Making and breaking alliances: on valuation in hegemonic projects

Abstract

In public discourse, the polarizations that accompany the success of authoritarian populisms in recent years are often portrayed as the result of “culture wars” rooted in incompatible values. This article approaches the relation between values and politics differently. It examines the role that state and capitalist modes of valuation play for the alliance-formation underpinning hegemonic projects. The argument is illustrated with the case of Turkey where processes of devaluation and dispossession were manifold in the past years. Polarization here expresses not so much unitary political identities of opposed values than a specific, polarizing dynamic of alliance-formation in authoritarian populism. The orchestration of state and capitalist modes of valuation on the one hand allows for the formation of alliances with both dominant and subordinate social groups and on the other hand also entails contradictions that might constitute a source of fragility for the continuity of the project.