Conspiracy Theories in Turkey
Presented by
Doğan Gürpınar
Friday 27 December 2019, 12:30-13:30
FFB 006
Text:
Conspiracy Theories in Turkey: A Historical and Contemporary Look
This talk will provide an outline of the underpinnings and the cultural and ideological frames of the Turkish conspiratorial universe and its master narrative. It will present a brief overview of the making of modern Turkey and the unfolding incipient Turkish nationalist mind. Examining and deliberating on the traumas revolving around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it will assess how this background fostered a conspiratorial script. It will then delve into the Islamist counter-narrative that duplicates in part the master narrative, but partially overturns and challenges its chief premises. It will connect this historical legacy to our contemporary in which populisms builds on us-they dichotomy juxtaposing people and the elites and thus deploy a conspiratorial narrative. Thus it will try to connect historical legacy and global contemporary environment as dynamics fostering conspiratorial narratives.
Doğan Gürpınar is an associate professor at the Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ). He is a historian specialized in the late Ottoman and contemporary Turkish historiography, thought, and ideas. He published extensively on the trajectories of contemporary Turkish ideologies including three books in English: Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and Ottoman/Turkish Visions of the Nation, 1860–1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Conspiracy Nation: Conspiracy Theories in Turkey (Routledge, 2019).