Revisiting national security discourse in Turkey with a view to pacification: from military power to police power onto orchestration of labour power

Abstract

In this article, I try to analyse the neoliberal re-structuration in Turkey with a view to fabrication of official national security discourse and its adaption as common sense among productive classes. Acknowledging pacification as a counter-hegemonic approach to securitization, I offer an alternative framework to study the role of national security in Turkish politics that goes beyond rather traditionalized civil-military dichotomy. I argue that national security is a technique aiming at pacification with both imperial and local targets and that it should be understood with recourse to the neoliberalism-security-pacification axis. The article composes of three sections. First, I explore the history of the term pacification. Second, I look at the discursive continuities on national security between the military regime and the civilian AKP governments. Third, I reflect on the alternative forms of solidarity emerged during the Gezi Resistance that open the possibility of creating a counter-hegemonic common sense.