ABSTRACT

It is a truism that Turkey cuts across geographical, political, cultural, and economic categories. Her defiance of easy binary distinctions, such as traditional-modern, East-West, authoritarian-democratic and developing-developed, has been the subject of much attention. Even a cursory glance at these makes clear that modernization, both as a process and as a concept, has been at the center of these debates. While considerable strides have been taken to reach a more critical and nuanced view of modernization politics in Turkey, two significant gaps remain. First, the increasingly critical approach to the authoritarian underpinnings of modernization processes and their homogenizing tendencies has limited itself to ethnicity, gender, and religious politics. This has come at the cost of understanding the impact of aggressive modernization on the natural environment. Secondly, even the harshest critics of modernization in Turkey have not adequately problematized the tenuous link between economic growth and multi-faceted societal problems.