Abstract
Under what conditions do global scripts resonate among ordinary people? Neo-institutional world polity theory has tended to sideline this question by privileging macro-comparative explanations of states’ adoption and social movement activists’ framing of global scripts. Adopting a negative case approach, we draw on concepts from cultural sociology to explain why global scripts fail to resonate among ethno-religious minorities in Antakya, Turkey. Antakya has been exposed intensely to global minority rights and multiculturalism discourses; it has been targeted by various ethnic movement activists, and its diverse population has long experienced stigma and discrimination stemming from Turkey’s model of nationhood. Yet, ordinary people there have seldom utilized global diversity scripts in their everyday struggles for recognition. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative fieldwork between 2004 and 2015, we find that global scripts fail to match people’s cultural schemas of perceiving and reproducing boundaries—their local repertoires of diversity—due to a deep-seated ambivalence toward the category of “minority.” This lack of resonance potentially weakens popular support for substantial policy reforms advancing minority rights and is one among several factors explaining why Turkey’s turn from an exclusionary to an inclusionary model of nationhood has remained largely ceremonial.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
All private names are pseudonyms.
Ninety percent of Christians are Orthodox; the majority of the rest are Catholic, Protestant, or Armenian Gregorian.
Numbers at the city level do not exist, but additional local population figures can be found in Ozgen (2015, 43).
The former is a heterodox Muslim community residing along Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast (in the cities of Mersin, Tarsus, Adana, and Antakya), as well as in coastal Lebanon and Israel. While Alevis in Central and Eastern Anatolia speak predominantly Turkish or Kurdish, Alawis in Antakya speak Arabic, and their religious practices are influenced by Arab Islamic culture. For example, they exclude women from religious rituals; they fast for thirty days in Ramadan; and they worship at mosques or tombs of Alawi saints rather than at a cemevi (a house of gathering for Turkish and Kurdish Alevis). Notwithstanding distinct doctrinal orientations and communal identities, both Alawis and Alevis share grievances of stigma and exclusion.
See Table 4 in Appendix.
Similar to “extended fieldwork,” LQR takes various forms, such as continuous research in a single community, follow-up visits to the original site, or re-interviewing the same informants periodically. What sets LQR apart is the “deliberate way in which temporality is designed into the research process making change a central focus of analytical attention” (Thomson et al. 2003, 185).
See Appendix for the Turkish language local and national media sources, local ethnic organizations, and the interviewee profiles.
Class background (measured by educational attainment and professional occupation), rather than gender, age, or geographical location, created the greatest variation in responses. Educated and professional interviewees followed the national news and local initiatives, were more receptive to rights discourses, and a few were politically engaged. Working-class respondents were more skeptical of rights discourses; if not opposed to rights, these respondents were at least indifferent to them, suggesting that “rights were useful” albeit not something they were asking for.
Throughout the text, the number in parentheses denotes the year the interview was conducted: A (‘04) stands for a 2004 interview.
Such claims for individual rights might also be anchored in global scripts, notably in the standard package of liberalism that has characterized the post-war human rights regime. However, because we have focused on global diversity scripts (collective minority rights; multiculturalism), we did not explore the potential influence of other global scripts.
Akin to claims for equal citizenship rights, the “universalistic” strategy of boundary blurring might draw on global human rights tropes. But what is crucial for our argument is that both strategies are anchored in local repertoires of diversity such as “peaceful history,” “mosaic,” or “collective fight in the war.” As a consequence, global diversity scripts emphasizing categorical distinctions cannot resonate among ordinary people.
References
Akkoyunlu, Karabekir, and Kerem Öktem. 2016. Existential insecurity and the making of a weak authoritarian regime in Turkey. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 505–527.
Aktürk, Şener. 2012. Regimes of ethnicity and nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Almeida, Paul, and Chris Chase-Dunn. 2018. Globalization and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology 44: 189–211.
Asya Gazetesi. 2014. Aleviler tarih boyunca zulme maruz kalmışlardır (Alevis have been subjected to persecution throughout history). http://asyagazetesi.com. Accessed 5 Aug 2019.
Atayurt Gazetesi. 2014. Devlet Alevileri görmezden geliyor (The State ignores Alveis). https://issuu.com/dturunc/docs/15-07-2014. Accessed 3 August 2019.
Ayoub, Phillip M. 2016. When states come out: Europe's sexual minorities and the politics of visibility. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Barkey, Karen. 2010. In the lands of the ottomans: Religion and politics. In Religion and the political imagination, eds. Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones, 90–111. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bayar, Yeşim. 2017. Constitutional debates and nationalist visions. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23 (3): 340–360.
