YEŞIM ARAT is professor and chair in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has published on questions of women’s political participation, Islam, and democratization in Turkey. Contact: araty@boun.edu.tr.
We are lucky that the July 15, 2016, coup was aborted in Turkey. Coups in Turkey have undermined democracy, trampled on civil rights and human rights, dismantled political organizations, and bred violence. Men planned and executed coups even though women and everybody else suffered from them. The July 15 coup was no exception. Both the coup makers and those against whom they attempted to wage the coup were patriarchal men who shaped women’s interests as they saw fit.
We do not know the exact details of the coup yet, but it looks like the Gülenists who infiltrated the military planned and attempted to execute it. Gülen was a preacher in Turkey who cultivated a huge following that developed into a transnational religious and social movement. He had his media barons and businessmen and instructed his disciples to infiltrate...
