Papers by Gulsen Seven
Toplum ve Bilim, 2022
Özet: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi'nin (AKP) yirmi yıllık iktidarı süresince şahit olduğumuz değişi... more Özet: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi'nin (AKP) yirmi yıllık iktidarı süresince şahit olduğumuz değişim ve dönüşüm bir süredir rejimin adını koyma ve niteliğini belirleme çalışmalarının odağında. Senelerdir ülkede siyasi düzen tartışmalarının demirbaşı olmuş anayasa ve anayasacılık da bu çalışmaların dikkate aldıkları unsurlar arasında belirleyici bir öneme sahip. Bu literatüre katkı sunmayı amaçlayan bu yazı AKP'nin anayasa yaklaşımı temelinde Türkiye'nin siyasi rejimini, on yedinci yüzyılda yaygın kullanılan frontispiece, kitabın ana fikrini anlatan iç kapak resmi, geleneğinden ilhamla, yazarın AKP'nin anayasa ile ilişkisini temsil ettiğini düşündüğü görsellerden hareket ederek ele alıyor. İlk başta, değişimi, bir tarihsel devirden daha üstün olan diğerine geçişi simgeleyen Roma tanrısı Janus olarak karşımıza çıkan AKP'nin giderek Türkiye'de siyaset ve anayasacılığın başat paradigmasını temsil eden Leviathan'a has özellikler ortaya koyduğunu ve 'üstünlüğünü' anayasal demokrasi tesis ederek değil otoriterliği perçinleyerek gösterdiğini savunuyor.
Abstract: Radical reforms undertaken during two decades of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rule in Turkey has encouraged a proliferation of studies that attempt to identify the nature of the emergent political regime. This study, which aims to contribute to this literature, discusses the nature of the regime by considering AKP’s approach to constitutionalism. Drawing inspiration from the seventeenth century practice of frontispieces, it sets out from visual representations that characterize AKP’s relationship to constitutions and constitutional order. In particular, it claims that while, at first, AKP appeared as the Roman god of transitions, Janus of our time, twenty years on the constituted regime bears striking similarities to the Leviathan, which depicts the dominant paradigm of constitutionalism and politics in Turkey.
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Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 2017
This paper offers a critical rereading of the history of judicial review of constitutional amendm... more This paper offers a critical rereading of the history of judicial review of constitutional amendments in Turkey. We argue that, contrary to appearances, the claim to a power of amendment review on the part of the Turkish Constitutional Court does not fit Ran Hirschl’s model of hegemonic preservation, which aims to explain the genesis of strong constitutionalism and judicial review as the result of an anti-democratic elite consensus that tries to leverage the prestige of judicial institutions. Attempts to impose Hirschl’s model on the constitutional history of the Turkish Republic have been very popular in the jurisprudential literature on Turkey, but the model offers a misleading and incomplete diagnosis of what ails Turkish constitutionalism. It is not the supposed excessive strength of formal constitutionalism and judicial review in Turkey, but rather the normative weakness of the Turkish Constitution of 1982, that is responsible, at least in part, for Turkey’s repeated constitutional crises. We therefore suggest an alternative template for understanding Turkish constitutional history—the theory of sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception put forward by Carl Schmitt.
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Book Chapters by Gulsen Seven
Oakeshott's Skepticism, Politics and Aesthetics, 2022
This essay considers the significance of the sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne for M... more This essay considers the significance of the sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne for Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Geuss: twentieth century philosophers associated with contemporary political realism, who nevertheless occupy divergent positions on the ideological spectrum. The aim, in doing so, is twofold: to contribute to attempts at uncovering a tradition of realism and realistic thinkers, and to single out Montaigne's potential substantial relevance for some of the contemporary debates in political theory.
