Researching the impact of gender on maintaining authoritarian state regimes

A project, which is part of The Open University's (OU) Open Societal Challenges themes around Tackling inequalities, has had findings published in Women’s Studies International Forum (WSIF) Journal.

Dr Ece Kocabıçak, Lecturer in Sociology in the OU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, author of the paper: The causes and consequences of the patriarchal state: Evidence from Turkey, published in WSIF, researched the factors which sustained the patriarchal character of the Turkish regime since 2002.

The incident which inspired Dr Kocabıçak’s research, was the fact that Turkey signed and ratified the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, known as the İstanbul Convention in 2011, becoming the first country to do so and then abruptly withdrew from the Convention in 2021.

Dr Kocabıçak found that Turko-Islamic racism is intertwined with the biological reproduction of the Turkish and Sunni-Muslim population, enabling patriarchal political figures to reinforce biology/ nature-based interpretations of sex and gender. By subscribing to racism, these political figures gain influence over the state and justify attacks on the rights of women and LGBTQ+ individuals. Simultaneously, the biology-based reductionist understanding of sex and gender weakens the feminist struggle.

Dr Kocabicak concluded: “To tackle these issues, my work emphasises the urgent need to establish anti-racist alliances and expand feminist imaginations with respect to the social construction of bodies, sexuality, and intimacy.”

Read the full paper: The causes and consequences of the patriarchal state: Evidence from Turkey