Cemal Burak Tansel

Deafening silence? Marxism, international historical sociology and the spectre of Eurocentrism

Approaching the centenary of its establishment as a formal discipline, International Relations today challenges the ahistorical and aspatial frameworks advanced by the theories of earlier luminaries. Yet, despite a burgeoning body of literature built on the transdisciplinary efforts bridging International Relations and its long-separated nomothetic relatives, the new and emerging conceptual frameworks have not been able to effectively overcome the challenge posed by the ‘non-West’. The recent wave of international historical sociology has highlighted possible trajectories to problematise the myopic and unipolar conceptions of the international system; however, the question of Eurocentrism still lingers in the developing research programmes. This article interjects into the ongoing historical materialist debate in international historical sociology by: (1) conceptually and empirically challenging the rigid boundaries of the extant approaches; and (2) critically assessing the postulations of recent theorising on ‘the international’, capitalist states-system/geopolitics and uneven and combined development. While the significance of the present contributions in international historical sociology should not be understated, it is argued that the ‘Eurocentric cage’ still occupies a dominant ontological position which essentially silences ‘connected histories’ and conceals the role of inter-societal relations in the making of the modern states-system and capitalist geopolitics.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Democratic Backsliding in Turkey: Beyond the Narratives of Progress

Abstract Unpacking the core themes that are discussed in this collection, this article both offers a research agenda to re-analyse Turkey’s ‘authoritarian turn’ and mounts a methodological challenge to the conceptual frameworks that reinforce a strict analytical separation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ factors. The paper problematises the temporal break in scholarly analyses of the AKP period and rejects the argument that the party’s methods of governance have shifted from an earlier ‘democratic’ model – defined by ‘hegemony’ – to an emergent ‘authoritarian’ one. In contrast, by retracing the mechanisms of the state-led reproduction of neoliberalism since 2003, the paper demonstrates that the party’s earlier ‘hegemonic’ activities were also shaped by authoritarian tendencies which manifested at various levels of governance.

Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue takes as its point of departure three centres of gravity that have shaped the study of neoliberalism but have also established barriers to further progress in these debates. By promoting an intersectional materialist research agenda which challenges extant ideational, modernist and empiricist tendencies in scholarship on neoliberalism, the essay contextualizes the special issue articles by outlining and clarifying key aspects of our understanding of authoritarian neoliberalism. In particular, we reflect on themes related to conceptualization and periodization, which are of importance for both this special issue but also for broader questions of knowledge production and praxis. Through doing so, we argue that there are two distinct yet connected trajectories within the research agenda on authoritarian neoliberalism: one which focuses on the intertwinement of authoritarian statisms and neoliberal reforms; and another which traces various lineages of transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces). Recognition of this spectrum of authoritarian neoliberal practices is important as it helps us uncover how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and pushes us to consider more fully how other worlds can be made possible. Nevertheless, it is affirmed that we must remain open to what an emancipatory society might look like, and what struggles would be most appropriate, in and across various socio-spatial contexts.

Reproducing authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey: urban governance and state restructuring in the shadow of executive centralization

ABSTRACT The implosion of popular struggles against the erosion of economic and democratic rights in the Middle East has thrown into sharp relief the co-constitutive character of neoliberal reforms and authoritarian state practices. This article zooms in on this relationship, and traces the consolidation of a core component of authoritarian statisms by examining how the ruling AKP government in Turkey has facilitated executive centralization. This process refers to a form of state restructuring whereby key decision-making powers are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the central government while democratic avenues to contest government policies are curtailed through legal and administrative reforms, and the marginalization of dissident social forces. I unpack the mechanisms of executive centralization in Turkey by exploring the transformation of urban governance under AKP rule, which has promoted a spectacular degree of state-led commodification of land and housing while simultaneously recentralizing key decision-making powers. The investigation demonstrates that executive centralization in urban governance has paved the way for the swift implementation of contested urban transformation projects marked by a non-participatory approach to urban ‘renewal’, the reconfiguration of the state’s redistributive function vis-à-vis low-income households, and a tendency to exacerbate existing patterns of inequalities in the housing market.

