The Mechanical Atatürk
Cybernetics and State Violence in the Second Turkish Republic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8967442 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joakim Parslow (0000-0002-2010-0450, University of Oslo, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 569-588 |
| Publication date | 2021-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020743821001033 |
| OpenAlex | W4200427359 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Turkey's 1960 military coup d’état was received by Kemalists in the courts, bureaucracy, and universities as an opportunity to reinvigorate Atatürk's ideal of a centralized and rationally organized state. This article investigates how a handful of avant-garde thinkers sought to ride the post-1960 wave of reformism by promoting a techno-utopian approach to governance through publications and seminars aimed at state leaders and intellectuals. Cybernetics, they argued, offered a paradigm of adjudication and administration unblemished by association with the ascendant ideologies of the Cold War, whether socialist or conservative, and was fully in keeping with Kemalism. I argue that, although it remained largely at the stage of fantasy, Turkish cybernetics ultimately served as a set of metaphors with which conservative state thinkers from different political camps found common ground, facilitating the shift that occurred within the state during the 1970s away from the rights-based pluralism of the Constitution of 1961 and toward an effort to de-radicalize Turkish society, if necessary through violence
Adjudication · Bureaucracy · Constitution · Corporate governance · Cybernetics · Epistemology · Guardian · Ideology · Management · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Turkish · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |