Authoritarianism, Informal Law, and Legal Hybridity / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

To that end, the book argues that the AKP has paved the way for Islamist legal hybridity where society, state, and law, are being gradually Islamised on an ad hoc basis. Informal law and legal pluralism in Turkey have had a non-state characteristic which have permitted Muslims to solve disputes by seeking the opinions of religio-legal scholars. Yet under the AKP rule, this informal legal system has become increasingly dominated by conservatives, sometimes radical Islamists, which the governing party has taken advantage of by either formalizing some parts of the informal Islamist law, or using it informally to mobilize its supporters against the opposition.

Ihsan Yilmaz is Research Professor and Chair at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has conducted mixed method research on authoritarianism, legal pluralism, nation-building, citizenship, Islam-state-law relations in majority and minority contexts (Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, UK, USA and Australia), Islamism, populism, transnationalism, ethnoreligious and political minorities, securitisation, and intergroup relations. He was Professor of Political Science at Istanbul Fatih University (2008-2016), Lecturer in Law, Social Sciences and Politics at SOAS, University of London (2001-2008), and a fellow at Centre for Islamic Studies, the University of Oxford (1999-2001).