Abstract This article examines Turkey’s constitutional trajectory through Carl Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty, exception and dictatorship. It argues that Turkey’s political development cannot be fully understood as a process of gradual democratic erosion alone but must be analyzed as a sequence of constitutional ruptures in which exceptional powers have repeatedly redefined sovereign authority. From Abdülhamid II’s suspension of the 1876 Constitution to the Grand National Assembly’s exercise of wartime sovereignty in 1921, the military interventions of 1960 and 1980, and President Erdoğan’s post-2016 consolidation of power, sovereignty has shifted among personal, collective and institutional actors capable of suspending legality and founding new constitutional orders. By situating Turkey within a longer history of sovereign reconstitution, the article critically reworks Schmitt’s framework to show how emergency provisions – initially designed to defend constitutional order – can be transformed into instruments of constitutional refoundation. It demonstrates how commissarial responses to crisis may evolve into sovereign dictatorships, enabling regime transformation under the appearance of legal continuity. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on authoritarian constitutionalism and emergency governance by clarifying the constitutional mechanisms through which legality is suspended, reconfigured and redeployed. Beyond the Turkish case, the article advances a broader comparative agenda for global constitutionalism: integrating the study of democratic erosion with an analysis of sovereign reconstitution in moments of exception, thereby illuminating how contemporary constitutional orders are reshaped through crisis.
Özgür Salmanoğ (Fri,) studied this question.