Morally Offensive?: Censorship, Religious Parties, and Resistance

This analysis delves into how morality is defined in countries like Turkey, where a religious party has been in power since 2002. It offers one of the first systematic analyses of decisions made by Turkey's Radio and Television Council (RTUK)—a largely neglected pivotal state institution controlled by the country's pro-Islamic government that monitors all media contents, fines, and imprisons individuals and agents when their expressions are determined to be offending or damaging "public morality." Although it was once described as a model Muslim democracy, the country's democracy has declined drastically over the last few years, while the level of religiosity fluctuated over time, and the protection of Islamic values gradually replaced the protection of secular values. Turkey has been ruled by a populist, authoritarian, pro-Islamic party that enables us to question how religious parties use their political dominance through ostensibly innocuous mechanisms and institutions and if and how those who identify as "secular" resist. Drawing on a data set I developed that organized RTUK'a's decision between 1998 and 2023 and interviews with RTUK members, the findings show that despite the common depiction of state censorship as a top-down process, populist authoritarian regimes build and share their monitoring capacity through various mechanisms. Placing RTUK in a broader context of authoritarian regimes and populist regimes, the paper discusses how censorship and different strategies are adopted to mitigate the objections to politically strategic censorship, which targets various groups such as oppositional media and LGBTQ+ communities. The paper also explores the role of international and domestic civil society groups in countering these mechanisms.