Bayir, Derya. 2013. Minorities and nationalism in Turkish law. London: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Beck, Colin J., Gili S. Drori, and John W. Meyer. 2012. World influences on human rights language in constitutions: A cross-national study. International Sociology 27 (4): 483–501.
Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. 2000. Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–639.
Bianet. 2016. Mültecilerin şartları kötü, hatay’da herkes tedirgin (The situation of the refugees is dire, everyone in Hatay is uneasy). Bianet. https://www.bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/174229-multecilerin-sartlari-kotu-hatay-da-herkes-tedirgin. Accessed 30 Nov 2018.
Biner, Zerrin Özlem. 2007. Retrieving the dignity of a cosmopolitan city: Contested perspectives on rights, culture and ethnicity in Mardin. New Perspectives on Turkey 37: 31–58.
Bloemraad, Irene, Fabiana Silva, and Kim Voss. 2016. Rights, economics, or family? Frame resonance, political ideology, and the immigrant rights movement. Social Forces 94 (4): 1647–1674.
Boli, John, and Michael A. Elliot. 2008. Façade diversity: The individualization of cultural difference. International Sociology 23 (4): 540–560.
Boyle, Elizabeth H., Minzee Kim, and Wesley Longhofer. 2015. Abortion liberalization in world society, 1960–2009. American Journal of Sociology 121 (3): 882–913.
Bromley, Patricia. 2014. Legitimacy and the contingent diffusion of world culture: Diversity and human rights in social science textbooks, divergent cross-national patterns (1970–2008). Canadian Journal of Sociology 39 (1): 1–44.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. Ethnicity without groups. Archives Europénnes de Sociologie (European Journal of Sociology) 43 (2): 163–189.
Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea. 2006. Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Casier, Marlies, and Joost Jongerden. 2010. Nationalisms and politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish issue. London: Routledge.
Casier, Marlies, Joost Jongerden, and Nic Walker. 2011. Fruitless attempts? The Kurdish initiative and containment of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. New Perspectives on Turkey 44: 103–127.
Chua, Lynette. 2019. The politics of love in Myanmar: LGBT mobilization and human rights as a way of life. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Cole, Wade M., and Francisco O. Ramirez. 2013. Conditional decoupling: Assessing the impact of national human rights institutions, 1981 to 2004. American Sociological Review 78 (4): 702–725.
Corden, Anne, and Jane Mill. 2007. Time and change: A review of the qualitative longitudinal research literature for social policy. Social Policy and Society 6 (4): 583–592.
Dağtaş, Seçil. 2012. Tolerated identities: Secularism, religious pluralism, and nationalism in the city of Antakya, Turkey. In Cultural difference and social solidarity: Critical cases, eds. Scott H. Boyd and Mary Ann Walter, 135–148. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dağtaș, Seçil. 2020. The civilizations Choir of Antakya: The politics of religious tolerance and minority representation at the national margins of Turkey. Cultural Anthropology 35 (1): 167–195.
DiMaggio, Paul J. 1997. Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–287.
Dressler, Markus. 2013. Writing religion: The making of Turkish Alevi Islam. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ekmekcioglu, Lerna. 2014. Republic of paradox: The league of nations minority protection regime and the new Turkey's step-citizens. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46 (4): 657–679.
Emigh, Rebecca Jean. 1997. The power of negative thinking: The use of negative case methodology in the development of sociological theory. Theory and Society 26 (5): 649–684.
Ferree, Myra Marx. 2003. Resonance and radicalism: Feminist framing in the abortion debates of the United States and Germany. American Journal of Sociology 109 (2): 304–344.
Fox, Jon E., and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2008. Everyday nationhood. Ethnicities 8 (4): 536–563.
Goertz, Gary. 2006. Social science concepts: A user’s guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gourlay, William. Forthcoming. The remaking and unmaking of multi-ethnic spaces: Diyarbakir and Southeast Anatolia in the 21st century. In Ethnic, religious and cultural minorities in Turkey, eds. Tahir Abbas, Anja Zalta, and Umut Azak. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Grigoriadis, Ioannis N. 2008. On the Europeanization of minority rights protection: Comparing the cases of Greece and Turkey. Mediterranean Politics 13 (1): 23–41.
Hafner-Burton, Emilie, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui. 2005. Human rights in a globalizing world: The paradox of empty promises. American Journal of Sociology 110 (5): 1373–1411.
Hatay Valiliği. 2016. AB Bakanı Bozkır Hatay’da sivil toplum kuruluşları ile bir araya geldi (The EU Minister Bozkır get together with civil society associations in Hatay). http://www.hatay.gov.tr/ab-bakani-bozkir-hatayda-sivil-toplum-kuruluslari-ile-bir-araya-geldi. Accessed 9 June 2016.
