1 - Protection

Summary

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.