turkish case shows that not in legitimizing (via desecuritization), but in delegitimizing opposition (via securitization) religion has been the main tool deployed by the ruling party. This finding needs to be tested in other contexts and cases. Additionally, since this paper only focuses on the narrative of the AKP's religious delegitimization, further research is needed to measure its efficacy and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blame avoidance has been one of the most applied strategies by policy makers in both democratic and non-democratic regimes to avoid responsibility and accountability in cases of failure and tragic events. It is also known that politicians have used religion for Machiavellian purposes, as exactly advised by Machiavelli. However, a systematic empirical analysis of how religion is used for blame avoidance by politicians has not been conducted. In this article, we aim to address this gap by examining the empirical data derived from the weekly Friday sermon texts produced by Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs and delivered in more than 90 thousand mosques every week to a large segment of the population in Turkey, where the majority claims to be religious. Starting with its violent response to the peaceful Gezi protests in 2013, the ruling AKP has opened up a new phase in Turkish political history by resorting to civilizational populism: it blamed the Western world for financing and masterminding the protests, using the protestors as internal pawns to attack Turkey and the Muslim World, suppressed the protests brutally and entered into a populist authoritarian regime. Our paper shows, following this turn, how the Diyanet sermons started using religion to help with the AKP's blame avoidance. The Diyanet either parroted the AKP's conspiratorial narrative or tried to convince the citizens that all negativities are works of God and with these humans are being tested by God. The AKP's use of religion to avoid blame is a text-book case of how both a religious institution and religious discourse can be used to help the incumbent avoid responsibility. Whenever, there was a problem that would the AKP votes, the Diyanet's sermons tried to shift the blame to either God or citizens or conspiratorial enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]