Bilingual Authoritarianism: Turkey's Targeting of Turkish Minorities in the Balkans with Non-Turkish Content

Description

In post-imperial kin-states, the combination of authoritarian rule and the historical memory in home-states of their kin-minorities have led to a dangerous brand of ethnic politics. In the absence of fully-established minority regimes in home-states, kin-minority often serves as the primary arbiter of political interactions between countries and their governing elites. These conditions combine to present minority elites and their political big brothers in the kin-state with strong incentives to (mis)use ethnic issues as a means of securing and maintaining power in the kin-state's domestic politics. Especially in the age of communication, kin states often use kin minorities’s need for receiving news in the minority-language in the near abroad to shape the minorities’ public opinion and to strengthen the political base of the kin state's political power in those regions. As a result of the fact that the public broadcaster in home-state can't keep up with the times with its inadequate distribution, almost all ethnic communities depend in whole or in large part on their kin-state's media for information and analysis concerning their need for information. However, targeting kin minorities with kin-state media may not be sufficient to shape kin minority public opinion, especially when it comes to countries with transition of identities. This paper aims to analyze the preliminary impact of TRT Balkans, an arm of state-owned Turkish Television and Radio, broadcasting in Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), Macedonian and Albanian, on the public sphere of the Turkish communities of North Macedonia and Kosovo.

Period	1 Dec 2022
Event title	The ECMI Expert Workshop on Minority Language Media in Eastern Europe
Event type	Workshop
Location	Flensburg, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International