Leor Uestebay defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Anthropology
Candidate
Leor Uestebay, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.
Title
Radical politics in times of populism: Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), democracy and the politics of resilience in Turkey
Committee
- Professor Henrik Erdman Vigh
University of Copenhagen (chair) - Professor Emerita Jenny White,
Stockholm University - Dr. Zerrin Ozlem Biner
University of Kent
Host
Head of the PhD Programme in Anthropology, Professor Tine Gammeltoft
Time and Place
6 September, at 2:00 PM
University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K
Room no. 35.0.12
The defence is scheduled to last a maximum of 3 hours. After the defence, the department will hos an informal reception in room 33.1.19.
A copy of the dissertation is available for reading at the Department of Anthropology, by contacting Vicki Antosz (va@samf.ku.dk), office 16.1.34. The dissertation will be available via academic books as an e-publication after the defence.
Summary
This dissertation examines radical politics, democracy and activism in Turkey by focusing on the Kurdish-majority leftist alliance, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) that has been the second largest opposition party in parliament since 2015. It unfolds democracy and change not as a promised outcome of a revolution rested on grand narratives, but as a contingent and ambiguous project that is always on the threshold of becoming. It is about the experience of moving both forward and backward as HDP activists try to engage with radical politics in the shadow of an oppressive and violent present, in which ideal futures seem temporarily unavailable but democratic action nonetheless takes places. I suggest throughout the dissertation, HDP activists had a break with their long-standing ideological investment in revolutionary politics and temporal logics of utopian horizons. Based on my field research in Istanbul under the state of emergency, I suggest rather that the HDP’s radical politics lends itself to a particular resistance that takes the form of the resilience to cope with exposure to a world that is necessarily hazardous, to a world where romantic views of commonality and counter-politics do not work. They simultaneously engaged in both electoral and grassroots politics, claimed stability and change, and generated the idea of radical politics with multiple meanings that were not necessarily coherent. If one takes the measure of Turkey’s democracy as unexpected and disordered convergences of demands for institutional reforms, civil rights, identity politics and revolution, the analysis of the HDP and its democratic vision has to reckon with contradictions and compromises that have become the essential feature of political agency in contemporary Turkey.
The frame of ‘a politics of resilience’ that I develop in this dissertation explores how HDP activists managed the contradictions of democratic practice as they were played out in the present reality. Resilience emerged when a multiplicity of political groups in the HDP had to strive towards a tentative collective identity and reassess their expectations of revolutionary change in a political landscape marked by the legacies of state violence, ethnic and political divisions, and repression. It also emerged as activists contended with the opacity and contingency of political agency under such circumstances. A politics of resilience is evident in HDP activists’ flexible positioning between on the one hand global interpretations of (radical) democracy and citizen entitlements, and on the other hand socially resonant traditions of identity politics, civil society and protest in Turkey. It is defined by their awareness of the contingency of solidarity, agency and temporality as they moved between the historical markers of their political identities and their attempts to create a more mixed constituency; between street protests and institutionally based democratic engagement; and between a dystopian present and an idealized future.
This analytical framework is based on three central claims. First, the concept recognizes uncertainty, change and crisis as normal rather than exceptional. The world is conceived as being in a permanent state of flux. This reflects the ebb and flow of Turkish democracy - the term that has been picked, reproduced or cast aside in favour of other possibilities by secularists, Islamists, Kurds and leftists in different moments and historical circumstances since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Rather than relying on generic and all-encompassing conceptions, here, we can analyse when and why the terms solidarity, democracy and political transformation may seem particularly apt or not useful at all. As a consequence, resilience is perceived as a dynamic process, rather than as a certain state or characteristic of a social entity. Second, the study of social resilience emphasizes the embeddedness of social actors in their particular histories, as well as their social and political environments; as such, it is a relational rather than an essentialist concept. Third, processes of social and political transformations are never deterministic, but are open to debate, despite the fact that hegemonic discourses may play important roles in defining potential directions for what a radical politics should look like.
Drawing on this particular approach, this dissertation makes three main conclusions. First, the meaning of being HDP’li generates both some degree of shape and order as well as contradictions, as the meanings of solidarity and togetherness in the party is continually produced and negotiated with a range of interlocutors: Kurds, youth, old-school politicians, students, pious, middle-class professionals, socialist activists, urbanities. They carefully assess and monitor boundaries against the authority of a certain narrative, organization or a leadership figure that are assumed to represent the ‘true’ identity of the HDP and HDK, depending on activists’ own understanding of their coordinates in the movement. Second, we can glean from this research case that the meanings of radical or revolutionary-cum-democratic projects are temporarily stabilized in different formations and deployed for a wide range of purposes and contexts. As activists inhabit these notions in the context of stability and reforms as well as resistance and transformation, this research concludes that contradictions and contingencies are inevitable qualities of democratic politics rather than a failure as understood in modernist and teleological frameworks. Last but not least, a politics of resilience acknowledges the historical impasse of the present in Turkey, demonstrating that HDP activists think of possibilities and potential interventions by moving the future from ‘the domain of fate into the realm of action’. In this framing, hope and anxiety become co-constitutive in stimulating and creating critical political action; they also establish new contingent links between past, present and future. All in all, a politics of resilience unfolds not only a particular party politics, but also a an emerging political agency among different anti-system political streams in Turkey, which constitutes ambiguity and contradiction not as a failure - as understood in modernist and teleological frameworks - but as a central feature of democratic activism.