ABSTRACT
The 2016 coup attempt occurred in the midst of a deep crisis, marked by the ever-intensifying difficulties of the governing AK Parti to organise societal hegemony. In the 2000s, the party was a capable actor in building a nexus of neoliberal EU, IMF reforms and political Islam located within the international order. The societal contradictions emerging from that project became finally manifest in the 2013 Gezi revolt. The government’s efforts to deal with the crisis by repressive means increasingly strained Turkey’s international reputation—which is crucial for the highly internationalised regulation of the Turkish economy. Nevertheless the AK Parti survived the coup attempt in July 2016. Employing a Gramscian understanding of hegemony and a Neogramscian approach on international relations, this chapter argues that the AK Parti survived the crisis and the coup attempt because there had been no alternative actor capable to politically organise bourgeois hegemony, as the AK Parti did throughout the 2000s.
