State and governing through debt in Turkish politics, 2002-2020

This dissertation aspires to answer two interrelated questions. The first question as follows: based on the state and debt management dispositifs, how did the production and reproduction of power take place in global and Turkish politics between 2002 and 2020? To address this question, I trace the unfolding of the state and debt management dispositifs and go into an analysis of the question of how the AKP governments have transformed the political economy and power relations in Turkey during the period in question. In order to understand how the debt management dispositif becomes functional in the production of power, financialization processes and their relations through debt are investigated. This study emphasizes that the financialized economy not only forms an important basis for the production of the homo debitor, but it also deepens the relations of domination and subordination between the homo debitor and the sovereign. The second question underlying this dissertation pertains to the question of the ways in which this global picture manifests itself in its particular forms in Turkish politics. With specific attention to a number of legal and institutional regulations, I thus throw light on the process of restructuring the state dispositif as a security state between 2002 and 2020. It is argued that the state and debt became more and more dominant in the production of power in the society-individual relationship throughout the 2000s and 2010s. This study also points out that radical changes started to take place in Turkish political economy from 2016 onwards. In this context, under the impacts of global political and economic developments, the stage of governing through debt was succeeded by the phase of living with debt. This dissertation also illustrates this period as one of transition from the security state to the post-security state. The original contribution of this dissertation to the existing scholarhsip lies in its analysis of contemporary Turkish politics in light of the concept of dispositif and its close relationship with global politics.