Chapter 1. Introduction

It is more than a decade since the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power as a single political party in Turkey in 2002. Irrespective of who criticizes or appreciates its policy preferences and their implementation, many would agree that, going beyond its institutional existence, this party, which has its roots in political Islamic tradition,1 symbolizes a new era in Turkish politics, in the sense that the socioeconomic structure of the country has changed immensely in favour of the current needs of global markets and politics, respectively (Şen, 2010). Although the transformation is an ongoing process and started long before the party came to power (the adaptation to neoliberal capital accumulation and the societal effects of these policy preferences began in the 1980s), the AKP has taken many initiatives to speed up the transformation. Alongside its political and financial power, the political discourse of the party has also been crucial in this process. The party has benefited from strategic language use to create its political hegemony. It has sought to establish a discursive sphere which imposes neoliberal policymaking as the only way of making progress. This attempt to create discursive hegemony as part of a wider political hegemony attracted my interest and motivated me to further investigate the discursive-strategic aspects of such policymaking in a systematic way, i.e. to decipher the actual content, direction and effects of policy practices.