Seeking the Truth Among Dead Crops: Carbon Footprint Victimhood, Platformed Conspiracism, and Climate Countermovement in Turkey
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, sa.20, ss.2631-2651, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.65476/r93vp061
- Dergi Adı: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: EBSCO Communication Source, Communication Source (EBSCO), Scopus, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), IBZ Online, ComAbstracts, Communication Abstracts, Index Islamicus, Directory of Open Access Journals, Social Sciences Abstracts
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.2631-2651
- Galatasaray Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
After years of climate inaction, Turkey’s ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2021 prompted the Justice and Development Party’s discursive shift from high-carbon hegemonic agenda to green developmentalist rhetoric. This policy change provoked a backlash among conspiratorial climate-denial networks on social media. When the country’s worst-ever wildfires in 2021 were followed by wheat field fires in 2022, far-right and nationalist coalitions on X disseminated the conspiracy theory that foreign actors deliberately set these fires to undermine Turkey’s food sovereignty and engineer demographic decline under the cover of the climate agenda. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we examine tweets from 2 major hashtag campaigns linking these fires to climate conspiracy theories. Our analysis identifies 3 interconnected motivational themes: environmental nationalism, economic injustice, and population control, each framed through a rhetoric of moral decay that sustains nationalist resentment and a discourse of victimhood.