Eventocracy, Affective Supremacy and Resistance in Turkey’s Captured Media Ecology

Abstract

Abstract The Turkish government has captured media to build ‘eventocracy’, a regime of ‘ruling by event’ to manage public attention and disrupt politics. Eventocracy strives for affective supremacy, a mode of political-emotional domination where the ruling AKP positions itself as the self-righteous national power. Through a chain of events, it casts the opposition’s grievances as national threats. Two specific events, the Roboski Massacre and the Kabataş Incident, demonstrate how the government has mobilized bitter arguments and sensational narratives with often sexist and ethnicist undertones of supremacy to affectively deplete the opposition. In response, narratives produced by citizens in low-budget street interviews and rap artists in songs contest this affective supremacy, revealing that institutional media capture remains fragile at best. Reframing media capture through affect helps us rethink the state as a key media producer and performer of political crises while questioning fact-checking as an oppositional style across authoritarian contexts.