Güvenlikleştirme ve Yurttaşlığın Siyasetsizleştirilmesi: Türkiye’de ve Hindistan’da Kadın Hareketleri, 2008-2025

Abstract

This thesis examines how the technique of government deployed by authoritarian-populist regimes securitises women’s movements, and how it thereby depoliticises women’s capacity for political agency, through a comparison of the AKP in Turkey and the BJP in India. I argue that once the mechanisms of neoliberal consent manufacturing begin to erode, security ceases to be an exceptional function of the state and becomes a routine technique of everyday government, one that constitutes the women’s movement as one of the primary targets. The movement occupies this position both because of its historical depth and because these governments frame it as a threat to their own sphere of power. The research rests on a qualitative and comparative design. Forty-four in-depth interviews, conducted with the executive and grassroots activists of thirteen women’s movement organisations in each of Turkey and India, together with expert academics, lawyers and journalists from both countries, are analysed through critical discourse analysis. Reading the three participant groups together makes it possible to combine the discourse of power, its organisational counterpart, and the activists’ experience in the field within a single analysis. The theoretical framework brings together Arendt’s conception of political action, Foucault’s analysis of biopolitical governmentality, and critical security studies. Despite the deep cultural and ideological differences between the two cases, the outcome remains common, which shows that the explanation is to be sought not in cultural content but in the structural technique to which these governments resort. Examined across six thematic axes, this commonality grounds the study’s most original empirical finding. Securitisation assumes a monolithic form in Turkey, enclosing the entire field within a single category of threat, whereas in India it takes a selective form that differentiates women according to religious and caste belonging. Although the form changes, the outcome remains constant. In both cases woman is reduced from a political agent to a subject to be protected and governed. I develop the concept of “de-citizenization” to name this shared outcome, which constitutes the thesis’s original contribution. The concept refers not to the removal of citizenship as a legal status but to the gradual withdrawal of the citizen’s capacity for political action, that is, the ability to act with others in the public sphere. In this respect, it contributes to feminist theory, critical security studies, and comparative politics.