Conspiracy theories are a prevalent feature of culture and politics in Turkey. Conspiracism is an important phenomenon in understanding Turkish politics.[1] This is explained by a desire to "make up for lost Ottoman grandeur",[1] the humiliation of perceiving Turkey as part of "the malfunctioning half" of the world,[2] and a "low level of media literacy among the Turkish population."[3]
The development of conspiracy theories in Turkey has been connected to the political instability and territorial losses of the late Ottoman Empire. Its collapse remains a painful memory for some Turks who believe Western influences contributed to its collapse[4]. This has shaped conspiracy narratives that portray foreign powers and minority groups as threats to Turkey’s government and national security.
Turkish author and journalist Mustafa Akyol describes the reason for the prevalence of conspiracy theorizing in Turkey as "it makes us feel important. If the world is conspiring against us, we must be really special. It is, I believe, the way we Turks make up for our lost Ottoman grandeur."[1] Turkish economist Selim Koru has pointed to the humiliation of perceiving Turkey as part of the "malfunctioning [half]" of the world.[2]
Turkish consumers are the second-most media illiterate when compared to countries in Europe, leaving them especially vulnerable to fake news, a 2018 report released by the SorosOpen Society Institute said. A combination of low education levels, low reading scores, low media freedom and low societal trust went into making the score, which saw Turkey being placed above only North Macedonia.[3] According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, Turkey with some distance is the country with most made-up news reports in the world.[5] The largest peddlers of conspiracy theories are often Turkish news outlets and social media which makes avoiding conspiracy theories nearly impossible. Social media presents a unique challenge to media literacy due to the fact that "bots" or fake accounts have a financial incentive to produce outrageous content. The more traction social media accounts get, the more money that is generated for the account user.[6]
Fall of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire spanned parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa and included diverse ethnic and religious communities, such as Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Arabs[7]. Those who identified as Muslims generally had more citizen rights. Ottoman leaders introduced reforms that aimed to promote unity. One approach was Ottomanism, which sought to establish an inclusive civic identity and equality among Ottoman subjects regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds. However, these efforts were resisted by nationalist movements among minority groups . Turks view the involvement of foreign countries and the nationalist movements as proof that foreign power seek to weaken Turkey.
1920 Treaty of Sèvres
In 1920 the Treaty of Sèvres proposed dividing former Ottoman territories among the Allied powers and creating arrangements for Kurdish and Armenian territories. It also placed İzmir and other areas under arrangements that threatened Turkish territorial control. Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rejected the treaty and declared War for Independence which lasted from 1919 to 1923. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 which established Turkey's modern borders, and the Republic of Turkey was established that same year. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the proposed division of its territories contributed to fears that foreign powers would use minority groups to weaken the new Turkish Republic.
Sèvres Syndrome
Widespread conspiratorial views about foreign powers and the internal groups that seek to weaken or divide the Turkish Republic. This conspiracy narrative has shaped educational content, views of the European Union, government policies favoring isolationism, foreign relations, and responses to the Kurdish insurgency. Kerem Karaosmanoğlu refers to it as "mother of all conspiracy theories in Turkey." This fear has been subsequently abused by Turkish politicians who have used political polarization and national distrust to divide people and legitimize their own authoritarian regime.[8]
Distinct features
Mustafa Akyol argues that Turkey's official political discourse is shaped by anti-Western conspiracy narratives that portray terrorist groups as working together to bring about the country's downfall. A distinct feature of conspiracy theorizing in Turkey is that at the alleged command and control end of an alleged conspiracy scheme is usually narrated to be governments because the worldview taught in the Turkish education system is massively focused on the state.[9]
Doğan Gürpınar, a scholar whose areas of study include nationalism, historiography, and ideologies in Turkey, argues that conspiracism's power to shape intellectual discourse and ideological standpoints and to represent the state tradition is "unique to Turkey".[10]
Political and Social Consequences
Political legitimacy
The concept of üst akıl describes a powerful and secretive force believed to control the public sphere in Turkey socially and politically. Politicians use this to justifying government actions, discredit opposing views, protect political power, and gain public support.
