How do the Youth Perceive and Experience Turkish Citizenship?

Abstract

Citizenship is generally perceived as a political practice that falls within the historical domain of the nation-state. At least, this is the claim of many nation-states themselves, which disavow the possibility of citizenship outside of their own structures. Rather than concentrate on the organization of citizenship, this article, instead, concentrates on the experience of individual citizens. It explores a wide-ranging sample of Turkish youth's perceptions and practices of citizenship, focusing on three dimensions: citizenship as legal status; citizenship as identity; and citizenship as civic virtue. It argues that individuals' perceptions and experiences of citizenship can be mapped out according to these three dimensions, and, additionally, political affiliation or commitment is the key to young people's preference for any one of these dimensions. Thus the legal status aspect of citizenship was emphasized by liberal and republican young people; nationalist, Islamist and Kurdish youth were concerned for its identity aspects; and the civic virtue aspect was stressed by republican and leftist respondents. However the article also demonstrates that similarly to the experiences of young people themselves, these three aspects of citizenship are not clearly demarcated theoretical domains but are both deeply interrelated and conflicted with each other. The reasons for this lie in the practice and understanding of citizenship facilitated and propagated by the Turkish state.