Turning Counterhegemony into Hegemony: The Creation of “New Turkey” through Discursive Governance

abstract:This article attempts to show how government-supported women’s NGOs (GONGOs) in Turkey actively contribute to the construction of neoliberal, conservative, antigender discourses of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Since the second decade of the 2000s, Turkey has undergone rapid de-democratization as a result of AKP’s election victories, which have brought with them a major backlash against gender equality policies. Moreover, a new political discourse constructed by the government has replaced the concept of gender equality with gender justice and gender equity. Relying on seven semistructured indepth interviews with members of GO-NGOs and a review of primary and secondary documents, this article contends that the civil society established under the so-called New Turkey situates it in the construction of antigender and antiwomen’s rights discourse.