Modernity as a Field of Struggle: State Guardianship and Socıal Modernities in Türkiye (1960–2016)

This article reconceptualizes political development in Turkey between 1960 and 2016 by analytically distinguishing between state modernity and plural social modernities. Challenging linear modernization theory and exceptionalist accounts of Turkish politics, it argues that modernity in Turkey has been constituted through a persistent struggle over the authority to define legitimacy, rationality, and the future. Rather than viewing authoritarian interventions as deviations from modernization, the article theorizes guardianship as a distinctly modern governing rationality through which the state sought to discipline social plurality and monopolize the meaning of modernity.

Drawing on state theory, multiple modernities, and new social movements scholarship, the article demonstrates that military tutelage (1960–1980), neoliberal governance (post-1980), and majoritarian executive power (post-2000) represent historically specific articulations of a continuous state modernity project. At the same time, social movements in Turkey—ranging from labor and student mobilization to Kurdish, Islamist, feminist, and urban movements—are analyzed as alternative modernity projects rather than reactive responses to repression. These movements articulated forward-looking claims grounded in rights, recognition, participation, and dignity, thereby exposing the exclusionary limits of state-centered modernity.

Keywords: State Modernity, Guardianship, Multiple Modernities, Social Movements and Identity Politics, State–Society Relations.