The Turkish Model, the Double-Security Dilemma, and the Political Reproduction of State Polities in the Middle East

Conceptually the aims of this thesis are to show the salient features of the political reproduction of states as a necessity for their survival as they continually face a double-security dilemma in the neoliberal era. Empirically this thesis examines Turkey’s ruling party from 2002 to 2015. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) maintained authority by mitigating the polities and actors that posed vertical and horizontal competition to their power (the double-security dilemma of domestic and international threats faced by state rulers). To outcompete and absorb its rivals, the AKP maintained a post-Islamist alliance-building model of political reproduction through a globalized Islamic neoliberal authority pattern until 2011. This became popularized as the ‘Turkish Model’, a model of political reproduction framed as suitable for other Muslim-majority states. The findings from data analysis show that to maintain the constitutive sovereignty of the Turkish state, the AKP built a post-Islamist hegemony. Furthermore, this thesis explores how the AKP horizontally built a pluralist vision of neo-ottomanism enabling their navigation of the international political system. Their ‘zero-problems’ foreign policy was the cornerstone of building regional liberal peace. This policy was the basis of the AKP’s maintenance of functional sovereignty until the ‘Arab Spring’. Yet, the new double-security dilemma that emerged through the ‘Arab Spring’ not only threatened the existence of post-Islamism within Turkey, but the existence of the ‘Turkish Model’ itself. The AKP then moved towards a fortifying pattern of authority to shield both themselves and the Republic from emergent threatsMarie Curie European Commission Sustainable Peacebuilding Project through Sabancı University and the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust

Paging the Clinical Informatics Community: Respond STAT to Dobbs v Jackson's Women's Health Organization

If the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was a wake-up call that clinical informatics and digital health play vital roles in our future, the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (Dobbs)[1] is a blaring alarm. Dobbs, which overturned Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allows states to individually regulate access to abortion. This ruling has triggered the enforcement of existing state laws that ban or restrict abortion and efforts to pass similar new laws