EXPERT OPINION: Mideast politics, with Feryaz Ocakli
What should we know about the Syrian civil war? In the humanitarian crisis, Jordan and Lebanon are so swamped by refugees that they are now dependent on interna- tional aid. Turkey is managing financially to absorb Syrians who flee there, but some frictions have erupted between them and the local populations near the refugee camps. What nobody’s talking about is that many will never return to Syria—they have no houses or jobs left, and it’s been so long that their children are growing up in the host countries. They’ll need to be integrated into their new societies. In addition to the immedi- ate suffering of war, there is a hidden violence: the destruction of a country, which steals the future of the next gen- eration. Also the war has strengthened radical
Islamists, who now have a platform to show their martial abilities; they’ve gained a foothold in an otherwise secular state.
How are Islamists gaining populari- ty around the Middle East? For a book project, I’ve been studying how Islamist political parties broaden their appeal to more centrist voters. In Turkey a relatively radical Islamist party received 21% of the vote in 1995, at the height of its popularity; recently, although the Turkish public has been moving away from Islamist ideologies, the moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party has been getting 50% of the vote. Like- wise, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood did well in the 2012 elections, and such trends can be seen in other countries too. These parties are working hard to appeal to voters who don’t share their Islamist ideology but are perhaps socially conser- vative or individually pious. My research is looking at politics on a local scale, analyzing the party chapters’ organizational and networking skills. I try to understand why the Islamists won elections in some cities and lost to secu- larist parties in other, very similar cities.
I compare, for example, Gebze and Corlu, two industrial cities bordering Istanbul. In Gebze the Islamists won elections be- cause they had a strong party operation. This party chapter used business net- works (say, with the lure of state con- tracts or other benefits) to recruit promi- nent merchants, industrialists, and other influential residents to join it. It also pro- vided effective social services to work- ers and their families, building their loy- alty. In Corlu, infighting divided the chap- ter’s membership, and each faction would undermine the other faction’s so- cial programs. As a result, the party didn’t build wide enough support to win at the polls. So it’s not that “Islamists all band together”—just like other groups, sometimes they work well together and sometimes they don’t.
What other institutions drive political activity? Civil-society organizations tend to be weak in the Middle East, but even a weak civil society can have some political im- pact. Civic organizations interact with po- litical parties, each to advance their own interests—for example, some of Turkey’s
religious businessmen, who used to be excluded from the political system by sec- ular elites, found their way into local poli- tics through the help of their business as- sociations. Another avenue is hometown associations that bring together migrants who came from the same area: political parties often ally with them, helping their ambitious members to run for office. Politics in the Middle East are very
complex and tend to be locally diverse. As a comparative political scientist, my job is to tease out which factors are real- ly causal and can be traced in other cities and countries.
Feryaz Ocakli joined Skidmore in 2012. He teaches courses such as “Political Islam,” for which he and his students arranged a series of public events on Afghanistan.
SPRING 2014 SCOPE 5
MARK BOLLES
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