Farhan Mujahid Chak

This article deconstructs the stated reasons behind the quartet’s blockade on Qatar, including i) Iranian-relations; ii) funding ‘terror;’ iii) supporting ‘political Islam’ –Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc.; and iv) destabilizing the Arab world through Al Jazeera, and scrutinizes their veracity. In actuality, these accusations are mere obfuscation. Henceforth, understanding the quartet’s motivation requires employing post-colonialism as an explanatory variable. It does so by assuming the preponderance of U.S. military power in the GCC produces three conflicting ideal-types: i) Saudi-led quartet Arab project, ‘subservient’ to U.S. hegemony; ii) Iranian-led partisan project, resisting/increasing engagement to U.S. hegemony; iii) Turkish-led ‘civic Islam’ project, pivoting from engagement to resisting U.S. hegemony. In this, three-rivalry is the roots of the blockade and the larger meta-strategy at behind the blockade.

This article explores the processes involved in the emergence of rival social imaginaries, as they develop in a cultural ecosystem, relating it to Turkey’s failed coup. To accomplish that, it unravels how people construct their own nature by studying the social construction of reality, which is comprehensively partial to ‘values.’ What we see and how it is understood leads to the emergence of diverging ideological trajectories and, eventually, to social contestation as a result of competing claims. In Turkey, this ongoing contestation is reflected in the failed coup d’état. In other words, the failed coup d’état is explored as a clash of social imaginaries, in which the Gülenist social imaginary was vanquished by the AK Party’s social imaginary.