Governing Turkey’s information society

Abstract

This article analyses the information society developments in Turkey. Utilizing analytical insights of Foucault’s governmentality to move beyond state-centric approaches and to focus on the practical, productive and imperfect operations of power, it identifies four main actors of governance through which the rationalities and practices of information society are developed and disseminated: the Justice and Development Party, the European Union, global development organizations and information society experts. The article demonstrates that despite their different and sometimes competing backgrounds and projections, each actor promoted neoliberal governmentality and maintained that Turkey’s information society strategy should be regarded as an opportunity for further liberalizing the economy and mobilizing citizens of Turkey with digital and entrepreneurial skills. While Turkey’s information society strategy has certain technical inefficiencies and limitations in its reach, it clearly demonstrates the political ambitions of integrating Turkey into global capitalism, and the contemporary governmental phase in Turkish modernity in which local and global actors have started playing important roles. Such decentralization of governance does not mean that authoritarianism in Turkey has ended. In fact, neoliberal rationalities have intersected with the existing authoritarian ones to produce globalized yet compliant citizens who are under digital surveillance. The case of Turkey demonstrates that rather than being a linear process, governmentality advances through complex local and global articulations and may coexist with authoritarianism and surveillance.