This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people – Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people’s everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.neoliberalism and political events.

In Media in New Turkey, Bilge Yesil unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. Yesil focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. Her analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and she uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships. Yesil confronts essential questions regarding: the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech. Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, Yesil provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.

This book focuses on media and zeroes in some critical and oppositional aspects of internet usage within Turkey. It does not radically challenge some works on Turkey’s recent grand narrative but presents empirical and minor accounts to this. However, in elaborating the long history of relatively resilient and multilayered oppositional digital media networks in Turkey, this book insists that an idea of authoritarian turn may be misleading as the internet communications are exposed to repressive measures and surveillance tactics from the very beginning of the country’s recent past. While discussing from citizen journalism practices to political trolls and from Gezi Park protests to disinformation campaigns, this book pays tribute to digital activists and points out that mobilizing through digital networks can present glimmers of hope in challenging authoritarian regimes.

This book analyzes the impact of social media on democracy and politics at the sub-national level in developed and developing countries. Over the last decade or so, social media has transformed politics. Offering political actors opportunities to organize, mobilize, and connect with constituents, voters, and supporters, social media has become an important tool in global politics as well as a force for democracy. Most of the available research literature focuses on the impact of social media at the national level; this book fills that gap by analyzing the political uses of social media at the sub-national level. The book is divided into two parts. Part One, “Social Media for Democracy” includes chapters that analyze potential contributions of social media tools to the realizing of basic values of democracy, such as public engagement, transparency, accountability, participation and collaboration at the sub-national level. Part Two, “Social Media in Politics” focuses on the use of social media tools by political actors in political processes and activities (online campaigns, protests etc.) at the local, regional and state government levels during election and non-election periods. Combining theoretical and empirical analysis, each chapter provides evaluations of overarching issues, questions, and problems as well as real-world experiences with social media, politics, and democracy in a diverse sample of municipalities. This volume will be of use to graduate students, academicians, and researchers, in several disciplines and fields, such as public administration, political science, ICT, sociology, communication studies and public policy as well as politicians and practitioners.

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is known for his populist Islamist ideology, charismatic personality, and for ushering in new forms of communication strategies in Turkey. The key tools in Erdogan's political communication repertoire include religious, cultural and historic symbols and imagery. From engaging Israel to the Gezi Park protests, from the Arab uprisings to the July 2016 coup attempt, every key moment in Turkey's recent history has heralded a change in Erdogan's rhetoric. Communication Strategies in Turkey examines the transformation of political messaging that has taken place within the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under Erdogan. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with high profile AKP officials, observations at AKP rallies and headquarters, and analysis of Erdogan's speeches from 2002 to 2019, the book shows how his method of communication changed over time to prioritise a “New Turkey” to replace Atatürk and his legacy.

Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media. Drawing together empirical analyses of the use of social media by political movements and in national and regional elections and referenda, The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics presents studies ranging from Anonymous and the Arab Spring to the Greek Aganaktismenoi, and from South Korean presidential elections to the Scottish independence referendum. The book is framed by a selection of keystone theoretical contributions, evaluating and updating existing frameworks for the social media age.

The study of politics in Turkey : new horizons and perennial pitfalls / Güneş Murat Tezcür -- Democratization theories and Turkey / Ekrem Karakoç -- Ruling ideologies in modern Turkey / Kerem Öktem -- Constitutionalism in Turkey / Aslı Ü. Bâli -- Civil-military relations and the demise of Turkish democracy / Nil S. Satana and Burak Bilgehan Özpek -- Capturing secularism in Turkey : the ease of comparison / Murat Akan -- The political economy of Turkey since the end of World War II / Şevket Pamuk -- Neoliberal politics in Turkey / Sinan Erensü and Yahya M. Madra -- The politics of welfare in Turkey / Erdem Yörük -- The political economy of environmental policymaking in Turkey : a vicious cycle / Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, and Murat Arsel -- The politics of energy in Turkey : running engines on geopolitical, discursive, and coercive power / Begüm Özkaynak, Ethemcan Turhan, and Cem İskender Aydın -- The contemporary politics of health in Turkey : diverse actors, competing frames, and uneven policies / Volkan Yılmaz -- Populism in Turkey : historical and contemporary patterns / Yüksel Taşkın -- Old and new polarizations and failed democratizations in Turkey / Murat Somer -- Economic voting during the AKP era in Turkey / S. Erdem Aytaç -- Party organizations in Turkey and their consequences for democracy / Melis G. Laebens -- The evolution of conventional political participation in Turkey / Ersin Kalaycıoğlu -- Symbolic politics and contention in the Turkish Republic / Senem Aslan -- Islamist activism in Turkey / Menderes Çınar -- The Kurdish movement in Turkey : understanding everyday perceptions and experiences / Dilan Okcuoglu -- The Transnational Mobilization of the Alevis of Turkey : from invisibility to the struggle for equality / Ceren Lord -- Politics of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey : limits and prospects of populism / Fatih Resul Kılınç and Şule Toktaş -- A theoretical account of Turkish foreign policy under the AKP / Tarık Oğuzlu -- US-Turkey relations since WWII : from alliance to transactionalism / Serhat Güvenç and Soli Özel -- Turkey and Europe : historical asynchronicities and perceptual asymmetries / Hakan Yılmaz -- Turkey's foreign policy in the Middle East : an identity perspective / Lisel Hintz -- Turkey and Russia : historical patterns and contemporary trends in bilateral relations / Evren Balta and Mitat Çelikpala -- Citizenship and protest behavior in Turkey / Ayhan Kaya -- Gender politics and the struggle for equality in Turkey / Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat -- Human rights organizations in Turkey / Başak Çalı -- Truth, justice, and commemoration initiatives in Turkey / Onur Bakiner -- The politics of media in Turkey : chronicle of a stillborn media system / Sarphan Uzunoğlu -- The AKP's rhetoric of rule in Turkey : political melodramas of conspiracy from "ergenekon" to "mastermind" / Erdağ Göknar -- The transformation of political cinema in Turkey since the 1960s : a change of discourse / Zeynep Çetin-Erus and M. Elif Demoğlu -- Political music in Turkey : the birth and diversification of dissident and conformist music (1920-2000) / Mustafa Avcı.