CBEES Advanced Seminar with Nagehan Tokdoğan, Post-doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin.

Speaker: Nagehan Tokdoğan, Post-doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin

Discussant: Paul T. Levin, Associate Professor at Stockholm University and Director of Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS)

Chair: Emek Cayli Rahte, Associate Professor at the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema, Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, and Visiting Researcher at the Department for Media and Communication Studies, Södertörn University and at CBEES

Abstract: For twenty years now, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leader of AKP, the former prime minister and the current president of Turkey, has enduringly been a symbolic figure through his speeches and behaviours regarding both internal and foreign policies. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan’s leadership and the ever-increasing support he has received from the masses have been a subject of academic interest throughout the years. Yet, almost all the literature about the AKP rule and Erdoğan’s leadership has somehow ignored the emotional motives of the masses supporting Erdoğan.
This researcha aims to gain an insight into Erdoğan’s leadership since 2003; how he became the symbol of the emotional motives of a collectivity and how he gained support by embodying and reflecting the emotions of the masses in his political discourse, personal inclinations and behaviours. Drawing on the literature on the politics of emotions, this research argues that Erdoğan’s leadership traits as well as his personal history have appealed intensively to the desires, passions and needs of the masses and his power substantially results from his ability to arouse emotions of the masses.
The Turkish context of “Erdoğanism” with regard to the emotions seems to be the result of his appeals to the emotional needs and desires of the members of the nation living in Turkey. Yet, we do not have a satisfactory explanation of the support Erdoğan has received from the Turkish diaspora worlwide throughout the years. For instance, in the presidential poll of 24 June 2018, Erdoğan got 64.8 percent of votes among Turks living in Germany. This massive support from within the Turkish diaspora is striking and deserves academic inquiry.
My research will contribute to the literature regarding AKP’s reign and Erdoğanism in particular. The contribution will be specific in unravelling the emotional motives of the support from within the Turkish diaspora for Erdoğan’s regime. In terms of methodology, this research has been conducted with the members of Turkish diaspora in Berlin by employing in-depth interviews, focus group interviews and observations. The expected outcome of this field research is to give answers to the core questions of why and how Erdoğanism is so prevalent in the Turkish diaspora and what the emotional motives and experiences behind this tendency are.

Nagehan Tokdoğan is a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions. She is the author of Yeni Osmanlıcılık: Hınç, Nostalji, Narsisizm (Neo-Ottomanism: Resentment, Nostalgia, Narcissism, 2018), and is currently working on the project “Emotional Motives of Erdoğanism in the Turkish Diaspora”. Her area of research are politics and emotions, the sociology of emotions, Turkish society and politics and Erdoğanism. She is also interested in right-wing extremism, conservatism, gender studies, men and masculinities, and Kurdish women’s movement.