This article tackles the puzzle of how Turkey’s ruling Islamist populist Justice and Development Party (AKP) was able to co-opt the secularist far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and to ensure the MHP’s support in creating an authoritarian regime, despite their previous antagonistic relations and ideological opposition. We investigate this puzzle through the combination of authoritarian resilience/stability theory and securitization theory. The article develops an empirically grounded account of how co-optation has happened in Turkey. In a novel way, it shows that the ruling party’s successful securitization of the MHP’s antagonists (pro-Kurdish opposition) has facilitated the co-optation of the MHP by the ruling party. This article contributes to the authoritarian stability theory by introducing securitization theory to this literature. It also contributes to the co-optation literature by showing a novel phenomenon: a powerful incumbent party’s ideological move towards the smaller to be co-opted party. The article also contributes to the securitization theory debates about the role of securitizing actors and their audiences, as well as the “right” of functional actors in securitizing an issue, despite their initial non-decisive authority.

This paper explores the emerging scholarship investigating the relationship between religion(s) and populism. It systematically reviews the various aspects of the phenomenon going beyond the Western world and discusses how religion and populism interact in various contexts around the globe. It looks at Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity and how in different regions and cultural contexts, they merge with populism and surface as the bases of populist appeals in the 21st century. In doing so, this paper contends that there is a scarcity of literature on this topic particularly in the non-Western and Judeo-Christian context. The paper concludes with recommendations on various gaps in the field of study of religious populism.

Drawing on the extant literature on populism, we aim to flesh out how populists in power utilize religion and related state resources in setting up aggressive, multidimensional religious populist “us” versus “them” binaries. We focus on Turkey as our case and argue that by instrumentalizing the Diyanet (Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs), the authoritarian Islamists in power have been able to consolidate manufactured populist dichotomies via the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons. Populists’ control and use of a state institution to propagate populist civilizationist narratives and construct antagonistic binaries are underexamined in the literature. Therefore, by examining Turkish populists’ use of the Diyanet, this paper will make a general contribution to the extant literature on religion and populism. Furthermore, by analyzing the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons from the last ten years we demonstrate how different aspects of populism—its horizontal, vertical, and civilizational dimensions—have become embedded in the Diyanet’s Friday sermons. Equally, this paper shows how these sermons have been tailored to facilitate the populist appeal of Erdoğan’s Islamist regime. Through the Friday sermons, the majority—Sunni Muslim Turks are presented with statements that evoke negative emotions and play on their specific fears, their sense of victimhood and through which their anxieties—real and imagined—are revived and used to construct populist binaries to construct and mobilize the people in support of an authoritarian Islamist regime purported to be fighting a “civilizational enemy” on behalf of “the people”. Finally, drawing on insights from the Turkish case, we illustrate how the “hosting” function of the civilizational aspect plays a vital role in tailoring internal (vertical and horizontal) religious populist binaries.

Inspired by the concept of ‘transnational populism’ this paper investigates the efforts of a religious populist regime to narratively construct ‘the transnational people’ and ‘the transnational leader’ in diasporic spaces that Sunni Muslim minorities occupy. The paper aims to show how Turkey’s ruling party is constructing an Islamist civilisational populist narrative fortified with emotions and how it is disseminating it. We show that Turkey’s current regime has expanded its definition of ‘the people’ in domestic politics to include the whole global Sunni Muslim community (the Ummah), presenting itself as the representative, protector and saviour of the Ummah that has been victimised by the Crusader West. It also expanded its definition of diaspora to include non-Turkish Sunni Muslims/Islamic communities who did not originate from Turkey. Then, similar to its propagation of this narrative and emotional rhetoric at home, it has attempted to transnationalise this Islamist civilisational populist narrative and thes emotions to the Sunni Muslim diaspora communities through state and non-state apparatuses. As a novel contribution, this paper builds a bridge between diaspora studies, religion and populism to capture this transnational aspect of populism.

By combining two separate strands of research, the comparative authoritarianism literature and securitisation theory, this article examines the question of why the Kurdish peace process in Turkey failed. By analysing the Turkish government’s treatment of the pro-Kurdish opposition, the article argues for a novel conceptual proposition on a securitisation mechanism of authoritarian resilience in electoral politics. It argues that the incumbents attempted to use the peace process (de-securitisation of the Kurdish issue) not for democratisation but for authoritarianism (by co-opting the pro-Kurdish opposition) and when that failed, they re-securitised the Kurdish issue, repressed the opposition and established an authoritarian regime thanks to justification of securitisation. The article contributes to both securitisation and authoritarian stability theories by showing that for authoritarian stability, depending on its needs and context, a government can successfully securitise, de-securitise and re-securitise the same issue with the use of the same functional actor in each stage.

This paper examines the emotional motives behind the reproduction and maintenance of Kurdishness as a transnational social identity among Kurds from Turkey residing in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing from 15 face-to-face, in-depth interviews with members of the Kurdish diaspora, we argue that the collective victimhood experienced by Kurds in response to repressive assimilationist state policies and crackdowns on political rights and activities in Turkey has played a significant role in shaping diasporic Kurdish identity. Our findings, however, reveal that resistance and resilience have also emerged among the members of the Kurdish diaspora in Australia, and are now equally integral to the construction and preservation of Kurdishness. By exploring the complex interplay between emotions, victimhood, resistance and resilience, this paper sheds light on the ongoing struggles and shifting diaspora identities.