Democratic Backsliding and the Instrumentalization of Women's Rights in Turkey

Yeşim Arat

doi:10.1017/s1743923x21000192

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the instrumentalization of women's rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. I show how the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party governments and their allies used women's rights in constructing authoritarian rule and promoting a conservative gender agenda. The governing elites had different needs at different political stages and instrumentalized women's rights to meet those needs. First, they needed to legitimize their rule in a secular context, so they expanded liberal laws on women's rights. Second, in the process of backsliding, they sought to construct and legitimize their conservative ideology, so they reinterpreted existing laws to promote conservative goals. Finally, they wanted to mobilize conservative women in support of the newly authoritarian regime, so they built new institutions and marginalized existing women's NGOs. The article contributes to the literature on regime types and gender rights by shifting the focus from regime type to regime change.

Highlights

This article examines the instrumentalization of women’s rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey
This study contributes to the literature on regime type and gender rights by examining the instrumentalization of women’s rights in Turkey during a process of regime change and the concurrent emergence of a conservative gender regime
It focuses not on a regime at a particular point in time, but rather on a regime that transformed over time from a weak democracy to an authoritarian regime

Summary

Bogazici University

This article examines the instrumentalization of women’s rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. It aims to elaborate the hypothesis that at each stage of democratic backsliding, political regimes have different interests in instrumentalizing women’s rights In this context, the article explores the affinity between regime change and the transformation of the gender framework. During the years of democratic backsliding, the pro-AKP judiciary reinterpreted existing laws to extend religious rights, to the detriment of many women This helped the AKP regime use the legal framework to promote its conservative gender ideology from the top down. A showdown with Europe did not seem expedient, and sharing universal values concerning women’s protection from violence would be helpful both for diplomatic relations and for sustaining local support for the regime While these reformist liberal laws helped the increasingly illiberal governments maintain a liberal image to consolidate their power, none of the reform measures, including the Penal Code and the Istanbul Convention, was implemented. At this stage of institutional change, the liberal reforms and the liberal discourse served to consolidate the power of the AKP governments both domestically and internationally

LIBERAL INTERPRETATIONS FOR ILLIBERAL ENDS

REPLACEMENT OF INSTITUTIONS

Findings

CONCLUSION