The making of neoliberal Turkey

the point of entry of many illegal refugees, there was, to say the least, no meeting of minds: as the Hellenic police explained, ‘we detain them for a few hours, then we release them, and then we arrest them again. In this way, we are breaking their nerves and we must make their lives harder in order for them to understand that they are unwanted in the country and leave’ (105). When it was explained to the Greek security professionals that such practices were placing obstacles to the development of a coherent long-term immigration policy and undermining the full implementation of ‘integrated border management’ – and indeed, compromising the principle of solidarity and co-operation among EU member states, the reply was in the form a huge Gallic shrug! The authorial team show that the EU continues to suffer from a considerable gap between its initial ambitions and eventual actions in many elements of its internal security policies, indeed, nowhere more so than in the field of cyber security where many member states are unwilling to invest appropriate sums ‘of the kind that only the British GCHQ can command. This is not only another case of the familiar ‘rhetoric-reality’ gap in EU security policy. States are equally searching for additional and supposedly more effective strategies ‘... to stimulate resilience in a decentralised, bottom-up manner’ (74). Essentially, this is a volume aimed at a limited readership among lawyers, academics, bureaucrats and policy-makers of the EU and member states, for whom the arcane issues involved in developing the internal strategic networks required in the modern security environment mean wrestling with endless protocols, Regulations, Opinions, Directives and conventions spilling out from Brussels and elsewhere in pursuit of a competent Internal Security Policy. For most others the task of unravelling at least 105 acronyms employed in the book will be more than enough to be going on with. The publishers have provided no index for this volume, which, in the circumstances, is probably just as well.

Geopolitics, social forces, and the international: Revisiting the ‘Eastern Question’

This article contributes to current debates in materialist geopolitics and contemporary IR theo-rising by restating the centrality of social forces for conceptualising geopolitics. It does so by offering a detailed conceptual reading of the corpus of the ‘Eastern Question’, which is composed of a series of po-litical analyses written by Marx and Engels in the period of 1853–56. This archive presents unique analyt-ical and conceptual insights beyond the immediate temporal scope of the issue. I unpack this argument in three movements. The paper (I) offers an overview of the debates on materialist geopolitics, (II) contextu-alises the historical setting of the ‘Eastern Question’ and critically evaluates the great powers’ commit-ment to the European status quo, and (III) constructs an original engagement with a largely overlooked corpus to reveal the ways in which Marx and Engels demonstrated the interwoven relationship between domestic class interests, the state and the international system. I maintain that revisiting the ‘Eastern Question’ corpus (I) bolsters the existing materialist frameworks by underscoring the role of class as an analytical category, (II) challenges an important historical pillar of the balance of power argument, and (III) empirically strengthens the burgeoning scholarship in international historical sociology.

Introduction: revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt

SUMMARY This introduction to the ROAPE debate reasserts the centrality of revolutionary theory to understand the dynamics of social and political struggles in contemporary Middle East and North Africa. Framed around the conceptual and political interventions brought about by Brecht De Smet’s Gramsci on Tahrir (2016), we discuss the utility of Gramscian concepts in explaining the trajectories of social mobilisations in the peripheries of global capitalism.

Passive revolutions and the dynamics of social change in the peripheries

SUMMARY Tansel’s contribution to the debate dissects the concept of passive revolution and highlights the significance of understanding passive revolutions as concrete historical episodes of mobilisation and state formation.

Ties that Bind: Popular Uprisings and the Politics of Neoliberalism in the Middle East

The momentous uprisings classified under the epithet of the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have spawned a considerable interdisciplinary academic literature that strives to account for the origins, evolution, and gradual dissolution of the social mobilizations that shaped these events (Yom 2015). While the initial response to both events, in academic circles as well as in press outlets, was shaped by a significant degree of surprise and disbelief, the emergent literature has already provided important sets of analytical and conceptual tools to contextualize and explain the uprisings (Patel et al. 2014, p. 57; Gause 2011). Insights from critical strands in international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) as well as economic and political sociology have helped fashion refreshing lenses through which the events have been analyzed. Viewed from such perspectives, these episodes of popular struggle have been contextualized as “a concatenation of political upheavals” that were triggered by a growing discontent with neoliberalism, though the Arab uprisings’ roots in the inner contradictions of neoliberalism have arguably received a more sustained analytical scrutiny than the Turkish case so far (Anderson 2011, p. 5).

Debtfare states and the poverty industry: money, discipline and the surplus population

conversation regarding how these reforms have translated into real changes. While she truncates the larger issue by focusing almost entirely on gender-based violence, she uses the brief discussion to acknowledge that there is still a long way to go to mainstream gender practices culturally in even the most successful cases of disruption. These minor faults notwithstanding, Tripp’s book is an excellent exploration of how complicated changes to the gender order in postconflict African states were neither smooth nor straightforward. Beyond contributing thoughtful analysis on the changing gender regimes, Tripp’s analysis offers detailed narratives about the peacemaking process and its consequences. With this work, she encourages her readers to think about the good that can follow conflict. Concluding the book, she calls upon her fellow scholars to address the ambitious research agenda that emerges out of the project, focusing on women’s voices, framing women in peacemaking beyond tropes, understanding the impact of international and transnational peace movements, and addressing the necessity and success of informal peacemaking.