THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

This event launches Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP written by Ceren Lord and published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Since the elections of 2002, Erdogan's AKP has dominated the political scene in Turkey. This period has often been understood as a break from a 'secular' pattern of state-building. But in this book, Ceren Lord shows how Islamist mobilisation in Turkey has been facilitated from within the state by institutions established during early nation-building. Lord thus challenges the traditional account of Islamist AKP's rise that sees it either as a grassroots reaction to the authoritarian secularism of the state, or as a function of the state's utilisation of religion. Tracing struggles within the state, Lord also shows how the state's principal religious authority, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) competed with other state institutions to pursue Islamisation. Through privileging Sunni Muslim access to state resources to the exclusion of others, the Diyanet has been a key actor ensuring persistence and increasing salience of religious markers in political and economic competition, creating an amenable environment for Islamist mobilisation.

Ceren Lord is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, with Middle East Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). She completed her PhD in May 2015 at the London School of Economics, Government Department, focusing on the role of the state and the ulema (Diyanet) in the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Alongside her academic career, Ceren previously worked in finance as an economist focusing on Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 

Mehmet Kurt is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Yale University. His research lies at the intersection of political science, sociology, and political ethnography with a specific focus on political Islam and civil society in Kurdish Turkey and among the Turkish diaspora in Europe and the USA. He received his PhD from Selçuk University. He was a research assistant at Yale University, an assistant professor at Bingöl University (Turkey) and a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

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