By Selin Bengi Gümrükçü
Published in Terrorism and Political Violence
During the 1970s, Turkey’s radical nationalist youth were ideologically and culturally shaped by their involvement in the idealist (ülkücü) movement. The idealists also played a significant role on the streets in fomenting the mass political violence that characterized Turkey at this time. Based on the social movements literature, this paper analyzes why and how far-right movements used political violence, departing from the case of the ülkücü movement in Turkey. In doing so, the paper employs Protest Event Analysis with an original dataset of 5,361 protest events for 1971–1985. The findings suggest that far-right violence was facilitated by discursive and political opportunities, namely the praise of ruling politicians and the non-critical rhetoric of and opportunities provided by the alliance structures.
Selin Bengi Gümrükçü (2021) Ideology, Discourse, and Alliance Structures: Explaining Far-Right Political Violence in Turkey in the 1970s, Terrorism and Political Violence, DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2021.1895121
About the Author: Selin Bengi Gümrükçü received her PhD in political science from the University of Zurich in 2014 with a dissertation titled “Reconstructing a Cycle of Protest: Protest and Politics in Turkey, 1971-1985”. She worked as a research assistant at the Department of International Relations and the EU (later Department of Political Science and International Relations), Izmir University of Economics from 2007 to 2014, and as a lecturer (2014-2015) and Assistant Professor (2015-2016) at Izmir University. She studies on various aspects of social movements, political parties, far right, violence and Europeanization and Euroscepticism, mainly focusing on the case of Turkey. Her publications appeared in international journals such as Turkish Studies, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies and in edited volumes. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Rutgers University.