Endless “Democratic Transitions”

The majority of human beings live under regimes that are neither dictatorships (or tyrannies) nor democracies. Rather, most men and women in the world today live in societies that, while not submitted to permanent physical violence, are neither freed from violence. The dominant model on the world map today is therefore more of an in-between situation rather than one of democracy and civility. The case of Turkey is a good case for studying the permanence of authoritarianism and the resilience of such in-between regimes. The repressed violence of the past, the use of fear as a means to perpetuate a security state regime, as well as the over-determination of conflicts and cultural divisions within the political sphere, all of which derive from projects of modernisation “from above,” create a situation that favours the permanence of authoritarianism despite substantial changes in the ruling political class. How, then, to exit authoritarianism ?