The history of modern Turkey has witnessed several military interventions in politics of all types. The observers of Turkish politics already witnessed the execution of an elected prime minister in 1961, the martial law of 1971, the military junta of 1980 , and the “postmodern” coup of 1997, targeting political Islam. All these former coups in Turkey have been scrutinised in detail in the literatures of civil-military relations, democratisation, and militarism. Yet, what happened on 15 July 2016 was a shock for most observers, as well as for laypeople in Turkey. It differed in many respects from the previous military interventions, not least because of its multilayered dubious aspects. On one level, there are still questions around what exactly happened on the night of the coup attempt. On another level, the government has insistently reinforced a militarised atmosphere in the aftermath of the coup attempt, in a perhaps somewhat unexpected way. At first glance, it might seem unlikely that a highly militarised atmosphere would follow a failed coup attempt; yet, a careful contextualisation, carried out in the following chapters, demonstrates the conditions that have led to the emergence of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)-led militarism while also highlighting the deeply embedded nature of militarism in Turkish state and nation. The difficulty of grasping this unusual phenomenon makes analyses of cultural products and social relations in this volume a convenient means to trace several manifestations of the repercussions of the coup attempt, most notably the current militarised atmosphere.
What happened on 15 July 2016 was a coup attempt by different forces of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF), most notably the air force, supported by land troops. From the first hours of the coup attempt, the elected government declared that the putschists were soldiers, affiliated with the faith-based network of Fethullah Gülen. The reaction of the AKP government to the putsch attempt was firm and uncompromising, unlike in some of the previous military interventions , such as those took place on 12 March 1971 or on 28 February 1997. President Tayyip Erdoğan invited people to take to streets to stop the putschists. This invitation by live television broadcast was remarkably influential. Many people were on the streets, major squares in different cities, airports, and even in the entrance of army posts, to block troops’ mobility. Beside this civilian resistance, the AKP also had the police forces on their side. A shocking aspect of the coup attempt was that the putschists fired on the civilians as well as soldiers not following their orders. F-16 fighter jets bombarded the parliament and the presidential palace in Ankara. Jets also bombarded a police headquarter in Ankara, killing more than 40 people. Putschists killed dozens of civilians in İstanbul, too. The total death toll of this bloody night is 284 people, including 36 putschists. In the aftermath of 15 July, it became obvious that there was considerable resistance from within the army against the putschists as well but the official narrative was that the civilian resistance had defeated the coup attempt. Even though the coup plotters failed to seize democratic governance on 15 July, this narrative paved the way for serious restriction of basic rights and freedom in Turkey.
This volume is an attempt to contextualise this coup attempt of 15 July, within the framework of militarism and masculinities. It brings together chapters produced with an interdisciplinary perspective. The repercussions of the failed coup attempt are far from being complete; therefore, one might safely assume that it is still fairly early for an analysis of the coup attempt, based on a conventional political analysis framework. Yet, the reactions of the democratically elected government to the coup attempt, including the gradual establishment of a regime of “state of emergency” has many epiphanies, visible at the levels of official discourse, popular culture, urban and cyberspaces, among others. Hence, this volume introduces a broadly defined cultural studies perspective. As a reflection of this perspective, all the chapters take the world of symbols seriously and refer to their use in the current political climate in their analyses.
The interdisciplinary perspective of the volume includes four overlapping focuses: the first focus draws on a sociological perspective. The second chapter of the volume, “A Midsummer Night’s Coup: Performance and Power in Turkey’s 15 July Coup Attempt”, by Ateş Altınordu uses social performance theory to provide a detailed analysis of the coup night. Altınordu’s chapter emphasises that by constructing an authoritative narrative for 15 July, the AKP government made the ground ready to implement specific changes in the cultural, economic, and political domains.
The second focus is concerned with hegemonic masculinities in two sociological studies. Chapter 3, “Contending Sacrifices: Discontent of Military Veterans of the Kurdish Conflict for Civilian Veterans of 15 July” by Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu and Chap. 4 “Hegemonic Masculinity in Times of Crisis: 15 July Coup Attempt and the Turkish Football” by Başak Alpan not only inform the readers about how masculinity is constructed in modern Turkey by the state institutions in the realms of culture and ideology, but they also give an account of what types of challenges, crises, and ways of reproduction of normative forms of masculinity have emerged in the aftermath of the coup attempt. While Sünbüloğlu’s chapter offers fresh ethnographic findings on the emergent contention among two different veteran groups, old and new, the former who fought as soldiers against the militants in the Kurdish conflict, and the latter who resisted putschist soldiers, Alpan’s chapter analyses how the already existing hegemonic masculinity structures are reinforced in the football context right after the coup attempt.
