![]() ![]() The second section analyses resistance against the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism by focusing on the case of a unique social movement, Müslüman Sol hareket (Muslim Left movement), which fuses class politics with Islamic social justice. ![]() The GONGOs fulfil two aims: softening the immediate effects of the state’s withdrawal from social provision and generating bottom-up consent for authoritarian neoliberal governance. The AKP represses autonomous and dissident organisations and activists through judicial harassment and new regulations while facilitating the growth of a government-oriented civil society sector (GONGOs). The first section focuses on how Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) has transformed civic space through a selective approach that switches between repression and facilitation. This chapter reflects on the impact of Turkey’s authoritarian neoliberal governance on the transformation of civil society with a particular focus on latent counter-mobilisation. Working from the belief that new social subjects are political constructions, I argue that the process of building more radically democratic alternatives will require explicit linkages to be forged across multiple lines of social difference that currently divide the migrant collectivity. However, I conclude that common interpretations of the practices of the «collective migrant» as necessarily transformative are premature. I argue that these moments of discordance suggest that the FCZSC leaders» engagement with the purveyors of the remittances-to-development discourse is more than simple cooptation. Drawing upon this data, the article explores the moments of discordance between the market-oriented, anti-statist neoliberal rhetoric of the official remittances-to-development discourse and the political imagination(s) of the FCZSC leaders. It combines a content analysis of key texts expressing an emergent «remittances-to-development» discourse with elite interviews with leaders of the Federación de Clubes Zacatecanos del Sur de California (FCZSC) and related organizations in Southern California, as well as with Zacatecan state officials and return migrant politicians in Zacatecas. This article explores hometown association leaders» growing engagement with state officials and the international financial community in pursuit of job-creating «productive projects» in migrant-sending communities that might help to convert Mexican migration from a «necessity» to an «option». A broad range of societal players and coalitions, including civil society, play a critical role in authoritarian regime building. The study offers insights on the societal aspects of authoritarian regime building and cautions that crafting ‘successful’ authoritarian regimes is not a one-way process that takes place only at the formal institutional level. Their self-defined goals, ideological roots and grassroots reach inject a new disciplinary ethos and statist values in youth towards shaping them as Muslim and nationalist ‘ideal citizens’. The findings-based on original fieldwork conducted between October 2017–June 2019-demonstrate youth organizations’ country-wide grassroots engagement in four categories: indoctrination, extra-curricular training, service provision in the education sector, and street activism and humanitarian work. Seventeen government-oriented youth organizations illustrate the extent of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) quest for a new national identity and cultural hegemony within the broader context of Turkey’s steady decline into an authoritarian regime. This study argues that different from the secular Kemalist social engineering that dominated the state’s youth policy for decades, the AKP relies on the intermediary agency of Islamist-conservative and government-oriented civil society to shape young generations and convey ethno-religious nationalism to youth. Almost a century later, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempts to re-model youth through a new ethno-religious nationalist project. Modern Turkey’s emergence was a nationalist struggle that aimed to cultivate youth as secular citizens.
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