The alevi community in Turkey after 1980: An evaluation of political group boundaries in the context of ethnicity theories

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2006

Öğrenci: ALİ MURAT İRAT

Danışman: PINAR KÖKSAL

Özet:

The present thesis intends to determine how the ethno-religious Alevi communities in Turkey survive and what are the main sources and factors helping them to sustain their group borders, especially as from the mid-1980s when these communities had started to reveal their identity clearly. It is important to state that the Kemalist regime was challenged by an obligatory change process on both economic and political grounds after the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Because of the rising of political Islam and the Kurdish ethno-nationalist movement, the modernist Kemalist regime and the Jacobin laicism have been subjected to criticism. In this tense period, one of the most important legitimation tools used by the state was the Alevi population, known by its dominant secular, modernist and Kemalist identity. For this reason, it can be proposed that in this era the occurrence of the Alevi identity’s revelation might have been supported or guarded by the Kemalist regime or state institutions. But another claim for the Alevi awakening is that the Alevi population had tried to define their identity against and/or parallel to the rising of Kurdish nationalism and the political Islamic movement. In sum, in this thesis I intend to clarify how the Alevi community constructs and/or protects its ethno-religious borders in these circumstances according to ethnicity theories.