Who Shapes It and Why It Matters | Public Lecture by Gökhan Bacık
The Faculty of Arts invites all interested to a public lecture as part of the habilitation procedure in political science—Understanding Turkey’s Civilizational Populism: Who Shapes It and Why It Matters—to be delivered by Gökhan Bacık, Ph.D. (Department of Politicals and European Studies, UP Faculty of Arts).
Annotation:
Civilizational populism has become a defining feature of contemporary Turkish politics. This lecture examines how Turkey’s ruling parties—the Islamist Justice and Development Party (JDP) and the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (NAP)—draw on long-standing civilizational ideas and repurpose them into a populist narrative for both ideological and strategic purposes.
The presentation introduces a two-level approach. First, it traces the intellectual roots of civilizational thinking in Turkey. Second, it shows how political leaders mobilize these ideas in everyday political discourse to construct a powerful, resonant form of civilizational populism. This approach demonstrates that politicians rely heavily on older, widely familiar concepts, reframing them to suit contemporary populist agendas. As a result, civilizational populism in Turkey emerges as a dynamic continuity rather than a new invention.
By uncovering these dynamics, the lecture shows that the essentialist and culturist critiques commonly directed at Western political actors can also be applied to Muslim political elites—revealing broader patterns in global civilizational politics.
The lecture will be available online.