Culture, social contestation and Turkey's failed coup: The rivalry of social imaginaries

Abstract

This article explores the processes involved in the emergence of rival social imaginaries, as they develop in a cultural ecosystem, relating it to Turkey’s failed coup. To accomplish that, it unravels how people construct their own nature by studying the social construction of reality, which is comprehensively partial to ‘values.’ What we see and how it is understood leads to the emergence of diverging ideological trajectories and, eventually, to social contestation as a result of competing claims. In Turkey, this ongoing contestation is reflected in the failed coup d’état. In other words, the failed coup d’état is explored as a clash of social imaginaries, in which the Gülenist social imaginary was vanquished by the AK Party’s social imaginary.