Flags of the Quad countries—Japan, Australia, the United States, and India—symbolizing strategic cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Photo: Sameer Chogale.

Pax Americana to Pax Silica: Strategic Shifts in US Security Policy

by with No Comment CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceForeign PolicyHome

From Pax Americana to Pax Silica, US grand strategy is undergoing a quiet but consequential transformation. In this timely commentary, Dr. Prerna Chahar argues that recent US security documents—the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act—signal a shift away from global stewardship toward a selective, technology-centered, and leverage-driven order. Rather than underwriting international rules and alliances, Washington is increasingly exercising power through control over strategic technologies, supply chains, and infrastructural chokepoints—a model Dr. Chahar conceptualizes as Pax Silica. This reorientation prioritizes hemispheric consolidation, technological dominance, and transactional partnerships over normative leadership. For partners such as India, the implications are profound: engagement remains valuable but conditional, reinforcing the logic of strategic autonomy, calibrated cooperation, and multi-alignment in a fragmented global order.

By Prerna Chahar*

What is unfolding in US security policy is neither isolationism nor traditional internationalism, but a selective strategy centered on leverage, technology, and regional primacy. American grand strategy is undergoing a quiet yet consequential transformation one that redefines how power is exercised, how partnerships are valued, and how international order is sustained. Recent US strategic documents, the National Security Strategy (NSS), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) point to a decisive shift away from managing global order toward consolidating national advantage, with far-reaching implications for allies and partners.

The National Security Strategy (NSS), published on December 4, 2025, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026, signed into law on December 18, 2025, together confirm that the era of Pax Americana characterized by institutional stewardship, alliance management, and normative leadership is giving way to a more selective, technology-centered, and transactional order. This emerging configuration may be described as Pax Silica: an order grounded less in alliances and rules and more in control over technology, supply chains, and strategic chokepoints.

NSS and NDAA: Reframing US Grand Strategy

The framing of the NSS 2025 itself signals a deliberate break from earlier approaches to American grand strategy. Four recurring themes encapsulate this reorientation.

First, the strategy explicitly rejects “old policies,” portraying past commitments to liberal internationalism, open-ended multilateralism, and interventionism as having diluted US sovereignty, weakened economic resilience, and overstretched strategic focus. This narrative of rupture legitimizes a more restrained and interest-driven approach to global engagement.

Second, the NSS defines what America wants with unusual clarity. Rather than emphasizing the maintenance of international order, it articulates bounded national priorities border security, economic nationalism, technological dominance, and hemispheric stability. Global leadership is no longer treated as an intrinsic responsibility but as a derivative of clearly specified national interests.

Third, both the NSS and the NDAA foreground American strength in material rather than normative terms. The NDAA 2026 authorizes over $900 billion in national defense funding, making it one of the largest defense policy bills in recent history. This level of spending underscores a sustained emphasis on military readiness, industrial capacity, and technological superiority. Military capability, innovation ecosystems, industrial depth, and technological leadership take precedence over values-based diplomacy, institutional rule-making, or normative influence.

The NDAA further operationalizes this shift through enhanced cybersecurity authorities, frameworks for the secure development and deployment of artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems and strengthened protections for US Cyber Command and digital infrastructure. It also expands authorities related to airspace security and counter-unmanned aerial systems under provisions such as the Safer Skies Act broadening civil and federal counter-drone capabilities. Together, these measures reflect the logic of Pax Silica, in which control over technology and infrastructure replaces institutional stewardship as the primary currency of influence.

Fourth, the NSS report clarifies the renewed strategic focus on the Western Hemisphere. While global competition remains important, the strategy prioritizes hemispheric stability, border control, migration management, and economic dominance within the Americas. This represents a modernized revival of Monroe Doctrine logic, where securing influence in the immediate neighborhood is treated as foundational to national security. Engagement beyond the hemisphere is increasingly selective and interest-driven, filtered through considerations of domestic security, economic resilience, and technological advantage rather than assumptions of automatic leadership. The NDAA reinforces this orientation by prioritizing resources for homeland protection, maritime domain awareness in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and defense readiness tied to territorial security. Together, these documents signal a shift from global managerial ambitions toward consolidation of power closer to home.

Taken collectively, these elements reflect a fundamental strategic reorientation. Rather than presenting the United States as the custodian of international order, the NSS positions it as a state intent on consolidating advantage, preserving autonomy, and exercising leverage. This underscores the durability of what may be termed the Trump Corollary: the notion that alliances, institutions, and global engagements are instruments to be justified by tangible returns rather than commitments sustained for systemic stability or normative leadership.

US ‘Pax Silica’: Renewed Instrument of Power

Within this hemispheric and technological reorientation, Pax Silica captures the defining feature of the emerging order: power exercised through technological and infrastructural dominance rather than institutional rule-making. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, digital platforms, and financial networks now constitute the backbone of strategic competition. Control over access to these systems enables coercion and influence without overt force.

Edward Fishman, in his book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, demonstrates how American power increasingly operates through the regulation of markets, technology flows, and supply chains, an approach clearly visible in export controls, investment screening, and technology-denial regimes embedded in both the NSS and the NDAA. Unlike Pax Americana, which relied on openness, predictability, and alliance cohesion, Pax Silica is exclusionary and conditional. Cooperation is granted rather than guaranteed; access replaces inclusion as the principal mechanism of influence.

The most consequential aspect of this transition is the decoupling of power from stewardship. The United States remains pre-eminent, but it no longer seeks to underwrite global order as a public good. Instead, it prioritizes regional consolidation, technological control, and transactional leverage. This is not withdrawal, but re-hierarchization: the Western Hemisphere first, strategic technologies second, and global commitments contingent on domestic advantage.

Implications for India

The renewed US focus on the Western Hemisphere carries important implications for India. While the Indo-Pacific remains relevant, it is no longer the singular organizing theatre of US grand strategy. Engagement in Asia is increasingly shaped by cost-benefit calculations and capability contributions rather than long-term commitments to regional order. For India, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. Reduced ideological pressure allows greater strategic autonomy, but transactional partnerships demand constant negotiation. Cooperation in defense, technology, and supply-chain resilience particularly in semiconductors and critical technologies remains valuable yet inherently conditional. India’s participation in groupings such as the Quad must therefore be understood as calibrated engagement rather than alignment, reinforcing the logic of multi-alignment and diversification.

Conclusion

The shift from Pax Americana to Pax Silica reflects a profound transformation in US statecraft. The renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, combined with technological competition and transactional diplomacy, marks a move away from global stewardship toward selective, leverage-based power. For partners such as India, the challenge is to engage without illusion cooperating where interests converge, hedging where vulnerabilities emerge, and sustaining strategic autonomy in a world where leadership is fragmented and power is increasingly exercised through control rather than consensus.

 

(*) Dr. Prerna Chahar is a scholar of International Relations with published research on US foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, regional coalition-building, and India’s foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Centre for the Study of the Americas (CCUS&LAS), School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Emblem of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Photo: Dreamstime.

From the ‘End of History’ to the ‘End of a Fiction’: What Davos 2026 Really Announced

by with No Comment CommentariesEconomicsEditor’s ChoiceForeign PolicyHome

Davos 2026 revealed a global order no longer converging on a single liberal model, but sliding into a harsher era in which power increasingly outweighs rules and “integration” is reframed as vulnerability. The most striking paradox was that this diagnosis came not from critics at the margins, but from the system’s own architects—transforming elite “candor” into a strategy for managing declining legitimacy. In a world shaped by fragmentation and coercive interdependence, China’s state-capitalist model is increasingly perceived as a more effective crisis-response framework, while the United States and Europe drift toward a troubling hybrid: adopting not China’s developmental strengths, but its coercive instruments of control. This dynamic reflects an emerging logic of reverse convergence—the West is no longer guiding the world toward liberalism, but being pulled toward the governance style of its principal rival.

By Ibrahim Ozturk

The Davos platform can be seen as a stage where dominant actors test narratives, identify legitimacy losses, and modify the public vocabulary they use to govern (or justify governing). It rarely makes formal decisions; instead, it indicates what elites believe they can still publicly defend—and what they can no longer convincingly pretend. Davos 2026, in that sense, can be viewed less as a policy summit and more as a diagnosis of the regime.

In this context, Davos 2026 is significant because the words spoken inside the room seemed less like a reaffirmation of the post-1990 liberal-global order and more like an early draft of its obituary. Larry Fink, Interim Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and CEO of BlackRock—one of the world’s largest asset managers—started with a blunt admission that the world trusts Davos and the WEF’s ability to shape the future “far less,” warning that the forum risks seeming “out of step with the moment: elites in an age of populism” (Fink, 2026). Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, took it even further. He suggested that the problem isn’t just declining trust in institutions; it’s the collapse of the narrative foundations of the “rules-based liberal multilateral order” itself. He described “the end of a pleasant fiction… and the beginning of a harsh reality,” emphasizing that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” (Carney, 2026).

If anything was “announced,” then it was not a new treaty or a coordinated policy package. It was an elite confession: the old legitimating story no longer works.

What Exactly Is Ending?

The natural questions—What was declared at Davos? Is it the end of the Western system? Is Chinese-style state capitalism rising? —are the right ones. But they require careful separation of the West as power from the West as ideology, and of neoliberal globalization from liberal democracy. What seems to be ending is not “the West” as a geographical or civilizational fact, but a historically specific settlement—visible in three interlocking dimensions.

The end of the convergence myth: One part of the story traces back to assumptions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernization. Classical modernization thinking regarded history as a linear, stage-like process where societies would converge toward a single “advanced” model through diffusion, emulation, and integration—so that cross-civilizational differences would eventually appear as “time lags,” not alternative paths (Apter, 1965; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Rostow, 1960). In that framework, modernity was not just one option among many; it was seen as the expected endpoint of development.

Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis—initially presented as an essay and later expanded into a book—was a late-twentieth-century extension of this modernization perspective (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). After the fall of Soviet-style planning, liberal capitalism seemed not just victorious but final: no significant systemic challengers remained, and future conflicts were seen as minor issues rather than real alternatives.

Davos 2026, however, seemed to quietly acknowledge that this convergence theory has run its course. After decades of “learning-by-doing” globalization, the idea that marketization, integration, and digitization would inevitably lead to liberal-democratic outcomes has become less convincing. Among many others, Öztürk (2025) calls this a fundamental “liberal fallacy,” revealed by post-2008 stagnation, growing inequality, and the resilience of authoritarian governance under capitalist conditions.

The decline of the authority of the “rules-based order” (as performance): A second aspect involves the public authority of institutional rules. Carney’s remarks illustrated a familiar phenomenon: states show belief in a rules-based order—displaying the “sign” publicly—while privately recognizing how often the rules break down in practice (Carney, 2026). His metaphor strongly mirrors Václav Havel’s assessment of late-socialist legitimacy: the system’s survival relied on ritualistic compliance and public participation in an official fiction, even when no one truly believed it (Havel, 1978).

In modern global politics, this is the credibility crisis of liberal internationalism: the rules exist, but enforcement seems selective; the universal language stays, but power distribution shapes outcomes. This is exactly where realism comes back—sometimes openly, sometimes disguised as “values-based pragmatism.”

The end of elite capitalism’s moral economy: Third, Davos 2026 hosted a legitimacy check on elite-led capitalism itself. Fink’s insistence that prosperity cannot be reduced to total GDP gains or stock-market success implicitly admits what critics have argued for decades: growth narratives do not automatically generate social approval when the distribution of wealth is unfair, public services decline, and opportunities disappear (Fink, 2026; Piketty, 2020).

This line closely mirrors Robert F. Kennedy’s well-known critique of national income accounting, asserting that GDP can measure “everything… except that which makes life worthwhile” (Kennedy, 1968). What once seemed like fresh wisdom at Davos in 2026 now appears as delayed recognition: a long-overdue admission that the legitimacy of capitalism cannot rely solely on aggregate indicators. Taken together, these three dimensions do not imply “the end of the West.” They signify the end of the West’s story about itself—the self-description of a system that universalizes its model as destiny, naturalizes its institutions as neutral rules, and considers legitimacy to be the automatic result of growth. Historically, when a hegemonic story collapses, systems rarely vanish overnight; instead, they change and adapt.