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Michael Oakeshott on Authority, Governance and the State, 2019
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Book Reviews by Gulsen Seven
In recent years, a number of thinkers have attacked much of contemporary political theory for fai... more In recent years, a number of thinkers have attacked much of contemporary political theory for failing to engage with politics as an autonomous sphere of activity. It has by now become a common charge against these thinkers that despite their success in presenting formidable criticisms to moralizing approaches to politics, they perform rather poorly in offering exemplary accounts of 'political' approaches. This book aims to offer a corrective to this imbalance by investigating character of a would-be politics-centred political theory in the writings of the theorists of the 'political': Weber, Schmitt, Ricoeur, Arendt, Wolin, Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe. Each of these theorists are dealt with in separate chapters organized around three subsections. Explication of value and meaning of politics for each of these individual thinkers is followed by a demonstration of the inability of total isolation of politics (despite its relative autonomy) from other spheres such as metaphysics and ethics in their writings and by an account of their possible practical application to or implication for real politics. While these individual chapters noticeably convey the author's diligence in covering an extensive set of materials related to the subject matter, they fail to register any sense of clarity gained as a result. Yet, since the overall purpose of the book is to encourage development of a politics-centred political theory, its overall performance should be evaluated along this dimension. Readers, who hope to find a full-fledged politics-centred political theory within the pages of this book will be disappointed to find only a few (and not necessarily novel) pointers instead. The most important one is that a political political theory, which starts from theorists' substantive commitments to particular conceptions of politics from which they deduce everything else, is compatible with diverse understandings of politics, variety of ideological leanings and distinct normative and ontological concerns (p. 11; 19). A political-centred political theory, in other words, does not have a privileged locus. This insight alone should encourage thinkers, who care enough about politics, to take action against increasing specialization in academia and develop theories that allow for more integrated, cooperative conceptions of power, authority, ideology, interests and so on. Comprehending this is no wonder valuable. Yet, it is highly dubious how close it actually moves us towards developing a politics-centred political theory. GULSEN SEVEN Bilkent University
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Realism has recently been invigorated as a critical approach to the dominant liberal normative po... more Realism has recently been invigorated as a critical approach to the dominant liberal normative political theory, which, it is alleged, conceives politics as applied ethics. Among its central claims are a set of related theses such as the autonomy of the political, the irreducibility of politics to ethics and the centrality of power and conflict to politics. Such broadly canvassed realism is compatible with a wide swath of non-moralizing positions situated along different ends of the political spectrum. This book aims to present a contribution to a rather conservative form of political realism that takes its target to be forms of utopian thinking informed by an unsullied belief in reason-guided political action for the betterment of the world. What is particularly striking about the book is that it is disappointingly hard to make a penetrating sense of it before one reaches the very last chapter. The structural composition of it in general as well as the organization of individual chapters is of very little help in that respect. Although the first chapter is concerned with analysing what political realism is, for instance, one is left with a rather ambiguously eclectic understanding of what it might possibly involve (strife, necessity, enemy, revenge, power etc.), partly because subsections are not related to one another or to the overall purpose of each chapter or the book itself. On a more substantial basis, neither the negative claim of the book mentioned above, nor its positive one, if it can actually be said to advance one, except for an advocacy of political realism of a certain type, are presented with much clarity throughout. It is only when one reaches the very last section on Leo Strauss as a political realist that one notices Lanczi's advocated form of realism as a distinctively Straussian type. Leaving aside the question of the extent to which Leo Strauss can be considered a political realist, it is strikingly disingenuous to present an account of political realism tightly fit for a particular thinker without any mention of him in the beginning and then, in conclusion, to proclaim the very same person a political realist because he fits the previous description. For this reason, the book would better be read as a defence of Leo Strauss as 'the only genuine political philosopher of the twentieth century' rather than a rewarding contribution to contemporary debates on realism (p. 176). GULSEN SEVEN Bilkent University
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Political Studies Review, 2014
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Political Studies Review, 2013
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Europolis, 2008
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Papers by Gulsen Seven
Abstract: Radical reforms undertaken during two decades of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rule in Turkey has encouraged a proliferation of studies that attempt to identify the nature of the emergent political regime. This study, which aims to contribute to this literature, discusses the nature of the regime by considering AKP’s approach to constitutionalism. Drawing inspiration from the seventeenth century practice of frontispieces, it sets out from visual representations that characterize AKP’s relationship to constitutions and constitutional order. In particular, it claims that while, at first, AKP appeared as the Roman god of transitions, Janus of our time, twenty years on the constituted regime bears striking similarities to the Leviathan, which depicts the dominant paradigm of constitutionalism and politics in Turkey.
Book Chapters by Gulsen Seven
Book Reviews by Gulsen Seven
Abstract: Radical reforms undertaken during two decades of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rule in Turkey has encouraged a proliferation of studies that attempt to identify the nature of the emergent political regime. This study, which aims to contribute to this literature, discusses the nature of the regime by considering AKP’s approach to constitutionalism. Drawing inspiration from the seventeenth century practice of frontispieces, it sets out from visual representations that characterize AKP’s relationship to constitutions and constitutional order. In particular, it claims that while, at first, AKP appeared as the Roman god of transitions, Janus of our time, twenty years on the constituted regime bears striking similarities to the Leviathan, which depicts the dominant paradigm of constitutionalism and politics in Turkey.