Targeting Children via Education for Populist Necropolitical Propaganda

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the AKP propagates its civilizational populist necropolitical narratives through the national curriculum, school textbooks, and children’s magazines produced by the state’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). It describes how early education, which was already nationalist and chauvinist since the Kemalist times, has been instrumentalized by the Islamist civilizational populist AKP regime to encourage children to seek martyrdom. It shows how the AKP merges nationalism, patriotism, civilizational populism and Islamic concepts such as, jihad and martyrdom to mobilize the children against the AKP’s internal/external enemies and to encourage the children and the youth to sacrifice their lives for the Islamist civilizationalist ideals and values sketched by the regime.