The Crisis of Corporate Capitalism as a Reflection of the System

Öztürk’s (2025) “reverse convergence” hypothesis provides one of the clearest ways to interpret Davos 2026. It avoids two lazy conclusions— (1) “China is replacing the West,” and (2) “nothing changes; it’s only noise”—by arguing that the direction of convergence has reversed. Liberal democracies are increasingly adopting illiberal governance techniques (expanded surveillance, executive discretion, securitized policy frames, controlled pluralism), while authoritarian regimes are adopting capitalist tools (market mechanisms, technological dynamism, corporate scale) without liberalizing. This is not ideological convergence through persuasion. It is functional convergence driven by systemic pressure.

Here, Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement” becomes central: disembedded markets cause social division and political backlash, but the protective countermovement can be seized—redirected into nationalist, exclusionary, or authoritarian forms instead of democratic re-embedding (Polanyi, 1944). Fernand Braudel’s distinction is also important: capitalism is not the same as competitive markets; it is often a structure of lasting domination shielded from democratic accountability (Braudel, 1982, 1984).

Add the modern layer of digital political economy. The tools of governance increasingly function through infrastructures of data extraction, algorithmic control, and dependency rather than through persuasion or consent. This is the shared domain of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), vectoral power and information monopolies (Wark, 2004, 2019), and “techno-feudal” rent extraction via digital platforms and cloud infrastructures (Varoufakis, 2023). In this view, Davos 2026 was not just a geopolitical event; it also revealed that corporate capitalism has created a legitimacy gap that traditional liberal narratives can no longer fill.

When Fink’s speech is analyzed through the perspectives of Polanyi and Braudel, it seems to outline a plan to restore legitimacy. He urged the WEF to “regain trust,” boost participation, and modernize the language used to defend capitalism (Fink, 2026). Even if the diagnosis is sound, the messenger presents a problem. The contradiction is structural: the credibility crisis he describes is closely linked to the financial and corporate structures that BlackRock represents. When the “doctor” is also one of the system’s most powerful beneficiaries, criticism is often seen as mere damage control by elites rather than genuine reformist bravery. 

Fink also emphasized that prosperity must become distributive, turning “more people into owners of growth,” not spectators (Fink, 2026). Yet this is where Davos rhetoric regularly stalls: it acknowledges the legitimacy problem but often proposes solutions at the level of communication rather than at the level of reconstruction. The 2026 shift, then, is not the defense of globalization’s moral premise; it is an attempt to rewrite capitalism’s legitimacy contract amid mass distrust.

A key concern running through the Davos discussions about AI is anxiety. The worry is that AI will repeat the distributional betrayal of globalization: early benefits go to owners of data, compute, models, and platforms, while the social costs are spread out to others. Without strong redistribution and governance, AI risks being less of a productivity leap and more of a new enclosure system—worsening dependence instead of expanding opportunities (Zuboff, 2019; Varoufakis, 2023).

From Benign Interdependence to Fortress Logic

Carney’s intervention was more impactful because it explicitly addressed what “trust” rhetoric often overlooks: the geopolitical and geoeconomic rupture of the rules-based order. His speech repeatedly suggested that the liberal promise of mutual interdependence has run its course. Integration can become a source of vulnerability and subjugation, leading states to pursue strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, finance, and supply chains (Carney, 2026).

At one point, Carney invoked a brutally realistic moral: “the strong can do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The phrase echoes the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides—a canonical statement of power politics rationality (Thucydides, trans. 1972). The significance is not the originality of the reference; it is that Davos discourse now treats such realism as publicly speakable.

This is where “weaponized interdependence” becomes relevant: network power can be transformed into coercion when states or firms control critical chokepoints in finance, infrastructure, trade, and digital platforms (Farrell & Newman, 2019). Carney’s prescription—strategic autonomy or a “world of fortresses”—is therefore less a nationalist shift than an acknowledgment that global integration is no longer seen as harmless.

Seen from the broader perspective of globalization discourse, Davos 2026 signifies a significant reversal of the assumptions that characterized the early 2000s. Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat summarized the era’s belief that digital connectivity and integrated supply chains were “flattening” the world into a more open, opportunity-filled, and ultimately convergent space (Friedman, 2005). Two decades later, David J. Lynch’s The World’s Worst Bet reads like an obituary for that optimism: globalization now seems less like a benign force for shared prosperity and more like a risky gamble that has weakened industrial resilience, increased inequality, empowered strategic competitors, and fueled political backlash in the West (Lynch, 2025). The transition from “flatness” to “worst bet” reflects the same shift Carney now describes in geopolitical terms: integration is no longer assumed to be mutually beneficial; it is increasingly viewed as a potential pathway to dependence, coercion, and subjugation (Carney, 2026; Friedman, 2005; Lynch, 2025).

This closely aligns with Amitav Acharya’s argument that the liberal “rules-based order” was never entirely universal; it functioned as a Western-centered system with selective membership and inconsistent enforcement. What follows, according to Acharya, is not just “multipolarity,” but a decentralized “multiplex” world—more diverse, more contested, and less controlled by a single hegemon (Acharya, 2017; Acharya, 2018). Even defenders sympathetic to the liberal order acknowledge its historically Western core and its expansion after the Cold War (Ikenberry, 2008, 2018). 

Davos 2026, therefore, seemed like a moment when elites started speaking more openly than before about a world they can no longer describe as heading toward a single institutional model. However, there is a deeper contradiction at Davos: many of the harshest critiques in 2026 were made not by independent critics but by the system’s own architects—CEOs, senior officials, and high-level political leaders. This doesn’t invalidate their diagnosis, but it should change how we interpret it: what looks like honesty may also be a form of preemptive storytelling, a controlled version of systemic self-criticism aimed at maintaining core power structures while giving rhetorical ground.

The US–EU–China Triangle: Three Paths, One Convergent Pressure

Against this backdrop, the question facing mainstream systems is no longer just whether globalization can be “fixed,” but which governance model is increasingly seen as the better response to a high-stress world full of uncertainty, fragmentation, and coercive interdependence. Under conditions of heightened geopolitical competition, supply-chain insecurity, volatility in energy and food, and rapid technological rivalry, the focus is quietly shifting toward the idea that China’s model—often called socialist state capitalism—may provide faster, more disciplined, and more strategically coordinated solutions than the liberal market approach, mainly because it can mobilize resources, direct finance, and prioritize long-term national goals. In this context, Davos 2026 didn’t just expose a legitimacy crisis; it also pointed to a growing competition over “effective modernity,” where resilience and the ability to command are beginning to matter more than openness and procedural legitimacy.

Indeed, an even more concerning sign is emerging from within the West itself: leading trends in the United States and the European Union increasingly indicate that what they are taking from China is not its potentially positive strengths—such as developmental coordination or strategic industrial policy—but rather its negative governance traits: securitization, surveillance expansion, executive centralization, and the normalization of emergency-style rule. This creates a growing zone of hybridization, where liberal democracies preserve electoral rituals while gradually adopting illiberal techniques of control and exclusion. In other words, the West seems to be entering a phase of reverse convergence—a process where the “center” shifts toward the logic of its challenger, often in its most coercive forms—a dynamic that I will explore in detail.

Öztürk’s (2025) structured comparison across five dimensions—surveillance regimes, populist discourse, regulatory architecture, market concentration, and distributional outcomes—acts like a decoder for Davos 2026. It does not claim that the US, EU, and China are becoming identical. Instead, it argues that all three are responding to the same structural pressures—tech-driven control, oligopolistic concentration, legitimacy erosion—while doing so through different institutional legacies.

China’s large-scale integration of state and capital shows that advanced capitalism can exist without liberal democracy. It combines market activity and corporate growth within one-party control, increasingly extending worldwide through infrastructure, standards, and digital systems (Callahan, 2016; Creemers, 2018; Dai, 2020). Its governance tools—such as data-driven monitoring, biometric systems, and ideological control of platforms—provide an attractive model for regimes dealing with insecurity and social unrest, even though it also poses legitimacy challenges (Greitens, 2020).

The United States’ hybrid drift shows how liberal democracy can weaken internally due to inequality, institutional capture, and polarization, especially after the 2008 crisis delegitimized traditional economic promises and heightened distrust between elites and the public (Öztürk, 2025). Illiberal populism has proved to be a resilient narrative ecosystem (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018; Mounk, 2018). Meanwhile, corporate surveillance and algorithmic governance operate alongside expanding security measures, leading to convergence driven by technique rather than ideology (Zuboff, 2019).

The European Union’s regulatory ambition, even under legitimacy stress, stands as the strongest counterexample to simple convergence claims because it has built the most ambitious rights-based regulatory framework in the democratic world, especially in the digital area (Floridi, 2020; Véliz, 2021). However, it remains vulnerable to legitimacy stress: far-right normalization, internal rule-of-law conflicts, uneven fiscal capacity, and ongoing reliance on US platform power. Regulation can limit domination, but legitimacy ultimately depends on distributive foundations—not just technocracy (Brown, 2019; Piketty, 2020).

If one sentence embodies the West’s strategic trauma, it is this: China demonstrates that sophisticated capitalism can operate without liberal democracy—and at scale. The Davos concern is not just that China competes, but that China’s model is increasingly serving as a reference point for organizing power in the twenty-first century (Öztürk, 2025).

The Hidden Davos Declaration

If we summarize Davos 2026 into a single implicit statement, it is: The global order based on rules-based multilateralism, benign interdependence, and trickle-down legitimacy has reached a final crisis. What comes next is probably going to be centered around: i) strategic autonomy (energy, supply chains, critical minerals, digital sovereignty) (Carney, 2026), ii) narrative legitimacy repair (“inclusive prosperity,” participation, trust) (Fink, 2026). iii) technological control architectures (AI governance, surveillance trade-offs, platform regulation conflict) (Zuboff, 2019; Varoufakis, 2023), and iv) a reduced faith in universalism, and a greater acceptance of bloc rivalry, vulnerability management, and “value-based realism” (Acharya, 2017; Ikenberry, 2018).

This is why Davos 2026 felt like a turning point: elites are no longer pretending we still live in the 1990s. But the new order being outlined is not automatically democratic. It can just as easily shift toward market authoritarianism—combining capital preservation with control-first governance. A democratic solution is still conceptually possible: re-embedding markets in democratic institutions (Polanyi, 1944), rebuilding a distributive social contract (Piketty, 2020), and limiting both corporate and government power through enforceable rights (Floridi, 2020; Véliz, 2021). Davos 2026, however, raises a brutally practical question: Can democracies re-legitimate themselves quickly enough before surveillance, AI, and strategic autonomy become permanent justifications for executive insulation?

That question, more than any speech, was the true “announcement.”

 

References

Acharya, A. (2017). After liberal hegemony: The advent of a multiplex world order. Ethics & International Affairs, 31(3), 271–285. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

Acharya, A. (2018). The end of American world order (2nd ed.). Polity. (Wiley)

Apter, D. E. (1965). The politics of modernization. University of Chicago Press.

Braudel, F. (1982). The wheels of commerce (Vol. 2). Harper & Row.

Braudel, F. (1984). Civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century: Volume 2—The wheels of commerce (S. Reynolds, Trans.). Harper & Row.

Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press. (Columbia University Press).

Callahan, W. A. (2016). China dreams: 20 visions of the future. Oxford University Press.

Carney, M. (2026, January). Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting (Davos 2026). World Economic Forum. 

Creemers, R. (2018). China’s social credit system: An evolving practice of control. SSRN.

Dai, X. (2020). Enacting the social credit system: Governance through digital trust in China. Media, Culture & Society, 42(3), 408–423.

Farrell, H., & Newman, A. L. (2019). Weaponized interdependence: How global economic networks shape state coercion. International Security, 44(1), 42–79.

Fink, L. (2026). Remarks as Interim Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum at the 2026 Annual Meeting in Davos. LinkedIn.

Floridi, L. (2020). The fight for digital sovereignty: What it is, and why it matters, especially for the EU. Philosophy & Technology, 33(3), 369–378.

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history? The National Interest, 16, 3–18.

Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.

Greitens, S. C. (2020). Dealing with demands for surveillance. Journal of Democracy, 31(3), 15–29.

Havel, V. (1978). The power of the powerless. (Essay; English trans. published 1985).

Ikenberry, G. J. (2008). The rise of China and the future of the West: Can the liberal system survive? Foreign Affairs, 87(1), 23–37.

Ikenberry, G. J. (2018). The end of liberal international order? International Affairs, 94(1), 7–23.

Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy: The human development sequence. Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, R. F. (1968, March 18). Remarks at the University of Kansas. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, (jfklibrary.org).

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.

Lynch, D. J. (2025). The world’s worst bet: How the globalization gamble went wrong (and what would make it right). PublicAffairs.

Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy: Why our freedom is in danger and how to save it. Harvard University Press.

Ozturk, Ibrahim. (2025). “Capitalist Disruptions and the Democratic Retreat: A US–EU–China Comparison.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). September 11, 2025. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000116

Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and ideology. Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press.

Thucydides. (1972). The Peloponnesian War (R. Warner, Trans.). Penguin Classics.

Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Bodley Head. 

Véliz, C. (2021). Privacy is power: Why and how you should take back control of your data. Bantam.

Wark, M. (2004). A hacker manifesto. Harvard University Press.

Wark, M. (2019). Capital is dead: Is this something worse? Verso. (Verso)

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

US President Donald Trump delivers a speech to voters at an event in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo: Danny Raustadt.

From Farce to Tragedy: The First Year of Trump’s Second Term and the Unmaking of America

by AuthoritarianismCommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeLeadership & Persona

In “From Farce to Tragedy,” the author traces the first year of Donald Trump’s second term as a turning point in American political life. What once carried elements of chaos and dark comedy has hardened into something more deliberate and consequential. Trump’s return to power, framed by him as total vindication, has brought an unprecedented expansion of executive authority, the systematic weakening of institutions, and the normalization of personal loyalty over law. Drawing on sharp observations from leading journalists and scholars, the piece shows how emergency powers, executive orders, and transactional politics have reshaped governance at home and abroad. The result is not renewed greatness, but a spectacle of democratic erosion—an American tragedy unfolding without the comfort of a happy ending.

By Cemal Tunçdemir*

“What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending,” the American critic William Dean Howells, who was a central figure in Gilded Age American literature, once said. The second coming of Donald J. Trump to the US Presidency was not an accident of fate, nor even absurdity of democracy. It was a sequel demanded by majority of American voters that having once liked the “first season” and asked upon longer run. The real tragedy was not that Trump was Trump, that was obvious from the start, but that so many Americans mistook his loudness for conviction and saw his challenge to the rules as bravery. 

“The first time around, there was something almost thrilling about Donald Trump as president,” explains American historian and journalist Thomas Frank, “The respectable world came together against him with a gratifying unanimity: the legacy media, the nonprofits, the universities, the think tanks, the tech sector, the intelligence community. Insulting this imbecile became the most rewarding pastime on earth.” By contrast, according to Frank, for much of 2025, the feeling was darker. “Absolute despair” if you will.

The difference in the second term wasn’t just the lack of the thrilling or accidental comedic elements of the first term. Donald Trump viewed his return to the White House as a profound vindication. In his telling, his four years of exile had proven that he was right about everything. About economy, about “stolen” election, about press, about elites, about universities, about institutions. This absolute conviction liberated him from all doubt, and all rules. 

Trump’s unrestrained mind is on full display in a recent letter he sent to the Prime Minister of Norway as he wrote, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

“Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality,” observes Anne Applebaum, “one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him.”

“Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 in some ways but on steroids,” compares Peter Baker, New York Times’s chief White House correspondent who have covered six US presidents, including Trump in his first term, “A lot of the things that he talked about doing or exploring in the first term -or tried but failed to do or was dissuaded from doing-he’s now doing and in spades.” 

Unlike the first term, in the beginning of his second term, there was less confusion, more intent. And more so preparation. Trump has rolled out many of the Project 2025, 900-page Heritage Foundation-led blueprint, he once claimed he has nothing to do with. Many of Trump’s executive orders reshaping the government were outlined in this right-wing policy plan. From the early days of his tenure, Donald Trump began advancing Project 2025’s primary objective: the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” a term coined by his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. He has expanded the scope of executive power in ways unparalleled in modern history. 

By the end of 2025, some 317,000 federal employees were out of the government, according to the Office of Personnel Management. This was the largest reduction of the federal workforce in American history. He even fired members and officials from various independent and bipartisan boards, agencies, and commissions, including dozens of inspectors general, key watchdogs for waste, fraud, and abuse across all government.  

One of the things Trump learned was that it matters who is around him, Peter Baker observes, “Many of the people he surrounded himself with in his first term viewed their jobs as keeping him from going off the rails, from doing things they thought were reckless -or illegal even. This term, he’s surrounded by people who not only agree with him but are enabling him and empowering him and want to serve his desires.”

One of the Trump’s most daring test the limits of his presidential power was claiming powers that have typically resides with Congress. In his first year, executive orders have eclipsed actual legislation. Trump has signed 147 executive orders, setting a record for the most signed in any president’s first 100 days of office. By contrast, he has signed only five bills into law, a record low for the first 100 days.  

What is truly worrying is that his blatant misuse of emergency powers, which are meant to temporarily increase executive authority only during urgent and rapidly developing situations. The Brennan Center has identified 123 different laws could be triggered by a presidential emergency declaration. Because these powers are extensive, strong safeguards are needed to prevent misuse. Since The National Emergencies Act lacks safeguards, a president can declare an emergency by executive order and renew it every year indefinitely. Congress may vote to terminate an emergency, but only with a veto-proof majority. This flaw was exposed when Trump declared a fake emergency to fund a border wall Congress had rejected. 

As a striking example, instead of traditional tariff statutes (such as Section 301 or Section 232) he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is not a general trade statute, to impose sweeping import taxes. To justify invoking the IEEPA, Trump Administration declared “trade deficits” a national emergency. And this audacity has led to a legal drama that has now reached the Supreme Court.

The question is why the White House team ever invoked IEEPA at all, instead of traditional trade laws? The answer is not only that IEEPA provides the President broad authority to respond to a declaration of national emergency. The real answer probably lies in “political anthropology rather than jurisprudence,” writes Gillian Tett, “Trump’s team has a power structure more akin to a royal court than anything that adheres to 21st-century norms.” He always wants to have king-like powers, and his team is looking for loopholes that would allow him to acquire those powers. 

This is the posture of a man who has looked at the institutions meant to restrain him -the courts, the lawmakers, the prosecutors- have done nothing and he concluded they are toothless. After the surviving of the fallout of January 6, five years ago, he now moves with the confidence of someone who believes he is beyond the reach of the old rules. He wants a power that is feared and given whatever it wants. For this reason, some critics are no longer debating policy; they are discussing a change in the American regime. But a change to what? 

“There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism.” Jonathan Rauch answered the question in his now famous article. “Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing,” he wrote, “It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones.” 

The Art of the Deal-Making Presidency

“Nice woman but she does not listen.” 

After a reportedly tense phone call in early August, President Trump publicly criticized Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter with this condescending remark and quickly raised tariffs on Swiss imports to a punishing 39 percent. Couple of days later when two Swiss federal ministers and several government executives flew over to DC, but they got nowhere near Trump. Following months all the effort of traditional statecraft couldn’t resolved months of standoff. What ultimately break the deadlock was not diplomacy or policy talks. It was something shinier.

In early November, small delegation of Swiss titans -all male and, all billionaires- sidestepped the usual diplomatic channels, arriving at the Oval Office with a gold-plated Rolex desk clock and a 1-kilogram engraved gold bar. Before the guests had even leaved the White House, Trump shared a social media post announcing progress. Within the days, the previously urgent “national emergency” posed by Swiss trade deficit seemed to lose its urgency, and tariffs were trimmed to a comparatively modest 15 percent. 

As that meeting so strikingly demonstrated, access to the American leader is no longer earned through shared values or sound policy. It is now won through the language of the deal and, above all, the weight of gold.

Trump received gold coated replica of a royal crown from the Silla Kingdom from South Korea President, a golden pager from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a gold-plated golf club from Japan, a golden boxing belt from Ukraine.  Even Apple CEO Tim Cook presented Trump with a special glass disc on a 24-karat gold base in August 2025 and secured an exemption from 100% tariff on imported semiconductors. Apple gift was a favorite for Trump in the Oval Office until the Swiss came to town. “It was tough to beat Apple, but the Swiss did it,” one administration official told Axios.

Trump even kept original 24-karat gold Club World Cup Trophy for himself so FIFA had to give the winner team, Chelsea, a replica. Not only did he receive the trophy, but he was also awarded a gold medal, which FIFA presents to the players of the winning team.

“The golden age” that Trump promised in his second inaguration speech, has never seemed more literal. He wasn’t only for his trademark “Midas touch” flow, he seeks profit in every policy decision he makes. As Jonathan Rauch explained, in patrimonialism, every policy the president values is considered his own personal property. Some experts call it ‘pay-to-play,’ where foreign governments, businesses, and wealthy donors gaining political and financial advantages such as relaxed regulations and federal contracts by investing in the Trump Organization, supporting MAGA causes or by engaging in excessive flattery. 

Trump Towers have been proposed from Damascus to Belgrade. Trump hotels or Trump Resorts are being built in many major cities around the world, primarily in Asia and Africa. As Amy Sorkin puts it Trump has made it clear that no gift is too much for him -even, and maybe especially, someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize medal.

Even presidential pardon power has become big business. In his first-year Trump has pardoned an unusually high numberof wealthy people accused of financial crimes, including money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud. Wealthy individuals pay millions to lobbying and consulting firms to bring their cases to Trump’s attention. 

Trump pardoned cryptocurrency mogul Changpeng Zhao, months after Zhao’s company has struck a $2 billions deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s new crypto venture. In another revealing example, executives of Wells Fargo Bank, instead of paying the $8.5 million fine imposed for fraudulent transactions, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January, and two months later, their fine was reduced to a mere $150,000. 

In Trump’s World, Europe Is the Villain 

“The foreign policy of President Donald Trump combines the worst of isolationism with the worst of interventionism in a uniquely disastrous way,” says Thomas Reese. He began his presidency as a firm isolationist, but “America First” quickly turned into a wrecking ball -a license to upend America’s role in the world, discarding rules and norms with little restraint. 

“I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for the Iraq War,” said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian, but it turns out that the runup to that war, when American Administration did at least strive to convince the Congress and the world of the righteousness of its cause, was the “good old days.” The US removed Venezuela leader Nicolas Maduro based solely on national interest, bypassing all domestic, international authorization or public consent. Trump didn’t just break the rules it showed there aren’t any. 

“No autocrat likes to see one of their own seized, shackled and renditioned,” wrote Adrian Blomfield in The Daily Telegraph. However, China and Russia are unlikely to be troubled by Maduro’s removal. They may see it as evidence of the US stepping back globally and focusing on regional dominance. A world divided into spheres of influence, where powerful states act freely, could benefit Moscow and Beijing, as noted by Gideon Rachman in the FT.

Even Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) plan within its 33-page framework argues that Russia and China are US peers or potential friends. Instead, it points the finger at a surprising villain: Europe. NSS argues that the real danger isn’t Russian tanks or Chinese factories, but rather the “erasure” of European culture caused by mass immigration and the power of the European Union bureaucracy. The liberal international order, already fragile, found itself mocked not only by adversaries but by its former custodian. 

New Civil War and End of Forth Republic?

“Trump isn’t interested in fighting a new Cold War. He wants a new civilizational war,” wrote Thomas Friedman. Trump’s National Security Strategy language unlike any previous surveys, he observes, “It reveals a deep truth about this second Trump administration: how much it came to Washington to fight America’s third civil war, not to fight the West’s new cold war.” According to Friedman, after the Civil War of the 1860s and the second major civil struggle of the 1960s civil rights movement, America is now experiencing its third civil war. “This one, like the first two, is over the question ‘Whose country is this anyway?’ This civil war has been less violent than the first two—but it is early.”

Although the United States has operated under a single constitution, each civil war has produced a new political order, a new republic in all but name. For that reason, a “third civil war” would not just be another crisis; it would signal the end of what some analysts call the “Fourth American Republic.” 

As Jamelle Bouie pointed, the Civil War and its aftermath constituted the Second Republic. The Third Republic came into this world through the overwhelming victory of the Democrats in the election of early 1930’s. The legacies of the Third Republic had lived on when the fourth republic began with the achievements of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, which included a newly open door to the world. “This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society,” wrote Bouie, “It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.” 