Nationalism
Some Turkish right-wing parties use the Sèvres Syndrome to express distrust of Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union. For example, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) viewed EU requirements as part of a Western plan to divide Turkey by creating “artificial minorities.” Since the founding of the Turkish Republic, state ideology has also sought to prevent social divisions based on class and ethnicity.
Strengthening the Ruling Elite
Conspiracy theories about terrorism can serve the political interests of Turkey's ruling elite by attributing national security threats to foreign plots and portraying the country's leadership as a major force facing powerful international opposition. More broadly, people and political groups may turn to conspiracy theories when they struggle to explain complex social and political developments they oppose or use them to ease fears about perceived
List of conspiracy theories
Anti-Israel and antisemitism: In the course of the 2006 Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Turkey, Felicity Party member Abdullah Uzun claimed that the tick species that spread the disease was brought to Turkey by Israeli female tourists.[11] In May 2012, a dead European bee-eater with an Israeli leg-band, used by naturalists to track migratory birds, was found by villagers near the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep. The villagers worried that the bird may have carried a micro-chip from Israeli intelligence to spy on the area and alerted local officials. The head of the Agriculture and Livestock Provincial Directorate in Gaziantep, Akif Aslanpay, examined the corpse of the bee-eater and stated that he found that "the nose of the bird is very different and much lighter than others" and that it "can be used for audio and video," which, "in the case of Israel, they do."[12] A counter-terrorism unit became involved before Turkey's agriculture ministry assured villagers that it is common to equip migratory birds with rings in order to track their movements. The BBC correspondent, Jonathan Head, ascribed the event to his view that "wildly implausible conspiracy theories take root easily in Turkey, with alleged Israeli plots among the most widely believed."[13]
COVID-19 misinformation: After the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, false information regarding the virus's place of origin, treatment and diagnosis was widely spread through social media, news outlets and political biases.[clarification needed] Specifically, an Islamic activist and scholar named Abdurrahman Dilipak who wrote for a national Islamic newspaper perpetuated the idea that Covid-19 was a global conspiracy from China, the US, and the UK set out to destroy the world and Turkey. He was highly influential at the time and was the most followed Covid conspirast on the social media X (formerly known as Twitter)[16]. That caused an "infodemic," as dubbed by the World Health Organization, though this was a global phenomenon and not unique to Turkey. The numerous false claims regarding the treatment of the virus caused harm on various fronts in the fight to subdue it.[17]
Death of Özal: Some people believe that Turgut Özal, 8th president of Turkey, was assassinated in 1993. The main supporters of this theory are Özal's wife Semra Özal and their son Ahmet Özal.[18] Retired brigadier-general Levent Ersöz was accused of the "assassination" and tried, but was found innocent and received an amnesty.[19] Özal's body was exhumed in 2012 for an autopsy following long discussions and controversy over his death.[20]
Mastermind narrative: The term "mastermind" (Turkish: üst akıl) denotes the alleged command and control institution, somewhat ambiguously placed with the government of the United States, in a comprehensive conspiracy to weaken or even dismember Turkey.[24][25][1] Erdoğan as well as the Daily Sabah have often alleged that very different non-state actors, like the Salafi jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Islamist cult with political ambitions around Fethullah Gülen, were attacking Turkey at the same time in a well-coordinated campaign.[9] Journalist Ömer Turan asserted that Netflix Turkey's teaser trailer for Money Heist contained messages aiming to incite the "second wave" of the Gezi Park protests.[26]
Atatürk with a top hat, a common male headgear in the West at the time (1925). His many reforms secularizing Turkey have made Atatürk the target of Islamist conspiracy theories.
