This book examines how Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan produces and employs necropolitical narratives in order to perpetuate its authoritarian rule. In doing so, the book argues that as the party transitioned from socially conservative Muslim democratic values to authoritarian Islamism, it embraced a necropolitical narrative based on the promotion of martyrdom, and of killing and dying for the Turkish nation and Islam, as part of their authoritarian legitimation. This narrative, the book shows, is used by the party to legitimise its actions and deflect its failures through the framing of the deaths of Turkish soldiers and civilians, which have occurred due to the AKP’s political errors, as martyrdom events in which loyal servants of the Turkish Republic and God gave their lives in order to protect the nation in a time of great crisis. This book also describes how, throughout its second decade in power, the AKP has used Turkey’s education system, its Directorate of Religious Affairs, and television programs in order to propagate its necropolitical martyrdom narrative.

This book examines how Turkey's ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan produces and employs necropolitical narratives in order to perpetuate its authoritarian rule. In doing so, the book argues that as the party transitioned from socially conservative Muslim democratic values to authoritarian Islamism, it embraced a necropolitical narrative based on the promotion of martyrdom, and of killing and dying for the Turkish nation and Islam, as part of their authoritarian legitimation. This narrative, the book shows, is used by the party to legitimise its actions and deflect its failures through the framing of the deaths of Turkish soldiers and civilians, which have occurred due to the AKP's political errors, as martyrdom events in which loyal servants of the Turkish Republic and God gave their lives in order to protect the nation in a time of great crisis. This book also describes how, throughout its second decade in power, the AKP has used Turkey's education system, its Directorate of Religious Affairs, and television programs in order to propagate its necropolitical martyrdom narrative. Ihsan Yilmaz is Research Professor and Chair of Islamic Studies at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI), Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Omer Erturk is an Independent Researcher in Berlin, Germany, with an interest area focused on Turkish politics, Islamist movements in Turkey, relations between politics and religion, radicalism and autocracy.

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Authoritarian Populism and the Challenges for News Journalism: A Discourse Approach is a cutting-edge study of the practices of news journalism against the background of surging authoritarian populism. This book traces key challenges for news journalism when reporting on authoritarian populism or on topics (such as immigration and terrorism) that are typically leveraged by far-right actors and platforms as a way of attracting media attention and boosting their popularity with national electorates. It also offers in-depth analyses of how these challenges are responded to by news journalists in the actual, day-to-day practices of news production, as evidenced in the discourse of news. By placing qualitative, critical analysis of discourse at the heart of the systematic inquiry into authoritarian populism in the news media, this book applies a broad methodological framework for studying (a) political performances and their mediated representations, (b) the complex and, often contradictory, normalizing processes at work in the news media, and (c) the attendant challenges and critical tasks for contemporary news journalism. Based on detailed analyses of political and news discourse in various European contexts, and in the US, spanning a decade (2014-2024), this book makes a timely and relevant contribution - as liberal democracies could be facing a new turning point in the global rise of authoritarian populism. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, media studies, political communication, political science, sociology, and discourse studies who are interested in authoritarian and far-right populism, related discourses of nationalism and xenophobia, populist communication, and the role of news media and journalism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The media is often viewed as a primary gauge which reflects the changing political landscape as societies transition from authoritarian regimes to democracies. Chronicling the process through media analysis provides deeper insights into the relationship between technology, the state, and social forces that are reflected in the public's communications. This volume explores the challenges and political conditions that have shaped the media in several representative studies of the media in the Middle East, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. The contributors analyse the legacy of the past on the development of the media in post-authoritarian regimes and explore the relationships between media, communication industries (public relations), and politics. The use of new communications technologies to manipulate the media and the public introduce a novel use of social media by populists as well as authoritarian regimes and their proxies. This book presents a comparative and global investigation of the role of the media in the realignment from established policies to an emerging milieu of new channels of communication that challenge traditional media practices.

Editorial 7 Part One: World Situations Populism and Religion in Bosnia and Herzegovina 14 MILE BABIĆ Populism and Religious Nationalism in India 26 FRANCIS GONSALVES The Nationalisation of the Central Islamic Reference Point: Islam and Populism in the History of Turkey 37 DILEK SARMIS Part Two: Analyses Religious Populism: the New Avatar of Political Crisis 50 FRANÇOIS MABILLE Masculinist Populism and Toxic Christianity in the United States 61 SUSAN ABRAHAM Part Three: Challenging populism by theology The 'People' of God and its Idols in the 'One and Other' Testaments: How Sacred Scripture Challenges Populist Rhetoric 74 MARIDA NICOLACI 'Bridges not Barriers': The Potential of Christian Hope to Counter Right-Wing Populism 89 ANDREAS LOB-HÜDEPOHL Right-wing Populism and Catholicity: An Ecclesiological Reflection 101 FRANZ GMAINER-PRANZEL The Paradoxes of Populism and the Church's Contribution to Democracy: Some Hypotheses 111 CARMELO DOTOLO Part Four: Theological Forum Summer of Shame: American Catholics and the Latest Wave of the Abuse Crisis 124 CATHLEEN KAVENY Listening to the Conversation: After the Synod of Bishops Meeting on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment 130 BRUNO CADORÉ Contributors 136

"The essays collected here explore how global, regional, national, and local structures of power produce angry politics. They go beyond conventional academic debates about populism to explore the different kinds of anger that shape politics today, and to make legible the multiplicity of forces, antagonisms, conflicts, and emergent political forms that mark the present"--