A Year of Revelation

The first year of Trump’s second term offered Americans not greatness, but clarity. It showed what happens when empty and noisy demagogic rhetoric substitutes for vision and when power outruns principles. His return to power did not resolve the contradictions of Trumpism; it intensified them. Nationalism that depended on global markets. Capitalism claims to be self-regulating, yet in reality it is owned by the state. Law invoked as rhetoric and rejected as restraint. Freedom of speech demanded abroad and denied at home. Declared himself ‘Peace President’ and change the Department of the Defense name to Department of War. 

His supporters too—with their enduring appetite for loud certainty over quiet competence, find themselves caught in a season of paradox. Cheering the dismantling of the very institutions that once established the order they now claim to want again. They back tariffs, immigration, and social spending policies that heavily impact rural America, the backbone of their movement. And most ironically, this coalition of white Christians is led by one of the least religious presidents ever.

And yet, for all the noise he and his administration generate, the first year of his second term also revealed limits. Courts still blocked some actions. States resisted others. Markets reacted unpredictably. Bureaucracies slowed what they could not stop. Polls indicate declining support for him as the Congressional elections approach. Trump raged against these constraints, calling them sabotage, yet their persistence revealed an uncomfortable truth: even an “unbound president” cannot easily escape the structure of a constitutional federal system. 

Even in the face of repeated failures to “make America great again,” Trump succeeded at making one thing undeniably great again. It was not the greatness of law, restraint, economy, international leadership or wisdom, but the greatness of spectacle. A spectacle of American tragedy, one that may not have a happy ending this time. 

 

(*) Cemal Tunçdemir is a New York–based veteran journalist with extensive experience covering US politics and international affairs.

Protest against ICE following the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal operation, in Foley Square, Manhattan, NYC, USA on January 8, 2026. The fatal encounter has sparked national outrage and protests demanding accountability and reform of ICE use-of-force policies. Photo: Dreamstime.

Law, Order and the Lives in Between

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsMigrationVoice of Youth

In this Voice of Youth (VoY) article, Emmanouela Papapavlou delivers a powerful reflection on state violence, immigration enforcement, and the fragile boundaries of democratic accountability. The article critically examines the fatal shooting of a civilian woman by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Moving beyond official narratives of “self-defense,” Papapavlou situates the incident within broader patterns of institutional violence, racialized enforcement, and the erosion of human rights under the banner of security. By drawing historical parallels to the killing of George Floyd and interrogating the politics of “law and order,” the piece challenges readers to reconsider whose lives are protected—and whose are rendered expendable—in contemporary democracies.

By Emmanouela Papapavlou*

In a world where the concept of “security” weighs increasingly heavily on public policy, the use of state violence remains one of the most contentious and polarizing issues. In recent days, news that an agent of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed a 37 year-old woman in Minneapolis has reignited the debate over the limits of state power, institutional impunity, and human rights in one of the world’s most developed democracies.

The incident took place on January 7, 2026, during a large-scale operation aimed at enforcing immigration law in the city. Official statements from government authorities described the shooting as an act of self-defense, claiming that the woman attempted to “strike officers” with her vehicle. At the same time, however, video footage and eyewitness accounts contradict this version of events, suggesting that the gunshot was fired as the driver was attempting to leave the scene, without an evident and immediate threat to the officers’ lives.

The government’s effort to justify the action, even employing language such as “domestic terrorism operation,” has sparked outrage and skepticism among local officials, human rights organizations, and ordinary citizens. The mayor of Minneapolis openly stated that the self-defense arguments were “false” and called for ICE to withdraw from the city altogether. Many have described the killing as a clear example of excessive use of force by state authorities, particularly within the context of a large enforcement mission that disproportionately targets vulnerable communities.

But can this case truly be treated as an isolated incident? Or does it represent yet another link in a growing chain of violent encounters that follow a disturbingly familiar pattern? The Minneapolis killing is already being described as at least the fifth fatal outcome of similar federal operations over the past two years, suggesting that law enforcement strategy has evolved into an aggressive and dangerous form of violence, often exercised without meaningful accountability or transparency.

Social scientists and activists point out that the use of force by state authorities, whether in immigration enforcement or neighborhood policing, frequently activates deeper structures of social inequality. When the rhetoric of “law and order” is prioritized over human safety, trust between state institutions and the communities they serve erodes rapidly. And this raises a fundamental question: is the principle of “legality” applied equally to everyone, or is it selectively deployed as a tool of control and discipline over specific social groups?

This case cannot be examined outside its broader historical context. In 2020, in the same city of Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed as a police officer pressed a knee into his neck, turning a routine arrest into a public execution witnessed by the world. That moment became a global symbol of systemic police violence and racial injustice, igniting mass protests and exposing how deeply embedded power, race, and state violence are within modern societies.

And yet, how much has truly changed since then? Even today, the way state violence is addressed, whether through policing or immigration enforcement, continues to be shaped by the same logic that transforms people into threats and human lives into acceptable risks. The stories of those killed become symbols not only of injustice, but of a persistent institutional indifference toward the protection of life and dignity.

The Minneapolis case therefore serves as a reminder that violence exercised by institutions is not merely a “tragic mistake” or an “unfortunate exception.” It is part of a broader relationship between power and vulnerability that tests the very foundations of democracy and human rights. And just as in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, a new generation is once again refusing to accept narratives that normalize violence in the name of security. A generation that insists on asking the same uncomfortable question: what does security really mean, when preserving it requires the loss of human life?

 

(*) Emmanouela Papapavlou is a high school student from Thessaloniki, Greece, deeply passionate about social and political issues. She has actively participated in Model United Nations and other youth forums, serving as a chairperson in multiple conferences and winning awards in Greek debate competitions. Writing is her greatest passion, and she loves using it to explore democracy, civic engagement, and human rights. Her dream is to share her ideas, inspire action, and amplify the voices of young people who want to make a difference. Email: emmanpapapavlou@gmail.com

Photo: Julia Sudnitskaya.

Dopamine Detox, Self-Discipline, and the Populist Moralization of Responsibility

by CommentariesDigital-populismEditor’s ChoiceHome

This commentary interrogates the rising popularity of “dopamine detox” as a moralized response to digital overload and burnout, situating it within contemporary populist logics. Rather than challenging the political economy of platform capitalism, the discourse reframes structural problems of attention extraction, inequality, and exhaustion as failures of individual self-discipline. Drawing on political economy and cultural sociology, the piece argues that dopamine detox resonates with a depoliticized form of populism that governs through moral binaries—disciplined versus undisciplined—rather than through explicit elite–people antagonism. By transforming self-control into a civic and economic virtue, the trend normalizes inequality and obscures corporate and regulatory responsibility. Ultimately, the commentary shows how neoliberal self-help cultures intersect with populist moralization to shift blame downward while leaving platform power largely unchallenged.

By Zeynep Temel*

The term “dopamine detox” has emerged as a popular self-regulation trend across digital platforms, wellness cultures, and productivity discourses in the past few years. It is being promoted as a remedy for distraction, burnout, and declining focus; through practices such as abstaining from social media, minimizing pleasurable stimuli, reducing digital consumption such as screen time, and deliberately embracing “boring” routines. The concept promises mental clarity and renewed productivity through individual restraint on various different platform ranging from TikTok videos to self-help books and corporate wellness advice.

However, this trend goes beyond dopamine detox’s popular neuroscientific framing, as it effectively reflects a broader political and moral shift. This shift is visible in how attention, self-control, and responsibility are actively governed under contemporary capitalism. This commentary therefore argues that dopamine detox should be understood not merely as a lifestyle trend or productivity technique, but as a neoliberal moral project that resonates with contemporary populist narratives. The reason behind this is that dopamine detox, instead of challenging the structural conditions that produce distraction and exhaustion, places the responsibility onto individuals. This relocation transforms self-discipline into moral virtue while also depoliticizing systemic inequalities embedded in the digital attention economy.

From Neuroscience to Moral Narrative

The scientific language surrounding dopamine detox is often misleading. In essence, the neuroscientific definition of dopamine is more complex than it simply being a “pleasure chemical.” It is a neurotransmitter that is involved in motivation, learning, and reward prediction. In fact, work by Berridge & Robinson (1998) demonstrates that dopamine is more closely associated with “wanting” and incentive salience than with pleasure itself. Clinical interventions related to dopamine regulation are also typically reserved for neurological or psychiatric conditions, bearing little resemblance to the lifestyle practices promoted online as “dopamine detox.”

Several scholars and clinicians further emphasize that dopamine detox lacks empirical grounding as a medical or neuroscientific intervention. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke notes that while excessive stimulation can indeed shape habits and compulsive behaviors, the idea of “resetting” dopamine through short-term abstinence is mainly metaphorical than clinical (Lembke, 2021). 

However, the concept has gained remarkable cultural traction, and for a reason. As Eva Illouz (2007) argues, therapeutic language often migrates into everyday life not for being scientifically precise, but because it provides moral narratives of self-improvement and personal responsibility. In the case of “dopamine detox” therapeutic language functions to frame distraction as personal weakness, and to frame restraint as a signal of maturity, rationality, and self-mastery.

The Attention Economy and Individualized Responsibility

Political economy of digital platforms is also a crucial component of the rise of dopamine detox. Systemic extraction and monetization of attention are building blocks of contemporary platform capitalism. Similarly, social media platforms rely on algorithmic personalization, feedback loops, and continuous stimulation to maximize engagement and advertising revenue (Zuboff & Schwandt, 2019).

The way in which social media infrastructures shape user behavior is demonstrated in various empirical research. One of them is Zulli & Zulli’s (2020) work saying TikTok fosters “imitation publics” by encouraging users to replicate trends, sounds, and formats through algorithmic visibility incentives. Another one is Schellewald’s ethnographic research demonstrating how TikTok’s “For You” page structures everyday interaction by curating content flows that blur the boundary between personal expression platform-driven circulation (Schellewald, 2024). 

While these structural dynamics exist, dopamine detox discourse rarely questions platform design, corporate incentives or regulatory responsibility, and instead reframes overstimulation as a problem of individual excess (too much scrolling, too much pleasure, too little discipline). This shift echoes Michel Foucault’s description of neoliberal governmentality, in which individuals are encouraged to govern themselves according to market rationalities rather than asking for collective or institutional intervention (Foucault et al., 2010). The result is a paradoxical form of resistance that leaves the underlying economic model of attention extraction intact.

Moralized Productivity and Populist Resonance

Dopamine detox resonates with contemporary forms of populism not through electoral rhetoric or charismatic leadership, but through moralization. Because cultural and neoliberal variants of populism often operate by translating structural and economic problems into questions of individual virtue and responsibility, dopamine detox mirrors populist logics that divide subjects into “disciplined” and “undisciplined,” or the self-controlled and the irresponsible. In this sense, dopamine detox does not mobilize populism through the language of “the people” versus “the elite,” but through a moral distinction between the disciplined and the undisciplined. This type of populism governs through self-blame; thus dopamine detox discourse exemplifies a depoliticized, affective form of populist reasoning. 

This framework transforms self-control into an economic and moral virtue, and productivity into a character trait instead of output. As observed by Jonathan Crary, even rest and withdrawal are increasingly instrumentalized as strategies to enhance future productivity rather than as forms of genuine refusal (Crary, 2014). 

Dopamine detox fits neatly into this moral economy. High-dopamine activities such as social media usage, gaming, and entertainment are viewed as threats to cognitive capital and economic self-worth. By contrast, abstention is celebrated as common sense and self-discipline. This logic mirrors Weberian asceticism in a digital age-updated way, where self-denial signals moral legitimacy and economic rationality (Weber, 1930). 

Crucially, this moralization obscures inequality as the capacity to disengage from platforms, curate “low dopamine” lifestyles or embrace minimalist routines assumes material security. For precarious workers, freelancers, and gig-economy participants, constant connectivity is more of a condition of survival than that of choice. 

Affective Governance and the Politics of “Calm”

“Affective governance,” a term coined by Sara Ahmed (2024) signifying the circulation of emotions that attach moral value to certain ways of being is an important component of dopamine detox narrative. This affective hierarchy favors calm, controlled subjects whose lives fit white-collar work and middle-class wellness norms. 

Crucially, this hierarchy is not sustained only through discourse, but also through aesthetics. It is reproduced through carefully curated visual and lifestyle cues involving neutral color palettes, quiet mornings, and minimalist routines, thereby connecting dopamine detox to broader cultural trends such as “clean girl” aesthetics, soft productivity, and wellness minimalism. 