Sèvres syndrome: A reference to the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, there is a popular belief in Turkey that dangerous internal and external enemies, especially the West, are "conspiring to weaken and carve up the Turkish Republic".[34]
Treaty of Lausanne: Islamists have put forward many conspiracy theories about the Treaty of Lausanne.[35][28] For example, it was claimed in civil and formal circles that the treaty would expire in 2023. According to the conspiracy theory, Turkey was forbidden to mine its natural resources (such as boron and petroleum) due to the "secret articles" of the treaty, and therefore, Turkey would rapidly become a developed country by mining and exporting its resources once the treaty expired.[36]
War against Islam, also called the "War on Islam" or "Attack on Islam", is a conspiracy theory narrative in Islamism discourse to describe an alleged Islamophobic conspiracy to harm, weaken or annihilate the societal system of Islam, using military, economic, social and cultural means. The perpetrators of the conspiracy are alleged to be non-Muslims, particularly the Western world and "false Muslims", allegedly in collusion with political actors in the Western world. While the contemporary conspiracy theory narrative of the "War against Islam" mostly covers general issues of societal transformations in modernization and secularization, as well as general issues of international power politics among modern states, the Crusades, are often narrated as its alleged starting point. The English-language political neologism of "War on Islam" was coined in Islamist discourse in the 1990s and popularized as a conspiracy theory only after 2001.[37]
Wahhabism and The Memoirs of Mr. Hempher are linked in a popular conspiracy theory prevalent in neo-Ottomanist and Turkish far-right circles. The theory claims that the modern Salafi-Wahhabi movement was a British and Zionist psychological operation intended to weaken the Ottoman Empire and facilitate Zionist control over Palestine. Proponents of this conspiracy theory argue that the United Kingdom supported the Arab Revolt to facilitate the occupation of Palestine, which was under Ottoman rule before the revolt.[38][39]
The impact of political polarization
The political divide in Turkey has divided neighbors and friends. 74% of Turks would not engage in business with someone of a differing political party while 68% say they would not want their children to play with other children from families of a differing political party. [40]
↑Nic Newman with Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. L. Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (2018). "Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018"(PDF). Reuters Institute. p.39. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2018-06-18. Retrieved 2018-06-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑Saglam, E (2022). [10.1353/sor.2022.0047 "Subjectivity, Mobilization, and Everyday Politics: Insights from Reconfigurations of Conspiracy Theories in Turkey"]. Social Research: An International Quarterly. 89 (3): 831–857. doi:10.1353/sor.2022.0047– via Research Gate.{{cite journal}}: Check |url= value (help)
↑"TURKISH BAN ON FREEMASONS. All Lodges To Be Abolished". Malaya Tribune, 14 October 1935, p. 5. The Government has decided to abolish all Masonic lodges in Turkey on the ground that Masonic principles are incompatible with nationalistic policy.
35. Göknar, E. (2019). [Review of the book Conspiracy theory in Turkey: Politics and protest in the age of "post-truth", by Julian de Medeiros]. The Middle East Journal 73(2), 336-337. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/730239./
36. Karaosmanoğlu, K. (2021). The discourse of üst akıl: a search for hegemony in the Turkish media. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 21(1), 77–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2021.1872233/
37. Nefes, T. S. (2026). Rationalities of conspiracy theories: A Weberian analysis of Turkish parliamentary debates. Party Politics, 32(1), 89-99. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688251316067
38. Nefes, T. S. (2017). The impacts of the Turkish government’s conspiratorial framing of the Gezi Park protests. Social Movement Studies, 16(5), 610–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2017.1319269/
39. Saglam, E. (2022). Subjectivity, Mobilization, and Everyday Politics: Insights from Reconfigurations of Conspiracy Theories in Turkey. Social Research: An International Quarterly 89(3), 831-857. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0047./
Baer, Marc David (2013). "An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic". Jewish Quarterly Review. 103 (4): 523–555. doi:10.1353/jqr.2013.0033. S2CID159483845.
Göçek, Fatma Müge (2011). The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN9781848856110.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
