Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Dolunay Bulut is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP). She holds a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Bulut’s research draws from constitutional and democratic theory at the intersection of politics, law, and sociology, with a focus on the themes of legitimacy, sovereignty, and authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Her current project investigates the global escalation of the authoritarian appeal to constitutional politics and examines the commodification of the constitution against liberal democratic legal-institutional power configuration. Before joining SGPP, she taught at NYU, CUNY, and the New School, and worked for Social Research Journal and Constellations.

Institutional Consolidation of Authoritarianism in Turkey: the AKP Edition Since its establishment in 1923, efforts to build a multi-party constitutional democracy in the Republic of Turkey have been repeatedly disrupted by social, political, and economic upheavals. While the founding Kemalist, secular raison d'état has a poor democratic track record, the past two decades under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) have revealed a different trajectory of authoritarianism. The AKP, which initially rose to power promising to dismantle the republic's anti-democratic, exclusionary, and authoritarian tendencies, has instead fostered a new authoritarian regime. This presentation explores how the AKP government represents a departure from the Kemalist ancien régime, though not necessarily in pursuit of genuine democratic consolidation. Over the past two decades, the AKP's constitutional and political evolution has resulted in a more entrenched and potentially more dangerous form of authoritarian governance. The central argument is that the AKP has transitioned from relying on discursive strategies to employing more sophisticated legal-institutional mechanisms. By repurposing constitution-making and constitutional politics as its primary battleground, the AKP has forged a new authoritarian raison d'état that not only redefines state ideology but also restructures the legal and institutional power dynamics of the Turkish state. Through a critical analysis of the AKP's constitutional-political agenda—including multiple constitutional amendments, apex court-level disputes, and its constitutional development thesis rooted in the Welfare Party and the National Outlook (Millî Görüş) tradition—this talk maps out the key legal-institutional nodes of the AKP's authoritarian consolidation and regime transformation. It also offers broader insights into the global rise of authoritarianism, highlighting similar legal-institutional patterns emerging in other contexts.