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Religious Minorities in Turkey pp 55–96Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Securitization and Desecuritization of Minority Rights

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Abstract

Where minority rights are primarily framed as having strong implications for state security, they are securitized. When they are instead discussed in reference to other values (such as democracy or human rights), and when societal actors representing other than security interests dominate their contestation, they are desecuritized. This chapter provides an overview of how Turkey has dealt with its (religious) minorities. It reveals a background of strong securitization of minority rights emerging from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings of the Turkish Republic. It then shows how EU accession negotiations have provided an impetus toward a desecuritization process already begun in the 1980s, which however remains incomplete and far from irreversible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and International Relations, Yeni Yüzyil University, İstanbul, Turkey

    Mehmet Bardakci

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Annette Freyberg-Inan

  3. Department of Slavonic and Caucasian Studies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Thüringen, Germany

    Christoph Giesel

  4. University of Jena, Jena, Germany

    Olaf Leisse

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  1. Mehmet Bardakci
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  3. Christoph Giesel
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  4. Olaf Leisse
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Bardakci, M., Freyberg-Inan, A., Giesel, C., Leisse, O. (2017). Securitization and Desecuritization of Minority Rights. In: Religious Minorities in Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27026-9_3

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