Depoliticization Through Self-Blame

What makes dopamine detox particularly significant is its depoliticizing effect. It normalizes exhaustion as a personal management issue rather than a political one by turning structural problems of attention extraction into individualized moral responsibility. This shift mirrors broader neoliberal-populist dynamics in which systemic failures ranging from labor precarity to digital surveillance are reframed as matters of individual choice and discipline.

In this regard, dopamine detox illustrates a subtle but powerful form of contemporary populist reasoning: one that governs through affect, morality, and self-blame; rather than focusing on regulating platforms, addressing corporate power or rethinking digital labor. 

Conclusion: Detox Without Transformation?

This commentary argues that dopamine detox should be understood not as a scientifically grounded intervention, but as a neoliberal and moralized response to platform-induced overstimulation. It claims to resist distraction and burnout by framing them as failures of individual discipline which ends up in reinforcing the very economic logics causing them.

The political question then, is not about whether individuals need to reduce screen time, but why attention economies remain largely unregulated while self-discipline is constantly promoted as the solution. Another question that arises is if dopamine detox risks becoming yet another form of self-blame -rather than transformation- in an economy designed to exhaust, unless the political economy of platforms is addressed.

 

(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, but currently based in Shanghai. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

 

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (1998). “What is the role of dopamine in reward? Hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?” Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309–369.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8

Crary, J. (2014). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso.

Foucault, M.; Senellart, M.; Ewald, F.; Fontana, A.; Davidson, A.I. & Burchell, G.D. (2010). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79.

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Unabridged. Penguin Audio.

Müller, J. (2016). What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812293784

Schellewald, A. (2024). “Discussing the role of TikTok sharing practices in everyday social life.” International Journal of Communication, 18, 909–926.

Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner/Simon & Schuster.

Zuboff, S. & Schwandt, K. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Zulli, D. & Zulli, D. J. (2020). “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform.” New Media & Society, 24(8), 1872-1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 (Original work published 2022)

Voters queue at a polling station in Sendra village near Beawar during the Panchayati Raj elections in India on September 28, 2020, held amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with turnout exceeding 83 percent in the first phase across 25 districts. Photo: Dreamstime.

Voting with Freebies: How Direct Welfare Benefits Reshape Electoral Behaviour in India

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceGenderHomeVoice of Youth

In this analytically rich commentary, ECPS Youth Group member Saurabh Raj examines how direct welfare delivery is transforming electoral politics in India. Focusing on the recent Bihar assembly election, Raj shows how visible and targeted benefits—especially cash transfers to women—have become a powerful political language shaping voter participation and choice. Conceptualising this shift as “freebie populism,” the article argues that welfare now operates not only as a developmental tool but as a mode of political mobilisation, mediated through digital infrastructures and personalised state–citizen encounters. While caste, religion, and ideology remain influential, Raj highlights the growing importance of the individual beneficiary as a new axis of political belonging. Situating Bihar within broader interstate patterns, the article raises critical questions about democratic accountability, political reasoning, and the future trajectory of Indian democracy.

By Saurabh Raj*

The recent Bihar state[1] assembly election provides a useful lens to examine how welfare-centred mobilisation is reshaping contemporary electoral politics in India. Bihar recorded its highest ever voter turnout at 66.9 percent. The gender pattern was even more striking. Women voted at 71.6 percent while men voted at 62.8 percent. In 130 of the 243 constituencies, more women than men participated. These are not small variations or one time anomalies. They represent a structural shift in who participates and who determines electoral outcomes (Basu 2021).

The pattern of results closely mirrors this shift. The incumbent governing coalition won 114 of the 130 seats where women led the turnout which is close to 88 percent of all such constituencies. This alignment coincided with the scale and timing of welfare measures that reached women directly, warranting closer analytical attention. A direct cash transfer equivalent to approximately USD 120 to over twelve million women shortly before the election was only one part of a wider package that included pension increases, electricity bill relief and higher payments for frontline workers. The opposition responded with guarantee booklets, registration drives and promises of future support, as well as cards distributed by Jan Suraj[2] that signalled an alternative welfare imagination. Welfare was not an accessory to the campaign. It was the central axis around which political mobilisation occurred.

This election therefore makes visible a broader phenomenon that has been unfolding across India. Welfare centred electoral strategies are transforming political communication, voter reasoning and the emotional structure of democratic belonging. The rise of freebie populism, a term used here to describe the combination of populist rhetoric with highly visible and personalised welfare delivery, marks a distinct shift in how the state is imagined and how voters evaluate political actors. The term “freebie populism” is used here as an analytic category rather than a normative judgement. It refers not to the undesirability of welfare provision but to a specific political logic in which competitive electoral incentives privilege immediacy, visibility, and personalisation of benefits. This logic differs from rights-based or institutionalised welfare regimes, where entitlements are routinised and less directly tied to electoral cycles. The distinction is important, as the argument advanced here concerns the mode of political mobilisation rather than the legitimacy of welfare itself. ​​

Methods Note

This commentary draws on publicly available data from the Election Commission of India (Election Commission of India, 2024), state budget documents, press releases, field reporting in Hindi and English media and academic literature on populism, welfare delivery and voting behaviour. Interpretive arguments build on comparative work on populism (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017) and on scholarship that links welfare delivery to political participation (Khemani, 2022; Kruks Wisner, 2018). Additional reference is made to studies on gendered political engagement, digital welfare architecture and direct benefit transfer systems. The purpose of this article is analytical rather than predictive. It aims to situate the Bihar experience within a wider conceptual and empirical framework that illuminates the changing nature of electoral politics in India.

Classic Understandings of Populism

Cas Mudde defines populism as a thin centred ideology that imagines society as divided between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite” and insists that politics must directly express the general will (Mudde, 2004). Because it is thin centred, it can attach itself to a range of ideological projects including right wing, left wing or regionally specific imaginations of welfare, nationalism and identity. Mudde and Kaltwasser note that populism becomes powerful when leaders present themselves as direct protectors of ordinary citizens and construct emotional and symbolic shortcuts that bypass institutions and complex policy debates (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017).

Comparative research from Latin America demonstrates how populist leaders frequently combine emotive rhetoric with selective welfare delivery to cultivate direct affiliation with the masses (Hawkins, 2010; Roberts, 2015). These transfers are not incidental. They are political instruments through which belonging is reinforced and legitimacy is sustained. In India, populism has historically relied on religious mobilisation, symbolic gestures, charismatic leadership or caste-based appeals. Material transfers existed but did not shape political identity in the pronounced way witnessed today.

The current moment therefore extends rather than replaces classic understandings of populism. It adds a strong material and bureaucratically mediated dimension that is deeply embedded in the digital public infrastructure of the state. This dimension is responsible for the heightened immediacy with which political commitment is experienced.

Conceptualising Freebie Populism

Freebie populism represents a contemporary variant of populist mobilisation in which the primary bridge between leaders and citizens is constructed through direct material transfers rather than symbolic or rhetorical appeals alone. It does not replace classic definitions of populism but operationalises the promise of protection and recognition by making it tangible through targeted benefits. Cash transfers, subsidised electricity, expanded pensions, and free travel serve as visible proof of political commitment. These benefits act as recurring reminders that the state, often personified through political leadership, acknowledges the immediate material needs of citizens. Three features distinguish freebie populism from broader welfare politics. 

Immediacy is central, as transfers are often timed close to elections and their effects are felt within household budgets almost immediately. Voters therefore perceive the state not as a distant bureaucracy but as a source of immediate relief. 

Visibility is another critical feature. Digital transfers generate SMS alerts and bank notifications, and these alerts themselves function as instruments of political communication, turning a routine bureaucratic act into a concrete political moment. 

Personalised recognition is a third characteristic. Scholars note that direct transfers create a strong sense of being acknowledged by the state, particularly among women who manage household finances (Khemani, 2022). This personalisation transforms welfare from a bureaucratic entitlement into a more intimate political relationship between the individual and the state. 

Freebie populism does not erase caste or religious identities, which remain significant in shaping expectations and voting behaviour (Jaffrelot, 2021). However, welfare delivered directly to individual bank accounts establishes a new axis of political belonging. A woman from the Yadav or Paswan community may continue to retain group-based preferences, but her voting choices are also influenced by whether the state has reached her personally. The digital architecture of Aadhaar-linked transfers deepens this individualisation, making the relationship between the voter and the state more immediate, measurable, and experientially reliable.

Bihar and the Emergence of the Individual Beneficiary

The Bihar election demonstrates the mechanics of freebie populism with unusual clarity because the scale of targeted transfers was unprecedented. The distribution of ten thousand rupees to more than one crore twenty lakh women created a widespread perception that the state was acknowledging their economic vulnerability. This was part of a larger environment that included electricity bill relief, increased pensions and higher remuneration for frontline workers. These measures were repeatedly communicated through public meetings, local level messaging and digital outreach, ensuring that beneficiaries associated them with the ruling leadership.

The opposition attempted to counter this by centring women in its own campaign. Guarantee booklets, self-registration drives and targeted promises sought to build an alternative welfare narrative. Jan Suraj’s cards, for instance, attempted to construct a future oriented welfare claim. Yet the immediacy of actual deposits seemed to carry greater weight than future promises. Voters were able to verify receipt of benefits in the most tangible sense.

Turnout and voting patterns align closely with this political strategy. Women led the turnout in 130 constituencies, and the incumbent governing coalition won 114 of these. The fact that this alignment occurred during a period of intense welfare messaging suggests the strong influence of direct benefits on electoral behaviour. The political message materialised not as an abstract claim but as a verified deposit received through a mobile phone alert. Politics was increasingly experienced through the position of the individual beneficiary.

This alignment does not imply that welfare purchases votes. Rather it indicates that welfare is functioning as a channel through which political recognition, credibility and responsiveness are evaluated. Voters appear to be rewarding the government for delivering measurable relief and penalising actors whose promises remain untested.

Shifting Political Behaviour

The Bihar data indicates that freebie populism is reshaping political behaviour in ways that build on and extend earlier research. Scholars have noted that low-income voters are highly strategic and responsive to welfare delivery, often making reasoned decisions based on evidence of state performance (Khemani, 2022; Kruks Wisner, 2018). The Bihar experience reinforces this insight and highlights three important dimensions of change. 

First, welfare is increasingly becoming the primary language of political recognition. Women voters demonstrated exceptionally high turnout and a strong preference alignment in constituencies where welfare delivery was both visible and recent, suggesting that direct transfers and other targeted benefits have emerged as key instruments through which citizens assess the state’s commitment. 

Second, citizenship itself is being experienced through the household economy. This does not reduce political engagement to a transactional exchange but instead reflects a new democratic imagination in which the state operates as a direct economic actor within the household. For many women, welfare programmes provide relief from domestic pressures, enhance financial independence, and support caregiving responsibilities, thereby strengthening political agency. At the same time, political reasoning is increasingly grounded in immediacy. 

Third, freebie populism shifts the focus from abstract or long term developmental claims toward the voter’s immediate lived experience. Citizens evaluate political actors on the credibility, timing, and scale of benefit delivery and the responsiveness they witness in practice. This approach does not indicate passivity; rather, it reflects active and informed political calculation based on tangible outcomes and personal experience (Chauchard, 2017). 

Taken together, these patterns suggest that political loyalty is increasingly shaped by repeated and recognisable acts of recognition rather than broad ideological or identity-based appeals, signalling a profound shift in how democratic engagement is conceptualised and practiced.

These patterns resonate with findings from other democracies where targeted welfare provision has become central to electoral competition, including parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. In such contexts, welfare delivery increasingly functions as both policy and political communication, blurring the boundary between governance and mobilisation. The Indian case therefore contributes to a growing comparative literature on how material distribution reshapes democratic participation under conditions of economic precarity.

Patterns Beyond Bihar

The pattern observed in Bihar is not an isolated development but part of a broader transformation in electoral politics across multiple Indian states. Welfare centred strategies have become essential elements of political competition, and their design increasingly reflects the logic of freebie populism, where visible and immediate benefits shape political belonging and voter behaviour. Each state offers a slightly different model, yet all demonstrate the growing centrality of targeted welfare in shaping electoral outcomes.

Jharkhand provides a clear example of this shift. The state expanded support for low-income women through age linked educational transfers and targeted assistance schemes that reached households directly. These interventions were not presented merely as development initiatives but became central to political communication, especially in rural districts where economic insecurity remains acute. The emphasis on young women and first-generation learners created a perception that the state was intervening meaningfully in the life chances of vulnerable households. Political actors highlighted these measures during election campaigns, illustrating how welfare has become a key electoral asset.

Maharashtra further demonstrates the consolidation of welfare centred politics. The Ladki Bahin Scheme placed women at the centre of the electoral narrative by offering regular financial assistance and presenting the state as an active participant in household welfare. The scheme was supported by recognisable branding, sustained outreach and continuous communication that associated the ruling leadership with direct support for women. This combination of financial transfers and symbolic visibility strengthened the perception that welfare was both a right and a political commitment, reinforcing the link between beneficiaries and the state.

Telangana presents another version of this emerging trend. Successive governments have relied heavily on targeted welfare, particularly through agricultural support schemes, marriage assistance programmes and community specific initiatives. These policies created strong emotional and material incentives for distinct social groups and demonstrated that welfare could be used strategically to cultivate enduring political alliances. Welfare delivery in Telangana has become an essential component of electoral mobilisation rather than a supplementary tool and continues to play a decisive role in shaping partisan loyalty.

Tamil Nadu offers one of the longest running traditions of welfare linked mobilisation in India. The contemporary phase builds on earlier frameworks but introduces new elements such as free bus travel for women, expanded meal schemes, higher pensions and targeted relief for vulnerable households. Welfare delivery is deeply integrated into political identity and party narratives. Campaigns consistently highlight the immediacy and continuity of state support, reinforcing the idea that welfare programmes are expressions of political care rather than bureaucratic entitlements.

Across these states, welfare is framed not merely as development but as a direct political relationship. This relationship is mediated through digital systems that enable individual bank transfers, local mobilisation networks that translate policy into political communication, frontline workers who act as intermediaries between the state and beneficiaries and the emotional resonance generated when citizens experience state recognition in concrete and material form. Together, these elements show how freebie populism has become a national phenomenon shaping political participation and redefining the meaning of electoral competition.

However, important differences remain across states. In Tamil Nadu and other states, welfare programmes are embedded within long-standing party institutions and ideological narratives, reducing their electoral immediacy. In contrast, states such as Bihar and Jharkhand exhibit a more episodic and election-timed deployment of benefits, intensifying their political salience. These variations suggest that freebie populism operates most strongly where welfare delivery is newly individualised and weakly institutionalised.

Limits of Attribution and Scope of Argument

This article advances an interpretive rather than causal argument between welfare transfers and electoral outcomes. Voting behaviour is shaped by multiple overlapping factors, including caste alignments, candidate credibility, party organisation, and broader political narratives. The observed alignment between women-led turnout and electoral outcomes in Bihar should therefore be read as indicative rather than deterministic.

The argument advanced here is that welfare delivery has acquired heightened political salience under conditions of digital transfer, electoral competition, and economic precarity. Direct benefits function as signals of state responsiveness that voters incorporate into broader political reasoning. This does not imply political passivity or vote-buying; rather, it reflects strategic and experiential evaluation by citizens based on verifiable state action. Future research using booth-level data or longitudinal beneficiary tracking would allow for more precise estimation of causal effects.

Conclusion

Welfare centred mobilisation has become a central feature of contemporary electoral competition in India. The Bihar assembly election provides a useful illustration of how direct and visible welfare delivery is reshaping patterns of political participation by foregrounding the individual beneficiary as a significant site of democratic engagement. High female turnout and the alignment of women dominated constituencies with electoral outcomes underline the growing importance of welfare as a medium through which citizens experience and evaluate state responsiveness.

This shift does not indicate a decline in political reasoning or a reduction of citizenship to transactional exchange. Instead, it reflects a reorientation of democratic judgement in which voters increasingly rely on observable and verifiable state action to assess political credibility. Welfare delivery, mediated through digital and bureaucratic systems, functions not only as policy intervention but also as a communicative practice that signals recognition, reliability, and proximity between the state and citizens.

At the same time, the increasing centrality of welfare in electoral mobilisation raises important questions for democratic accountability. An emphasis on immediacy and visibility may encourage short term distributive competition at the expense of institutional consolidation and sustained policy debate. As electoral legitimacy becomes more closely tied to the timing and scale of benefits, political contestation risks narrowing to questions of delivery rather than deliberation.

The broader challenge for Indian democracy therefore lies not in the expansion of welfare itself but in the political logic through which welfare is mobilised. Understanding how welfare delivery reshapes political participation, voter reasoning, and experiences of citizenship is essential to assessing the evolving character of democratic practice in India. The Bihar case suggests that future electoral outcomes will increasingly be shaped by how convincingly the state makes itself present in the everyday lives of citizens, alongside enduring influences of identity, ideology, and organisation. Beyond India, the analysis highlights how welfare delivery can reconfigure democratic engagement in contexts where citizens encounter the state most directly through material transfers.

 

(*) Saurabh Raj is a core team member at the Indian School of Democracy and is associated with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). He has a decade of experience in Indian politics and elections.

 

References

Aiyar, Y., and Walton, M. (2015). “Rights, accountability and citizenship: Examining India’s social welfare architecture.” Accountability Initiative.

Basu, P. (2021). “Women and electoral participation in India: Changing patterns of turnout and political engagement.” Economic and Political Weekly, 56(12), 34 to 42.

Chauchard, S. (2017). Why representation matters: The meaning of ethnic quotas in rural India. Cambridge University Press.

Election Commission of India. (2024). State Assembly Election Data: Bihar.

Hawkins, K. A. (2010). Venezuela’s Chavismo and populism in comparative perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Jaffrelot, C. (2021). Modi’s India: Hindu nationalism and the rise of ethnic democracy. Princeton University Press.

Khemani, S. (2022). “Political economy of welfare delivery in India.” World Bank Research Observer, 37(2), 245 to 270.

Kruks Wisner, G. (2018). Claiming the state: Active citizenship and social welfare in rural India. Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541 to 563.

Mudde, C., and Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, K. M. (2015). Changing course in Latin America: Party systems in the neoliberal era. Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

[1] Bihar, one of India’s most populous and economically disadvantaged states, has historically exhibited lower levels of state capacity and social welfare penetration, making recent shifts in voter participation particularly significant.

[2] A recently formed political party in Bihar positioning itself around governance and welfare reform.

Turkish women took action on May 8, 2020 in Istanbul not to repeal the Istanbul Convention, which provides protection against domestic and male violence. Photo: Emre Orman.

Iran and Turkey through ‘The Golden Cage’ and ‘Contextual Gendered Racialization’ Lens: Populism, Law, Gender and Freedom

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceGenderHomeHuman Rights

In this commentary, Dr. Hafza Girdap offers a compelling comparative analysis of populism, law, gender, and freedom across two authoritarian contexts. Bringing Shirin Ebadi’s “The Golden Cage” into dialogue with transnational feminist theory, Dr. Girdap examines how populist regimes in Iran and Turkey moralize “the people,” narrow citizenship, and weaponize law to discipline dissent—particularly women’s dissent. Drawing on her original framework of contextual gendered racialization, she shows how gender governance operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging. The article foregrounds women’s resistance as a form of epistemic, legal, and care-centered praxis, redefining freedom not as order or security, but as memory, accountability, and collective struggle beyond the confines of the “golden cage.”

By Hafza Girdap

This piece offers a condensed commentary drawn from a broader, ongoing project of mine that seeks to trace a coherent trajectory bridging sociology, feminist theory, and human rights practice. Centering the experiences of racialized and marginalized women, my project examines how women actively reclaim voice, produce knowledge, and build solidarities across borders. By integrating scholarship with activism, it aims not only to interpret structures of oppression but also to intervene in them—amplifying marginalized women’s voices, reshaping public discourse, and contributing to justice-oriented social change at both local and global levels.

Within this framework, the article examines populism, gendered repression, and resistance in Iran and Turkey by bringing Shirin Ebadi’s The Golden Cage into dialogue with transnational feminist theory and my conceptual framework of contextual gendered racialization.

Across both cases, populism constructs a moralized vision of “the people,” narrows plural citizenship, and weaponizes law to discipline dissent, particularly women’s dissent. Read together, Iran and Turkey reveal a shared trajectory from revolutionary or reformist promise to authoritarian consolidation, where legality becomes an instrument of domination, intimacy is reorganized by fear, and women’s resistance redefines freedom not as comfort or order, but as accountability, memory, and collective care (Shabnam, 2016).

Populism and the Moral Community

In post-1979 Iran, Islamist populism intertwined anti-imperialism with religious moralism, deifying state power as the authentic voice of the ummah and framing dissent as moral deviance or foreign betrayal. Hardship, repression, and top-down governance are justified as ethical sacrifice, while sovereignty is equated with the regime itself (Qaderi et al., 2023; V for Human, 2025; Bottura, 2024).  

In Turkey, the populism of ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan evolved from counter-Kemalist majoritarianism into a religio-nationalist project that performs unity through slogans such as “one nation, one flag, one religion,” increasingly centralizing authority in the figure of the leader. While initially framed as democratizing, this project narrowed citizenship through moral conformity, loyalty, and cultural homogeneity (Yalvaç & Joseph, 2019; Yabancı, 2022). 

Ebadi’s metaphor of the “golden cage” captures the populist bargain in both contexts: material security, national pride, and moral certainty are offered in exchange for silence. Belonging becomes conditional, and pluralism is redefined as threat. Populism thus does not merely mobilize “the people”; it redraws their boundaries.

From Rule of Law to Rule-by-Law

Ebadi’s central assertion, “law without justice is violence,” resonates powerfully across both cases. In Iran, juridical language legitimates repression through moralized penalties, surveillance, and gender policing. Courts, decrees, and security forces recode dissent, especially women’s défiance, as disorder, immorality, or national betrayal. Following the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, intensified surveillance technologies and punitive legislation targeted women’s everyday presence in public space (V for Human, 2025, Makooi, 2025).

In Turkey, a shift from institutional reform to rule-by-law recalibrated the judiciary, media, and religious institutions to executive power. Gender governance became a central showcase of this transformation. The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention via presidential decree exemplified how formal legality can be used to hollow out rights while projecting a moralized policy turn. In both contexts, legality masks authoritarian consolidation, transforming law into a technology of control rather than protection (Girdap, 2021; Sarac et al., 2023).

Family, Fear, and Everyday Life

The Golden Cage demonstrates how authoritarianism penetrates the most intimate spaces of life. Ebadi’s family narrative traces siblings forced into divergent ethical trajectories; revolutionary idealism punished by imprisonment or execution, loyalist complicity pursued for survival, exile chosen at the cost of belonging. Love and loyalty become calculations of risk under surveillance.

Ebadi’s family members function as ethical projections under coercion: the revolutionary idealist destroyed by the system, the loyalist navigating compromise at psychological cost, and the exile living with safety and loss. Ebadi herself stands as the ethical center, a jurist-witness insisting that memory is a civic duty and that law must be reclaimed for justice. Her feminism is not abstract; it is anchored in accountability, testimony, and refusal to forget.

Contemporary Turkey echoes this intimate violence. Employment bans, travel restrictions, stigmatization of dissidents, and criminalization of speech ripple through households. Families become sites of risk management; ordinary communication is shaped by caution. The political becomes domestic, and repression is lived not only through spectacular events but through everyday self-censorship and fractured trust.

Gender as the Authoritarian and Democratic Measure

Gender emerges as both the primary target of authoritarian control and the most sensitive measure of democratic erosion. In Iran, women led the Woman, Life, Freedom movement following the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. Despite lethal repression, mass arrests, and intensified surveillance, women’s everyday practices, particularly in urban spaces, signal irreversible shifts in presence, visibility, and refusal (European Parliament, 2022; Blout, 2025).

In Turkey, women’s citizenship is increasingly restricted into motherhood, family duty, and moral loyalty. Feminism and LGBTQI+ activism are framed as moral and foreign threats, while patriarchal governance is legitimated through religious and nationalist discourse. The Istanbul Convention withdrawal galvanized resistance, making gender a central site through which democratic backsliding and civic resilience are simultaneously revealed.

My framework of contextual gendered racialization sharpens this analysis by showing how Sunni Turkishness is privileged through an ethno-religious “Turkishness Contract,” producing double marginalization for Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, and dissenting women. Gendered governance thus operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging (Unlu, 2023).

