Foreign Languages Department

This article explores how specific narratives of the past can be functionalized/ instrumentalized as discursive strategies in order to gain political power. To investigate this issue, four relevant governmental and non-governmental texts about the main opposition party in Turkey are analysed. The Republican People's Party (CHP), which played a historic role by becoming a state party between 1923 and 1946, and which later adopted a social democratic position in the political system, has frequently been criticized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its historical identity. The article illuminates how discursive strategies of argumentation, nomination and predication are used to portray the CHP as an enduring bureaucratic-militarist state party and the ways in which these strategies are functionalized by AKP politicians as well as by public intellectuals in favour of the government.

Can Küçükali is a third year PhD research student at Lancaster University. His current research concentrates on discursive strategies as hegemonic projects in Turkish politics. His areas of interest are critical discourse analysis, political discourse, rhetorical strategies and conceptual politics.

This paper delves into the problem of aggression in Turkish foreign-policy discourse on Syria which tries to legitimize a military operation. In order to understand how the policymaking preferences of a military operation are legitimized and promoted in governmental discourse, 166 governmental texts, from 2011 to 2013, are investigated in terms of the implementation of strategies proposed by several scholars (van Leeuwen . The results show that the increasing willingness of the Turkish government to take military action in Syria is systematically operationalized in several stages within each type of legitimation strategy (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999) to overcome international reluctance and provide support for a prospective conflict. At the end of the paper, the results are evaluated in light of recent political developments for a comprehensive understanding of the meaning and limits of the strategies implemented.

This article investigates the content of change discourse, which is the dominant practice observed while criticizing the main opposition party of Turkey and the party's discursive reaction to it. The main goals of the article are to disclose the ambiguity of change discourse, discuss the possible meaning of change under the domain of the 'third way' trend that we saw in the West as a result of neoliberalism, and reveal the general traits of CHP's discursive reaction to change by analyzing the framing preferences of the new leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, in the fifteenth extraordinary congress speech. The analysis shows that the discursive reaction of the CHP to the call for change is far from reconciling with the neoliberal market reforms, as it was seen by the 'third-wayers', but rather resistant to the main principles of neoliberal policy-making. ÖZET Bu makale, Türkiye'nin ana muhalefet partisi olan CHP'nin eleştirilmesinde hakim pratik olan değişim söyleminin içeriğini ve partinin bu pratiğe karşı verdiği söylemsel tepkiyi araştırmaktadır. Makalenin temel amaçları, değişim söyleminin belirsizliğini açığa çıkarmak, değişimin olası anlamını, Batıda 'üçüncü yol' adı altında gördüğümüz ve temel olarak neoliberalizmin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan eğilimler açısından tartışmak ve CHP'nin değişim söylemine verdiği tepkinin genel özelliklerini, partinin yeni lideri Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu'nun on