The articulation of discourses on state development around "East" and "West" imaginaries : the Turkish state

• Main Author: Thwaites, Ebru Çigdem
• Published: Lancaster University 2010
• Subjects: 956.1
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.588514

The thesis provides a socio-political analysis of the state-building processes in Turkey. It focuses on how the discursive formations on state development imagine, articulate and refer to a distinction between the 'East' and the 'West', and how this distinction is transposed to the discussion of state formation processes as a classification in terms of 'normal' and 'exceptional'. In this respect, the thesis also elaborates on the homologies between the Turkish case and other 'normal' and 'exceptional' cases in Western Europe and North America. Then, it moves to an ideology critique of the dominant theoretical paradigms and the ways in which they are utilized to describe different aspects of state development in Turkey. This ideology-critique, which traverses all the chapters, revolves around three major themes. First, it highlights Turkey's ambiguous position within different paradigms that reproduce Orientalist images of thought. Second, it explores the links between state-building processes and the emergence and dissemination of hegemonic social science paradigms. And third, it examines the nature of hegemony in the global organisation of the academic field with a view to illustrating the asymmetries in the formation of the Turkish academic milieu and its intellectual production. Overall, the thesis provides a theoretical and political analysis of the ways in which the knowledge of the 'Orient' articulates itself in the discourses on Turkish state development.