Transnational Racialization and Migration

Racialization travels across borders. In Turkey, difference is marked through proximity to dominant Sunni Turkish identity rather than skin color; minority women are symbolically racialized as deviant or suspect. In the United States, Muslim women become hyper-visible within Islamophobic regimes of surveillance, legally white, socially brown (Aziz, 2020). Hijab, accent, and names trigger institutional scrutiny across immigration, healthcare, education, and labor.

Women respond through strategic identity management: negotiating visibility, silence, and speech; altering dress or disclosure; cultivating selective belonging. These practices constitute feminist praxis rather than mere adaptation, resisting both authoritarian repression and reductive Western feminist frames. Situated feminisms emerge from lived negotiation rather than abstraction (Girdap, 2025).

Law, Memory, and Care as Resistance

Across Iran and Turkey, women deploy diverse resistance strategies that transform opposition from episodic protest into durable institution-building. Ebadi’s ethic of defending rights even within captured institutions finds parallels in feminist lawfare and documentation practices in Turkey. Litigation, femicide databases, survivor testimonies, and non-enforcement audits preserve public memory and sustain accountability even when legal victories are limited. As national protections erode, opposition-led municipalities expand shelters, hotlines, training, and care infrastructures, producing constituent feminism beyond electoral cycles. Campaigns such as #İstanbulSözleşmesiYaşatır (#IstanbulConventionSavesLives) and recurring protests after femicides sustain public scrutiny and agenda pressure. Groups like Mor Dayanışma link gender violence to labor precarity, militarism, ethnic repression, and anti-LGBTQI+ moral panics, expanding coalitions and articulating care-centered, class-conscious feminist praxis (Mor Dayanışma, 2025; Najdi, 2025; Şeker & Sönmezocak, 2021).

Conclusion: Freedom Beyond the Golden Cage

Bringing Ebadi’s ethic of law, memory, and freedom together with a transnational feminist analysis clarifies the stakes of the Iran–Turkey comparison. In both contexts, populism narrows [established] citizenship into a moral community, and gender becomes the key nexus of belonging. Yet women’s epistemic and practical resistance, through legal advocacy, documentation, care spaces, migration, and transnational solidarity, takes a huge step to widen citizenship back into rights, pluralism, and accountability.

Freedom, in this sense, is not comfort or order. It is collective remembering, feminist institution-building, and sustained struggle against normalization. The golden cage is broken not by silence, but by women who insist on memory, justice, and shared political futures across borders.

 

References

Aziz, Sahar F. (2020). “Legally White, Socially Brown: Racialization of Middle Eastern Americans.” In: Routledge Handbook on Islam and Race (ed. Zain Abdullah), Rutgers Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3592699 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3592699

Blout, Emily. (2025, September 16). “Resisting Iran’s High-Tech War on Women Three Years After Mahsa Amini’s Death.” Stimson. https://www.stimson.org/2025/resisting-irans-high-tech-war-on-women-mahsa-amini/

Bottura, Beatrice. (2024). “Theocracy, Radicalism and Islamist/Secular Populism in Iran, Afghanistan & Tajikistan.”European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). October 18, 2024. https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0089

European Parliament. (2022). Protests in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini.https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/733671/EPRS_ATA%282022%29733671_EN.pdf

Girdap, Hafza. (2021). “Right-wing populism, political Islam, and the Istanbul Convention.” European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS). https://www.populismstudies.org/right-wing-populism-political-islam-and-the-istanbul-convention/

Girdap, H. (2025). “Racialization and Response Through Embodied Identification.” In: From a Shadow to a Person: A Gender Studies Assessment of Women in the Middle East, edited by Shilan Fuad Hussain, Routledge, manuscript in preparation.

Holliday, Shabnam J. (2016). “The legacy of subalternity and Gramsci’s national–popular: populist discourse in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Third World Quarterly, 37:5, 917-933, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1113872

Makooi, Bahar. (2025, September 9). “Three years after Mahsa Amini’s death, Iranian women have seized ‘irreversible’ liberties.” France 24. https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250916-three-years-after-mahsa-amini-death-iranian-women-have-seized-irreversible-liberties

Mor Dayanışma. (2025, February 11). “Women, Work, and War: Organizing and Resistance in Turkey – an Interview with Mor Dayanışma.” https://www.mordayanisma.org/2025/02/11/women-work-and-war-organizing-and-resistance-in-turkey-an-interview-with-mor-dayanisma/

Najdi, Youhanna. (2025, September 16). “Mahsa Amini: 3 years on, will Iran face fresh protests?” DW.https://www.dw.com/en/mahsa-amini-3-years-on-will-iran-face-fresh-protests/a-74000756

Qaderi, H.; Delavari, A. and Golmohammadi, A. (2023). “Populism and Politics in Iran after the Islamic Revolution: Content Analysis of Presidential Speeches from 1989 to 2017.” Political Strategic Studies, 12(44), 9-58. doi: 10.22054/qpss.2022.66333.3002

Sarac, B. N.; Girdap, H., & Hiemstra, N. (2023). “Gendered state violence and post-coup migration out of Turkey.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 99, 102796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102796

Şeker, Berfu and Sönmezocak, Ezel Buse. (2021, June). “Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention: War on Gender Equality in Turkey.” Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/06292021_Freedom_House_Turkey_Policy_Brief-2-Withdrawal-from-the-Istanbul-Convention.pdf

Unlu, B. (2023). “The Turkishness contract and the formation of Turkishness.” In: F. M. Gocek & A. Alemdaroglu (Eds.), Kurds in Dark Times. Syracuse University Press.

V for Human (2025, August 12). Erased from the Scene: Türkiye’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. https://www.vforhuman.org/publications/erased-from-the-scene

Yabancı, B. (2022). “Religion, nationalism, and populism in Turkey under the AKP.” Middle East Institute. https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2022-10/Religion%2C%20Nationalism%2C%20and%20Populism%20in%20Turkey%20Under%20the%20AKP.pdf

Yalvaç, F. & Joseph, J. (2019). “Understanding populist politics in Turkey: a hegemonic depth approach.” Review of International Studies, 45(5), 786–804. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26843268

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is showing victory sign with both hand to supporters at Bharatiya Janata Party office amid the results of the Indian General Elections 2024 in New Delhi, India on June 4 2024. Photo: PradeepGaurs.

Bihar Provincial Assembly Elections Boost Modi’s Populism

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHome

In his incisive analysis, Dr. Amir Ali, examines how the 2025 Bihar Provincial Assembly elections have reinvigorated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist dominance in Indian politics. Situating Bihar’s results within India’s shifting electoral landscape, Dr. Ali shows how the BJP-led coalition’s victory undermines expectations of anti-incumbency following the party’s 2024 parliamentary setback. He critically engages controversies surrounding the Election Commission of India, welfare-driven electoral strategies, and the shrinking space for opposition politics. Drawing on his broader scholarship on populism, democracy, and sovereignty, Dr. Ali warns that the consolidation of power from “Parliament to Panchayat” raises serious concerns for institutional autonomy and democratic accountability in what V-Dem has termed an “electoral autocracy.”

Amir Ali*

The recently concluded election in the eastern Indian province of Bihar in early November 2025 was a shot in the arm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bihar is one of the poorest provinces of the country with a per capita income that is a mere fraction of richer provinces. High unemployment levels result in outflux of unskilled workers. Among the controversies that plagued the Bihar assembly elections was the running of special trains carrying Bihari workers from the northern province of Haryana that abuts the national capital Delhi, back to their native province, to ensure they could vote.

Despite its economic backwardness, Bihar is politically very important. The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is today the dominant political party in the country. It has replaced the earlier one-party dominant system of the Indian National Congress, that led India’s freedom struggle against British colonial rule. The BJP is at the center of the ruling coalition called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). In the province of Bihar, the coalition partner of the BJP is the Janata Dal United JD(U) whose party boss, Nitish Kumar has been Chief Minister since 2005. Nitish Kumar is a leader whose political origins lie in samaajwaad or Indian socialism. Mr. Kumar is also known for his constant political flip-flops as he has constantly switched sides to continue in power. Back in 2015 he successfully fought the election in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). This time the RJD was competing against him, winning only 25 seats.

The alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal United JD(U) performed surprisingly well, winning together with other smaller allied parties, 202 seats in the 243-seat legislative assembly. The result was a major blow for the opposition I.N.D.I.A alliance that includes the once powerful Congress Party. The resounding victory of the ruling BJP led alliance means a further political consolidation, captured in a stated desire to prevail over Indian politics from ‘Parliament to Panchayat’ (the lowest tier of local self-governance at the level of the village). The ruling BJP has also expressed an intent to rid the country of the supposed baleful presence of the Congress that is captured in the Hindi expression of a Congress mukt Bharat (India/Bharat rid of the Congress). 

The shrinking of the opposition becomes a cause for concern, especially as India has been characterized by the V-Dem institute as an ‘electoral autocracy.’ The provincial assembly election in Bihar needs to be seen in the backdrop of the 2024 parliamentary elections in which the ruling BJP suffered a setback as its numbers declined from 303 in 2019 to 240, forcing it into relying on significant support from coalition partners. This was viewed by the opposition as signaling a waning of the electoral dominance of the BJP.

Two Developments in the Run-up to the Election

The run up to the Bihar assembly election in early November 2025 was marked by two developments. The first was the announcement by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, four months prior to the elections. This became controversial on account of the onerous demands of documentation put on voters to ensure their names were on the voters’ list. The opposition immediately protested and appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which did not stop the SIR exercise, but demanded lenient consideration in terms of the documents that voters were required to produce. The opposition had hoped to make the revision of electoral rolls an issue in the elections, suggesting in their campaigns that the ruling BJP was conniving with the Election Commission of India to ‘steal’ votes. 

The aspersions cast on the Election Commission of India are unfortunate. It is a constitutional body that under Article 324 of the constitution is guaranteed autonomy from the executive to conduct free and fair elections. The Election Commission of India has generally been above board in terms of its conduct with a succession of Chief Election Commissioners, who head the institution, taking independently assertive positions against ruling governments. If the opposition’s allegations about lack of autonomy of the Election Commission are true, then this would tend to underline the anti-institutional element, characteristic of much populist politics that while exaggeratedly elevating the purity of the people, excoriates the very institutions that mediate the people’s will. The leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party has conducted a series of explosive press conferences where he has displayed proof of the Election Commission of India’s ‘conniving’ with the ruling BJP to ensure the latter’s electoral victory.

The second significant development in the run up to the elections was the decision taken by the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar to announce the disbursal of ten thousand rupees (95.75 Euros) for women voters under a scheme to promote women’s self-employment. Analysts felt that this was decisive in terms of winning the elections for the ruling NDA coalition. Opponents of the ruling coalition cried foul at the decision announced in late September 2025. This was just before the model code of conduct came into place. Such announcements are seen as an infringement of the model code of conduct as they may induce votes in favor of the ruling party.

Whither Anti-incumbency?

The election results from Bihar impart momentum to the ruling BJP led coalition as the year 2025 closes. Next year in early 2026, provincial assembly elections are due in two more states further to the east of Bihar, in the provinces of West Bengal and Assam. The elections result in Bihar, especially considered in the light of the electoral setback that the BJP suffered in the parliamentary elections at the federal level in early 2024, seem to put paid to the phenomenon of anti-incumbency which refers to the uphill task that an incumbent party experiences as it seeks re-election. The BJP’s dominance seems to defy what in India is called the law of anti-incumbency.

 

(*) Dr. Amir Ali is a faculty member at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Prior to this he taught at the Department of Political Science, Jamia Millia Islamia University. He was Agatha Harrison Memorial Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford between the years 2012 to 2014. He has authored two books South Asian Islam and British Multiculturalism (Routledge, 2016) and Brexit and Liberal Democracy: Populism, Sovereignty and the Nation-State (Routledge, 2022). His areas of teaching, research and writing are political theory, multiculturalism, group rights, British politics and political Islam. His regularly written political commentary on Indian and global politics has appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, Al Jazeera English, the Indian periodical Outlook and in Indian broadsheet newspapers such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, and The Telegraph. 

Refugee children are helped ashore after arriving by boat from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, capturing a moment where relief and suffering coexist. Photo: Aleksandr Lutsenko.

