The Colonization of Civil Society in Turkey: Entrenching Neo-Authoritarianism through Non-Liberal Actors

Scholarship on civil society typically portrays its actors as champions of democratic norms, focusing predominantly on their roles in countering state power and advocating for liberal democratic principles under oppressive regimes. This portrayal typically highlights narratives of suppression, marginalization, or co-optation, presenting a narrow characterization of civil society as an autonomous domain. However, this perspective overlooks the rising prominence of non-liberal actors within civil society who are gaining traction globally, especially in the context of global democratic decline and the rise of authoritarian-populist regimes. These actors promote isolationist, anti-pluralist, and anti-democratic agendas, supported by like-minded governments, effectively colonizing the civic sphere.

This paper examines this dynamic in Turkey, where, over the last twenty years, the AKP government and Islamic civil society actors have fostered a symbiotic relationship that has facilitated the entrenchment of a neoauthoritarian regime. Utilizing on a combination of ethnographic methods, interviews, document analysis, and textual data from seventy-one in-depth interviews across thirty-three Islamic civil society organizations, this study investigates the ways in which non-liberal civil society actors thrive under such regimes, benefiting from and contributing to the consolidation of power.

The paper argues that the interdependence between the AKP and Islamic civil society exemplifies a broader, concerning trend in civil society’s evolution, where non-liberal civil society actors are instrumental in reinforcing non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, posing significant challenges to the democratic fabric of societies. By examining this symbiosis, the paper illuminates how non-liberal civil society actors are not merely passive entities but active participants in political agendas that undermine democratic principles and deepen social inequalities.