Bilge Yesil
Affiliate Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Institution: the City University of New York
Bilge Yesil is Professor of Media Culture and affiliate faculty of Middle Eastern studies at the City University of New York. Her work spans global media and communication, authoritarianism, surveillance, media ownership and regulation. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life (2009), Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State (2016), and Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (2024), and a co-editor of The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East (2023).
Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”
“Civilization” has emerged as a key pillar of Turkey’s foreign policy during the AKP (Justice and Development Party) era. Following the events of September 11, the AKP capitalized on Turkey’s perceived role in forging a civilizational alliance between Muslims and the West, and in 2006, it became a co-sponsor of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations initiative alongside Spain. However, beginning in the 2010s, the AKP adopted a more confrontational stance towards the West, driven in part by various domestic and foreign policy crises. As discussed in Talking Back to the West, AKP officials and proxies have been promoting the supremacy of Turkish Islamic civilization through global communication initiatives ranging from English-language news to television series. They argue that the West is morally bankrupt and dysfunctional and position Turkey as a benevolent power that is reshaping the global order and restoring justice to oppressed people.
AKP-backed communication entities craft essentialized images of the West as inhumane and hypocritical in their coverage of police brutality, rights violations, Islamophobia, and far-right extremism in Europe and the United States. By referencing colonialism, slavery, Nazism, the Holocaust and other “shameful” episodes from the past, they criticize Western countries not only for what they do, but for who they are. This strategy aims to question the West’s political and moral leadership and signal the collapse of the West-dominated global order. Simultaneously, it allows AKP cadres to dismiss criticisms leveled by Western governments against Turkey regarding democratic backsliding and rights violations.
It is essential to note that these negative representations of the West and Western civilization do not necessarily advance a progressive or humanist critique, nor do they aim to foster a positive force for change. Within this framework, every comparison transforms the West, East, Turkey and Muslims into antagonistic entities, disregarding their complexities and interrelationships.
The focus on Western malaise partly stems from the AKP’s strained relationships with Europe and the United States, and a long-standing intellectual tradition that reifies the West as civilizationally inferior. Influential Islamist thinkers, such as Necip Fazil Kisakurek, Nurettin Topcu, and Sezai Karakoc, have played a significant role in shaping this tradition, which has been incorporated into the AKP’s foreign policy and public diplomacy initiatives by figures like Ahmet Davutoglu and Ibrahim Kalin. What these thinkers and state officials share is an emphasis on how Western societies prioritize power and self-interest over humanistic values. By contrast, Islam and Islamic civilization are seen as possessing inherent solutions to various crises prompted by Western modernity. There is also a strong resistance against the idealization of Western civilization, whether by European intellectuals or modernizing elites in Muslim-majority countries. Finally, there is a consensus on the revival of Islamic civilization as a means to counter Western hegemony on the international stage and challenge Eurocentric modernization projects at home.
Anti-Western narratives and the use of civilizational dualities to bolster legitimacy on the global stage are not unique to Turkey. They can also be observed in the global outreach and communication programs of other post-imperial states such as China and Russia. As part of the New Civilizationisms Project, I plan to undertake comparative analyses of how these states utilize a civilizational paradigm in their efforts to mobilize their domestic constituents and reshape the global order.