The third focal point is about representation. Chapter 5, “The Secular Army or the New Ottoman Fantasy?: Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity in the Image of İstanbul” by Feride Çiçekoğlu, and Chap. 6, “Press Start to Remember the Martyrs: On Video Games Commemorating the 2016 Coup Attempt in Turkey” by Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç Sezen deal with the ways of representing the army and the putschists in different cultural products. Çiçekoğlu examines two blockbusters and the position of the army in these movies. The chapter also asks how filmic image of İstanbul is positioned in different movies, and how contesting versions of hegemonic masculinities are produced during the decade preceding the coup attempt and in its immediate aftermath. Sezen and Sezen present an innovative approach by shedding light on post-coup attempt video games and how the night of 15 July is depicted in this virtual realm.
The fourth focus of the volume is related to the question of fatherhood. Chapter 7, “The Undead Father: The ‘Epic’ of 15 July as a Gothic Tale” by Bülent Somay, and Chap. 8 “Insidious Trauma and Traumatised Masculinities in Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman ” by Çimen Günay-Erkol are in conversation with each other in many ways. Both chapters refer to a psychoanalytic framework. Somay’s chapter reinterprets Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership and his political will to secure his position, including his determination towards the presidential system, by benchmarking it to the “Oriental Father” figure, intolerant towards any peer or check and balance mechanism. In her chapter, Günay-Erkol revisits the same theme of “Oriental Father”, and the father-son issues in Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Red-Haired Woman . Günay-Erkol’s chapter offers insight into insidious trauma caused by the military coups in Turkey as a fundamental constituent of Turkish masculinities.
The ninth chapter of the volume returns to the sociological perspective, and in a certain way closes the circle of these four focal points. In his chapter, “Return to the Status Quo Ante: Reloading Militarism Before and After 15 July Coup Attempt” Ömer Turan analyses the recent challenges to militarism and takes the peace process in the Kurdish conflict of 2013–2015 as the zenith of these challenges. Turan’s chapter identifies two steps to explain the return of militarism: first, the fall of the peace process, and second, the state of emergency in the aftermath of 15 July.
If “cultural studies” is one banner defining the mode of analyses of this volume, the other equally important point of reference is gender. This edited volume’s contribution is an analysis on the intense discourse of “hegemonic masculinity” that has reinforced militarism and nationalism after the 15 July coup attempt. Ideals of Turkish nationalist identity cannot be separated from the military-nation narrative, which prioritises the configuration of a specific type of masculinity. Drawing on this tradition, the construction of masculinity in the post-15 July period is a hegemonic and a militaristic one. Since hegemonic masculinity is a dynamic process rather than a static set of definitions and positions, the historically mobile gendered relations of hegemony pivoting around the 15 July coup attempt are investigated in several chapters of the volume. Chapters of this volume elaborate the “masculinity-in-crisis” debates in the complex culture of “winners and losers” created by the coup atmosphere in Turkey. Crisis of masculinity experienced by the veterans (Chap. 3 by Sünbüloğlu), gendered discourses in football stadiums (Chap. 4 by Alpan), and hegemonic masculinity reproduced in the popular movies (Chap. 5 by Çiçekoğlu) as well as in novels (Chap. 8 by Günay-Erkol) are amongst the themes focusing on masculinity in this volume.
This volume offers several details about 15 July coup attempt and informs the readers about the contested narratives on this event. Having said that, this volume does not aim to give a journalistic or a descriptive analysis of the course of events. Political observers and commentators have already noticed several dubious points in the events before, during, and after the coup attempt. Furthering these details is not the task we assign for this collection of chapters. In naming this coup attempt as a dubious case, we accentuate a particular puzzle around the coup attempt: when a coup attempt fails to topple down a democratically elected government to seize power, rise of militarism is less expected, contrary to what has happened in this case. Several chapters of this volume del...