Gökten Huriye Dogangün - Gender Politics in Turkey and Russia: From State Feminism to Authoritarian Rule

Gender Politics in Turkey and Russia

To Bahadr, my beloved brother

In 1993, Huntington put forward a controversial thesis that the cultural and religious divisions between the different civilizations of the West and the rest of the world would be the new fault line for conflict in the post-Cold War period (Huntington, 1993). The clash of civilizations would be the main replacement of the ideological and economic sources of conflict that had constituted the core of the struggle between the two superpowers in the Cold War period. Huntingtons predictions are only half right, because his work dealt extensively with Islam and the Muslim world as the prospective competitor of Western civilization. He was right in foreseeing that the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations, but he was mistaken in assuming that the reaction would come mainly from the Muslim world (p.29). It has recently been hybrid regimes, whether or not they are Muslim, which establish formal democratic institutions but fail to consolidate democratic norms and values, that compete with Western civilization. According to the latest Freedom House Survey (2018), in 2017 democracy was facing its most serious crisis in decades. The number of partly free countries had increased by 2017 from 33 to 63 while the number of unfree countries had risen from 42 in 1998 to 57 in 2017 (Freedom House Survey, 1998, 2018). These results show that the basic tenets of democracy, including the rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom of the press and of assembly, and the rights of minorities, are under serious attack in the world.