When Fifth Columns Fall: Religious Groups and Loyalty-Signaling in Erdoğan’s Turkey

This chapter investigates the role that fifth-column claims play in authoritarian politics. Specifically, it examines how fifth-column claims against the Gülen Movement have transformed the relationship between the Turkish state and both official (state-sanctioned) and unofficial Islamic actors in Turkey since July 2016. Erdoğan’s government reconfigured collusive claims about the alleged Gülenist fifth-column into subversive ones. In doing so, it expanded the scope of guilt-by-proximity and gave rise to loyalty-signaling dynamics within Turkey’s broader community of political Islamists. Documenting the shift from collusive to subversive fifth-column claims in this case reveals the extreme form of political pragmatism often guiding autocratic rule. Although Erdoğan’s regime has long been viewed through the prisms of de-secularization, Islamic political revival and neo-Ottoman ambition, these analytical frameworks obscure the fact that his political project is first and foremost about eliminating competing sources of domestic authority.