Hatay Valiliği. 2020. Nüfus ve Dağılımı (Population and its Distribution). http://www.hatay.gov.tr/nufus-ve-dagilimi. Accessed 21 November 2021.
Hermanowicz, Joseph C. 2013. The longitudinal qualitative interview. Qualitative Sociology 36 (2): 189–208.
Icduygu, Ahmet, and B. Ali Soner. 2006. Turkish minority rights regime: Between difference and equality. Middle Eastern Studies 42 (3): 447–468.
Karakaya-Stump, Ayfer. 2018. The AKP, sectarianism, and the Alevis’ struggle for equal rights in Turkey. National Identities 20 (1): 53–67.
Kay, Tamara. 2011. Legal transnationalism: The relationships between transnational social movement building and international law. Law & Social Inquiry 36 (2): 419–454.
Kaya, Ayhan. 2014. The Circassian diaspora in and outside Turkey: Construction of transnational space in the post-communist era. Problems of Post-Communism 61 (4): 50–65.
Koenig, Matthias. 2008. Institutional change in the world polity: International human rights and the construction of collective identities. International Sociology 23 (1): 95–114.
Koopmans, Ruud. 2013. Multiculturalism and immigration: A contested field in cross-national comparison. Annual Review of Sociology 39: 147–169.
Kurban, Dilek. 2003. Confronting equality: The need for constitutional protection of minorities on Turkey’s path to the European Union. Columbia Human Rights Law Review 35 (1): 151–214.
Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural citizenship. A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kymlicka, Will. 2007. Multicultural odysseys. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kymlicka, Will, and Eva Pföstl, eds. 2014. Multiculturalism and minority rights in the Arab world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–195.
Lamont, Michèle, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis. 2016. Getting respect. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levitt, Peggy, and Sally Engle Merry. 2009. Vernacularization on the ground: Local use of global women's rights in Peru, China, India and the United States. Global Networks 4 (9): 441–461.
Liu, Dongxiao. 2006. When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? A comparative analysis of the Chinese and Indian women's movements. American Sociological Review 71 (6): 921–942.
Liu, Dongxiao, and Elizabeth Heger Boyle. 2001. Making the case: The women's convention and equal employment opportunity in Japan. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 42 (4): 389–404.
Mansbridge, Jane. 2013. Everday activism. In The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movements, eds. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug MacAdam, 1–2. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Massicard, Elise. 2013. The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: Identity and managing territorial diversity. New York: Routledge.
Masters, Bruce. 2001. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: The roots of sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonnell, Terence E. 2014. Drawing out culture: Productive methods to measure cognition and resonance. Theory and Society 43 (3/4): 247–274.
McDonnell, Terence E., Christopher A. Bail, and Iddo Tavory. 2017. A theory of resonance. Sociological Theory 35 (1): 1–14.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Human rights and gender violence: Translating international law into local justice. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez. 1997. World society and the nation state. American Journal of Sociology 103 (1): 144–181.
Müftüler-Baç, Meltem. 2005. Turkey’s political reforms and the impact of the European union. South European Society and Politics 10 (1): 17–31.
Mylonas, Harris. 2013. The politics of nation-building: Making co-nationals, refugees, and minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neyzi, Leyla. 2002. Remembering to forget: Sabbateanism, national identity, and subjectivity in Turkey. Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (1): 137–158.
Niezen, Ronald. 2003. The origins of indigenism: Human rights and the politics of identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
NTV. 2005. Medeniyetler Hatay’da Buluştu (Civilizations Met in Hatay).
Oran, Baskın. 2004. Türkiye’de azınlıklar: kavramlar, lozan, iç mevzuat, içtihat, uygulama (Minoritirs in Turkey: Concepts, Lausanne, domestic law, jurisprudence, application). İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.
Ortadoğu Arap Halkları Araştırma Enstitüsü. 2015. Arap Alevilerin Devlet ile İlişkileri ve Sekülerlik (The relations of Arab Alevis with the State and Secularism). http://www.arapenstitu.com/tr/genel/arap-alevilerin-devlet-ile-iliskileri-ve-sekulerlik.html. Accessed 6 April 2016.
Özbudun, Ergun. 2007. Democratization reforms in Turkey, 1993–2004. Turkish Studies 8 (2): 179–196.
Ozgen, Zeynep. 2015. Maintaining ethnic boundaries in “non-ethnic” contexts: Constructivist theory and the sexual reproduction of diversity. Theory and Society 44 (1): 33–64.
Özgül, Ceren. 2014. Legally Armenian: Tolerance, conversion, and name change in Turkish courts. Comparative Studies in History and Society 56 (3): 622–649.
Özsoy, Ali E., İsmet Koç, and Aykut Toros. 1992. Ethnic structure in Turkey as implied by the analysis of census data on mother tongue. Turkish Journal of Population Studies 14: 101–114.
