MESOP ANALYSIS : Uneasy Rests the Crown: Erdoğan and ‘Revolutionary Security’ In Turkey
NORTH KURDISTAN (TURKEY)
By Howard Eissenstat is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy and Associate Professor of Middle East History at St. Lawrence University.
20 Dec 2017 – In a new POMED Snapshot, “Uneasy Rests the Crown: Erdoğan and ‘Revolutionary Security’ in Turkey,” Nonresident Senior Fellow Howard Eissenstat explores how the Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is remaking security structures to ensure loyalty and to maintain political control.
- Anxious to secure himself against another attempted coup or assassination, Erdoğan has politicized security institutions, given new prominence to paramilitary organizations and militant political clubs, and mobilized his own base to defend him.
- Erdoğan’s security is guaranteed today not only by formal security institutions such as the military and police, but also by an array of quasi-state and non-state actors whose fundamental loyalty is to him.
- The result is a growing record of abuse of perceived political enemies, including torture and targeted disappearances, at the hands of state and non-state actors; a lack of accountability for such violence; and fundamental insecurity for anyone courageous enough to express open dissent.
“Erdogan’s rule has become increasingly reliant on polarization and mass mobilization against internal enemies; the country lurches forward in a state of continual crisis,” Eissenstat writes. “The collapse of Turkish democracy is unlikely to bring security or stability.”
Howard Eissenstat is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy and Associate Professor of Middle East History at St. Lawrence University.