The Catastrophe in Turkey

One way of reading the AKP’s progress is as a two-step process of privatization. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatized a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has moved to make the state itself the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase — standard neoliberalism — won the AKP applause from the Western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher. 

Constructing Fate

Taking a handful of men into custody does not constitute an acknowledgment of the party-state’s systemic refusal to enforce public safety requirements when its clientelist political economy was at stake. As a Turkish colleague put it to me in conversation, the culprits will not be held to account when the culprits and those holding to account are the same people.