Karabekir Akkoyunlu on religion and democracy in Turkey and Iran

Karabekir Akkoyunlu, Lecturer in Politics & International Studies at SOAS, on "Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation" (Edinburgh University Press)

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Iran is a religious theocracy, while Turkey was seen as a secularist tutelary regime for many decades. Why compare these two systems, which are ostensibly poles apart?

The comparison between Iran and Turkey is not very common in social science scholarship. There is some historical work that looks at the origins of the modernisation projects in Turkey and Iran, comparing Atatürk's era with his contemporary Reza Shah. But when it comes to more modern politics there is practically no serious work or research that looks at the two countries from a perspective of similarities, not necessarily contrasts. I think there are two reasons for that. One is that the political discourse about the two countries has become so pervasive that it's been almost taken on board by social scientists, political scientists, and international relations scholars themselves. That discourse has depicted Turkey and Iran since 1979 as polar opposites in all sorts of ways: Turkey being a pro-Western secular democracy, albeit a flawed one, and Iran being an anti-Western theocratic dictatorship. So it's like a black and white comparison or contrast. International relations scholarship has often taken on board these rather knee-jerk portrayals and caricaturisations.

That started changing when the AKP came to power in 2002. Over the course of the 21st century the "secular vs Islamic" binary was a bit complicated and muddled, but that led to new binaries emerging. Now that Turkey was under a Islamist government, the difference was within the framework of Islam, so Sunni Islam versus Shia Islam, or with reference to Turkey and Iran's imperial backgrounds: The Ottoman and neo-Ottoman versus Iranian imperial opposites. It's always this notion of rivalry and opposition that is taken almost for granted in popular journalistic discourse, which feeds into scholarship as well. Having had an interest in Iranian politics from the late 2000s, and then having gone to Iran, traveled there and studied its language, I realised that not only was this a superficial binary to take on board, it concealed something that I saw was actually quite striking in terms of similarity. That was the existence historically and more in contemporary politics of institutions and actors of regime guardianship acting "in the interest of the nation and the people" in order to preserve a certain political ideological framework. In Turkey that was Kemalism and in Iran that was Khomeinism. I started taking interest in this and started looking more into how those discourses emerged in both countries, how they turned into political movements and institutions. I realised there was literally no attention being paid in popular, journalistic or academic fields into the similarity between these two countries on the basis of institutional architecture and ideological frameworks.

When I first started looking into this comparison in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the power struggle - between institutions of regime guardianship in both countries and the representatives of the people, as they call themselves, the elected governments - seemed to be reaching a new height. There was growing tension between those two sides in both countries. Politics was increasingly being articulated in terms of "guardianship vs democracy". That convinced me this is a comparison that needs to be made, explored further. I tried to do that in this book, which was originally my PhD thesis actually. I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking to people and reflecting on this concept.