The Humanity of Migration

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman RightsMigrationVoice of Youth

In this timely and powerful Voice of Youth (VoY) essay, Emmanouela Papapavlou reframes migration not as a crisis or threat, but as a defining human reality of the twenty-first century. Moving beyond populist slogans and fear-based rhetoric, the piece exposes the gap between political discourse and the lived experiences of migrants—marked by legal precarity, exclusion, and everyday vulnerability. It critically interrogates the selective use of “legality” in public debates and highlights how populism redirects anger away from power and toward the powerless. Importantly, the article identifies Generation Z as a potential counterforce, emphasizing its everyday engagement with diversity and its rejection of xenophobic narratives. Published on the occasion of International Migrants Day, the essay is a compelling call to restore dignity, humanity, and ethical responsibility to migration politics.

By Emmanouela Papapavlou*

In an age of global instability, migration is not an exception and not some marginal social phenomenon, it is a defining feature of the modern world. Wars, political persecution, economic collapse, environmental disasters and inequality push millions to leave their homes in search of safety, opportunity, and a sense of dignity. Within this reality, the 18th of December, International Migrants Day, is not just another “awareness day,” it is a powerful reminder that migration is one of the most central human experiences of the twenty-first century, and that the way we talk about it in public spaces has real consequences on real lives.

Despite its profoundly human dimension, migration has become one of the most polarized subjects in global politics. Populist rhetoric, flourishing across Europe, the United States, and beyond, finds in the “migrant” the perfect target, an “other” onto whom fears, insecurities, and imagined threats can be projected. Migrants are framed as a faceless mass, as an economic burden, as a cultural threat, or even as enemies of national security. Yet the reality of migration is dramatically different from these oversimplified narratives.

For millions, migration is not a choice, it is a necessity. And for those who manage to reach countries of arrival, the journey does not end, it begins. Access to legal documents, endless visa backlogs, the slow and often arbitrary asylum process, and the requirements for work authorization create a system that is frequently insurmountable. In the United States, for example, hundreds of thousands of people live for years without papers, not because they refuse to comply, but because the system is designed to delay, discourage, and exclude. Even proving that you qualify for asylum often requires documents that no one could possibly rescue while fleeing a bombed home or a collapsing life.

While political discourse focuses obsessively on “flows” and “invasions,” what almost never gets discussed is the actual everyday reality of migrants, the labor exploitation, the lack of access to healthcare or education, the constant uncertainty of “will I be allowed to stay tomorrow,” the threat of deportation, the social stigma, the ghettoization, the absence of meaningful integration. Many states treat migration as a problem that must be “controlled,” not as a social fact that must be understood, integrated, and addressed with humanity.

International Migrants Day exists precisely because of this gap, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between what is said and what people live. It is a day dedicated to rights and dignity, to the fundamental right to move and to the right to live without fear. It is also a reminder that societies do not show their humanity in how they treat the powerful, but in how they treat the vulnerable.

Here we see another dimension of populism, the selective invocation of “legality.” Public debate suddenly fills with people who appear deeply committed to the rule of law when the conversation turns to migrants. “They came illegally,” they say, as if respect for the law were a consistent personal value and not something invoked only when convenient. Because the same people who express moral outrage at a refugee are often the same people who consider underage drinking normal, who speed on the highway, who drive under the influence, who use recreational substances, who pirate movies, music, and games without a second thought. In those cases, the law becomes a “technicality,” and strictness evaporates.

Yet when the “offender” is someone who ran from war, when it is a mother holding a child in a boat, when it is a young person who left everything behind just to survive, then suddenly the law becomes absolute and unforgiving. And even worse, we almost never see the same outrage when the offenders are powerful, corrupt politicians who steal public funds, evade taxes, exploit systems for personal gain, or embezzle compensations. In those situations, anger disappears. Outrage fades. “Illegality” becomes almost invisible.

This contradiction has nothing to do with the law. It has everything to do with control, with fear, and with the political function of populism, which is to divert collective anger away from those who cause injustice, and direct it instead toward those who are least able to defend themselves.

Yet within this landscape, there is a source of hope, and it comes from Generation Z. Gen Z is the first generation in history to grow up fully online, exposed every day to the lives of people across the world, from every background and every context. Diversity is not perceived as a threat; it is an intrinsic part of reality. For this generation, multiculturalism is not an ideological position, it is the texture of daily life in schools, universities, neighborhoods, and digital spaces.

Young people do not see migrants as outsiders, they are classmates, friends, coworkers, neighbors. They are the stories shared on social media, the voices heard without intermediaries, the people facing the same universal anxieties, work, education, safety, rights. Take the example of someone like Zohran Mamdani, who arrived in the United States as a child refugee and eventually became an elected representative in New York. His story is not an exception, it is a sign of a new era in which identity is shaped not by where you were born, but by who you are and what you contribute to your community.

What becomes clear is that Gen Z, through everyday contact with diverse cultures and people, rejects fear based rhetoric. They are not easily persuaded by politicians who weaponize xenophobia, and they do not accept narratives of “threat” without question. They see migration as a human reality, not as a tool for propaganda. And this generational shift carries enormous political weight for the future.

If we truly want to honor International Migrants Day, it is not enough to acknowledge its existence. We must promote policies that allow for safe, legal, and humane migration, support integration programs that go beyond survival and lead to participation and dignity, reform asylum and legalization systems so they do not trap people in bureaucratic limbo, and build societies that recognize diversity not as a danger but as a collective strength.

Because at the end of the day, the question we must ask is simple, and its simplicity is what makes it so revealing: How can a human being be considered “illegal” on an earth we were all born into? How can anyone be treated as worthless simply because they were born a few kilometers away?

If we cannot answer that clearly, then perhaps International Migrants Day exists to remind us that before borders, politics, and identities, we are, above all, human.

(*) Emmanouela Papapavlou is a high school student from Thessaloniki, Greece, deeply passionate about social and political issues. She has actively participated in Model United Nations and other youth forums, serving as a chairperson in multiple conferences and winning awards in Greek debate competitions. Writing is her greatest passion, and she loves using it to explore democracy, civic engagement, and human rights. Her dream is to share her ideas, inspire action, and amplify the voices of young people who want to make a difference. Email: emmanpapapavlou@gmail.com

Kurdish festival Newroz being celebrated in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 20, 2011. Photo: Sadık Güleç.

Peace with the Kurds in Turkey: What about It?

by CommentariesEditor’s ChoiceHomeHuman Rights

In this incisive analysis, political scientist Professor Cengiz Aktar examines Ankara’s latest initiative toward the Kurds, arguing that what has been presented as a peace process is instead a populist performance of reconciliation. Professor Aktar shows how Turkey’s government frames “brotherhood,” “national unity,” and “terror-free Turkey” as harmonious goals, even though such populist language masks structural inequalities and omits democratic guarantees for Kurdish identity. With Abdullah Öcalan’s call for dissolution of the PKK left unreciprocated, and no mechanisms for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR), truth-seeking, or legal reform, Professor Aktar warns that the process risks being symbolic rather than transformative. He suggests that populism here functions not as conflict resolution, but as political containment — strengthening autocratic power while offering no durable settlement.

By Cengiz Aktar

Turkey’s long-running conflicts with its ethnic and/or religious groups have been on the permanent agenda for more than a century. Various attempts by successive rulers to suppress or resolve these conflicts have drawn the attention of Turkey watchers and international public opinion throughout this period.

Interestingly, the latest initiative by the Ankara regime toward the Kurds—although seemingly ground-breaking at first glance—has largely gone unnoticed by global media outlets, and even more so by the wider public abroad. Only Western governments have, rather unenthusiastically, welcomed the developments.

Why such a lack of interest? Most likely because there is no serious or lasting peace perspective visible at the end of the process.

The genocide in Gaza, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and the massacres and famine in Sudan are now almost entirely dominating the headlines. Nevertheless, a genuine “Kurdish peace” would normally contain—at least partially—the seeds of region-wide normalization. Yet no one seems to detect such a dynamic in Ankara’s initiative, and rightly so.

Let us briefly recall the background.

Since the surprise launch of the so-called “process” on October 1, 2024, a highly unusual modus operandi has been underway to address this decades-old military conflict.

First, contrary to well-established conflict-resolution practices, the parties involved are not on equal footing. The Kurdish leader remains in prison and is not free in his movements or actions. That asymmetry alone speaks volumes about the genuineness of the process.

Since his capture and imprisonment twenty-five years ago, Ankara has approached Abdullah Öcalan three times with the same objective: to pressure him to end the armed struggle and push for the PKK’s dissolution. This time, it appears to have worked.

Indeed, on February 27, Öcalan declared that the rebel group had “completed its life cycle” and called for its dissolution, potentially signaling the end of a decades-long conflict that claimed at least 50,000 lives—around 40,000 of them Kurdish. 

His “Call for Peace and a Democratic Society” was broadcast to the public at a hotel in Istanbul. In return, the plea for “legal and political regulations for dissolution and disarmament,” which was not included in the written call, was later added verbally.

Compared to the previous “peace” initiative of 2013, there is a clear regression. At that time, Öcalan linked the resolution of the Kurdish issue to the PKK’s demobilization, while proposing a broader, holistic framework. Today, there is no longer any connection between the dismantlement of the PKK and a lasting political solution to the Kurdish question. Öcalan’s major unilateral concession thus clearly signals that the entire scenario is being crafted by the authorities.

Second, in line with this fundamental imbalance, the scenario assumes that the Kurdish issue will be resolved within a vague framework of “national solidarity, brotherhood, and democracy,” falling far short of the structural changes required for equal citizenship and the recognition of Kurdish identity. Yet it aligns perfectly with a populist rhetoric that casually pairs concepts that in fact cancel each other out, such as “brotherhood” and “democracy.” 

In the regime’s daily populist rhetoric, the process is laconically labeled “terror-free Turkey”—and nothing more. Worse, Öcalan now seems to echo this line by consistently promoting a “brotherhood” narrative in which Turkishness clearly takes precedence.

Within this framework, the regime may make symbolic gestures of goodwill but will never undertake ground-breaking reforms that would establish the constitutional, legal, and political foundations of an equal citizenship. 

Kurds, under this logic, can only become full-fledged citizens on the condition that they dissolve into the Turkish magma. Accordingly, since the Öcalan call on late February, not a single meaningful step has been undertaken by the regime toward the Kurds.

Third, established conflict-resolution mechanisms and expert involvement are entirely absent from the Turkish process—whether in the form of joint commissions or specialized bodies within relevant public institutions.

Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR)—the return of ex-combatants to civilian life through weapons collection, disbandment of armed groups, and social and economic reintegration—is not part of the process. Likewise, no provision has been made for truth and reconciliation.

All in all, within this unusual conflict-resolution architecture, the only concrete step taken by Ankara has been the establishment of an advisory parliamentary commission until the end of 2025, which meets behind closed doors and in which regime parties hold an absolute majority. Its agenda does not include, for example, a crucial Kurdish demand: the official recognition of the Kurdish language.

As for the opposition—including the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the prevailing view seems to be that the process would automatically trigger broader democratization. As if history had ever shown a non-democratic regime transforming into a democracy through the smooth management of peacebuilding with an ostracized people—in this case, the Kurds. Simply because such a management requires as a pre-condition, a functioning democracy. 

The negative consequences of this clumsy process are already looming. While PKK circles have complied with the call of their “supreme leader” Öcalan, the Kurdish street remains profoundly skeptical. People welcome the official end of the armed struggle for its potential to spare the lives of their children—but no more than that.

Overall, the process is likely to strengthen Erdoğan and the regime bloc, allowing it to reap the political benefits of a “terror-free Turkey,” while weakening if not dismissing the Kurdish Political Movement. This carries the risk of a violent rejection of Kurdish “surrender” by radical—or less radical—segments of Kurdish polity.

Beyond this unfolding drama, Ankara’s ultimate objective remains the dissolution of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), led by Syrian Kurds and backed by a 100,000-strong, NATO-trained and equipped military force.

Nevertheless, the integration of this force into the nascent Syrian army appears to be the only realistic option for Damascus, for the AANES, and for the international coalition supporting the entity, which includes the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Saudi Arabia. Negotiations among all actors are underway despite Turkey’s stubborn opposition.

The Turkish state has never viewed the Kurdish issue as anything other than a security problem—whether inside Turkey or in neighboring countries. That reflex will not change unless Ankara is forced to accept the Rojava fait accompli, thereby swallowing both the empowerment and the legitimacy of a Kurdish-led polity in its immediate neighborhood and across the wider region.