Transnational Resistance to Communicative Ethnocide: Alevi Television during the State of Emergency in Turkey (2016–18)

Since the late nineteenth century the media in Turkey has been characterised by state intervention, which has intensified during times of political crisis and upheaval. For this reason, the media has often been in conflict with the state; state officials have censored and attempted to control media content in various ways when it has not complied with official ideology. In the last two decades, state intervention of the media has taken on a transnational aspect: the state has deployed various diplomatic and other strategies, particularly targeted at the Kurdish media, in order to control any alternative discourse on the Kurdish question (Sinclair and Smets, 2014). Following the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, the Turkish government imposed severe restrictions on the media, closing down television channels, imprisoning journalists, and confiscating the property and materials of several media organisations. The operations of the Alevi television channels, Yol TV and TV10, which broadcast from Germany and Turkey and appeal to the transnational Alevi community living in Europe and Turkey, were also closed down. However, the Alevi television stations turned to alternative means to keep in touch with their audience and found different ways to survive in resistance to the government’s measures. Drawing on interviews conducted with television producers and executives in Germany, this chapter focuses on the survival strategies of Alevi television at a time of growing state authoritarianism in Turkey.