PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This study is an attempt to make an interdisciplinary conceptualization of othering by explicating its relations with the way individuals define their social groups using the theoretical framework of group boundaries on the one hand, and by relating these to the debates of coexistence and diversity in Turkey on the other; through discussing national identity and citizenship. Othering is mostly considered equal with the us-them distinction, a social psychological dynamic that inevitably occurs to highlight the differentiation between social categories when individuals identify themselves with a specific category. However, the empirical model hypothesized and tested in this study indicated that othering is a more complex and socially constructed dynamic than such a distinction; it includes dimensions that perpetuate the hierarchization and essentialization of the group differences and that work to exclude the others from the moral, social, political, and civic boundaries of we. Analyses of secondary data extracted from the focus group meetings for the project of “Understanding the Process of ‘Othering’ in Encounters” organized with 25 young individuals who dentified themselves as a part of a social or political group indicated that the narratives used to define the ingroups included feeling superior to the others and experiencing negative treatment in the past concurrently. In the main study conducted with 451 participants living in İstanbul, young individuals were asked who their others were, why they state them as others and what they thought these others deserve considering the rights granted to them as citizens in addition to the group narratives they use to define their ingroup. At a conceptual level, the group narratives were considered as indicators of boundary-making while the constructions about the others were taken as boundary-maintenance processes. The empirical analyses indicated that the group narratives composed of glorification and victimhood beliefs as boundarymaking processes lead to defining others in extremely negative categories and considering them as sources of threat which eventually causes denying their political, civic, cultural rights as well as basic freedoms (intolerance) and distancing them in the society, which is an indicator of polarization. The model also confirmed that the definition of others by delegitimization and as sources of threat mediate the relation between group narratives and intolerance or social distance. The empirical results were discussed in terms of the practices of coexistence, construction of citizenship, and the xi content of national identity, as well as of the current politically polarized context of Turkey.