Bilge Yesil

Driven by an ambitious geopolitical agenda, the AKP seeks to promote Turkey in a positive light, especially among Global South audiences and Muslim diaspora in the West. To this end, it uses a number of global communication initiatives. Among them is TRT World, Turkey’s first 24/7 English language news channel. TRT World’s editorial line is associated with the empowerment of non-Western voices and presentation of alternative perspectives to “hegemonic” news organizations. The channel claims to bring a “humanitarian perspective” to international news by foregrounding the voices and stories of “underreported and underprivileged others.”

One such story is that of Muslim suffering. In documentaries, online news videos and philanthropic campaigns, TRT World tackles topics such as Islamophobia in Europe, the refugee crisis, Gaza blockade, Srebrenica massacre and other “injustices” inflicted upon Muslims. Though seemingly commendable, these texts reduce complex socio-political phenomena to questions of good vs. bad, moral vs. immoral, and hide the AKP’s geopolitical agenda behind a so-called postcolonial critique of the West.

Turkey’s ruling AKP government and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan have successfully deployed socio-cultural and religious binaries in domestic politics for the past 19 years. More recently, they have begun to re-tool these binaries (victim vs. perpetrator, good vs. evil, justice vs. injustice) on the international plane to ignite awareness of Muslim suffering and leverage Turkey as the benevolent leader of ummah. It is no coincidence that the instrumentalization of Muslim identity politics is occurring at a time when Turkey, under the leadership of Erdogan, is challenging the West and making claims to great power status.

Dr. Bilge Yesil is an Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, and Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interest is in global media and communication with a particular focus on Turkey and the Middle East; global internet policies, online surveillance and censorship. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life and Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East.