Paschel, Tianna S. 2010. The right to difference: Explaining Colombia’s shift from color blindness to the law of black communities. American Journal of Sociology 116 (3): 729–769.
Pope, Shawn, and John W. Meyer. 2016. Local variation in world society: Six characteristics of global diffusion. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 3 (2–3): 280–305.
Risse, Thomas, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds. 2013. The persistent power of human rights: From commitment to compliance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rumelili, Bahar, and Fuat Keyman. 2016. Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality. Citizenship Studies 20 (1): 67–83.
Sahin, Sehriban. 2005. The rise of Alevism as a public religion. Current Sociology 53 (3): 465–485.
Saldaña, Johnny. 2003. Longitudinal qualitative research: Analyzing change through time. Walnut Creek: Rowman Altamira.
Shields, Sarah D. 2011. Fezzes in the river: Identity politics and European diplomacy in the Middle East on the eve of world war II. New York: Oxford University Press.
Somer, Murat. 2016. Understanding Turkey’s democratic breakdown: Old vs. new and indigenous vs. global authoritarianism. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (4): 481–503.
Soysal, Yasemin N. 1994. Limits of citizenship. Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Spohn, Willfried, Matthias Koenig, and Wolfgang Knöbl, eds. 2015. Religion and National Identities in an Enlarged Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tambar, Kabir. 2014. The reckoning of pluralism: Political belonging and the demands of history in Turkey. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The new transnational activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomson, Rachel, Libby Plumridge, and Janet Holland. 2003. Longitudinal qualitative research: A developing methodology. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6 (3): 185–187.
Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2018. Rights make might: Global human rights and minority social movements in Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tsutsui, Kiyoteru, Claire Whitlinger, and Alwyn Lim. 2012. International human rights law and social movements: States’ resistance and civil society’s insistence. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8: 367–396.
Velasco, Kristopher. 2018. Human rights INGOs, LGBT INGOs, and LGBT policy diffusion, 1991–2015. Social Forces 97 (1): 377–404.
Wimmer, Andreas. 2002. Nationalist exclusion and ethnic conflicts: Shadows of modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wimmer, Andreas. 2013. Ethnic boundary making: Institutions, power, networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wimmer, Andreas. 2021. Domains of diffusion: How culture and institutions travel around the world and with what consequences. American Journal of Sociology 126 (6): 1389–1438.
Yegen, Mesut. 2004. Citizenship and ethnicity in Turkey. Middle Eastern Studies 40 (6): 51–66.
Yonucu, Deniz. 2018. Urban vigilantism: A study of anti-terror law, politics and policing in Istanbul. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42 (3): 408–422.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Elisabeth Anderson, Elisabeth Boyle, Zachary Elkins, Fatma Müge Göçek, Eric Hamilton, Markus Dressler, Michèle Lamont, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Gülay Türkmen-Dervisoğlu, our anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Qualitative Sociology for their insightful comments and valuable feedback. Thanks are due also to Büşra Mahmutoğlu for her meticulous research assistance and to Sinem Ilseven and Brian Pinaire for their careful copyediting. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the workshop “Imagining and Regulating Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Modern Turkey,” held at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (2016), as well as at the 113th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (2017), where participants offered helpful comments.
Funding
Funding for this research was provided by New York University Abu Dhabi’s Division of Social Science and by the Max Planck Fellow Group “Governance of Cultural Diversity—Socio-Legal Dynamics” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix
Appendix
Turkish-Language Media Sources
National | Local |
7 Sabah | Alevinet |
Agos | Antakya Haber |
Arkitera Mimarlık Yayını | Asya Gazetesi |
Avrupa Postası | Atayurt Gazetesi |
BBC | Hatay Express |
Bianet | Hatay İnternet TV |
Cumhuriyet | Hatay Mahalli Haber |
Evrensel | Hatay Valiliği |
Gazete Duvar | Hatay Vatan Gazetesi |
Gazete İpekyol | Hatay Yaşam Gazetesi |
Haberler.com | HRT Medya Grubu |
Hürriyet | İlk Kurşun Gazetesi |
IHA | İskenderun Haber |
Kültür Servisi | İskenderun Ses |
Lora Baytar Blog | İskenderun.org |
Milliyet | Pir Haber Ajansı |
Mimarizm Mimarlık Yayını | Samandağ Ayna Haber |
NTV | Samandağ Gazetesi |
Sabah | |
Siyasi Haber | |
Yeni Asya |
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ozgen, Z., Koenig, M. When Global Scripts Do Not Resonate: International Minority Rights and Local Repertoires of Diversity in Southern Turkey. Qual Sociol 45, 149–187 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09504-0
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09504-0