A Gramscian Reading : The Attack on Women's Freedom and their Role in Establishing Peace and Security in Illiberal Democracies

 The current Turkish government has failed to realize a holistic framework for gender equality. Its reluctance to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on WPS agenda proves its essentialist and victimhood-oriented approach. This article tries to show how this approach has determined its political project - the authoritarian, patriarchal, and conservative-confessional New Turkey - by concentrating on the policies issued by the Justice and Development Party (hereafter AKP) during the last twenty years. As a result of this project’s implementation, women in Turkey and their organizations have been negatively affected, especially after the 2016 crisis and the AKP’s adoption of increasingly sectarian/repressive/regressive policies. To shed light on the ongoing feminist-women/government tension, this article looks at the role of AKP’s ‘organic intellectuals’ who operate within Turkish society to support the government’s project, relying on Gramscian and Marcusean insights while analysing AKP’s authoritarianism according to Gramsci’s Caesarist-Bonapartist model. Its organic intellectuals consolidate this traditional and religious vision of women in society. By putting women at the centre of religious discourses and making them a bearer of moral or ethical principles, the government reproduces, approves and reasserts their second-class position in society.