Abstract

This paper explores the converging trajectories of bureaucratic authority, religious legitimacy, and digital governance in contemporary Turkey, a context that mirrors broader global shifts in statecraft. Within a post-Kemalist framework, the state increasingly operates through “appified sovereignty,” leveraging platforms like Diyanet Mobil (religious affairs), e-Nabız (centralized health records), and gocmen.gov (migration management). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structures, Foucault’s bio-power and governmentality, and insights from Agamben and Zuboff, we analyze these tools as techno-theological and biopolitical extensions of state power, deeply embedded in the cultural politics of nationhood and belonging. We argue that digital governance in Turkey fuses sacred rhetoric, bureaucratic algorithms, and biopolitical calculation, transforming citizens, believers, and migrants into devotional, docile, or liminal data points. Reflexively, this paper acknowledges its own complicity within the academic and digital apparatuses it critiques, positioning itself as an artifact of the assemblage it deconstructs, questioning knowledge production in an era of pervasive digital mediation.

Keywords: Digital Governance, Turkey, Post-Structuralism, Interface Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Governmentality, Diyanet, e-Nabız, Migration Management, Critical Theory

Introduction

In the shifting landscape of late-modern governance, Turkey exemplifies not a deviation from Western liberal norms but an accelerated fusion of their contradictions with unique power genealogies. From biometric health registration to religious notifications delivering daily guidance, state interaction increasingly occurs through screens, passwords, and QR codes. These technologies perform presence and extract compliance, reterritorializing engagement onto digital platforms. This paper focuses on the liminal space between prayer and database, ritual and login, embodied life and algorithmic representation.

Traditional analyses of Turkish politics—labeling the post-Kemalist state as authoritarian, populist, or hybrid—struggle to capture the fluid, networked interfaces of power emerging through Turkey’s digital transformation. Viewing the state as a rhizomatic assemblage of rituals, code, faith, and biopolitical strategies, we theorize new governance modalities that blur tradition and technocracy, the imam and the administrator, the fatwa and the HTTP response, the diagnosis and the health score, the border guard and the database query.

Turkey’s flagship platforms—Diyanet Mobil, e-Nabız, and gocmen.gov—function not as neutral tools but as theological, biopolitical, and carceral-bureaucratic devices. Embedded in power’s affective circuitry, they produce specific subjects. These apps introduce paradoxes: the state becomes more accessible yet more opaque; individuals gain visibility but face greater control. We conceptualize this as “interface sovereignty,” where power asserts itself through data-driven logics and performative visibility.

Synthesizing Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian rhizomatics, Agamben’s state of exception, Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, and ritual and technology studies, this paper examines how governance materializes in Turkey’s daily life. The bureaucrat, imam, and app form nodes in a distributed theology and rationality of control, where legitimacy is sought, performed, and contested through digital mediation. Reflexively, this paper acknowledges its position within globalized digital and academic infrastructures, aiming to reveal not just Turkey’s state but a broader condition of digital mediation.

Theoretical Framework

This study employs a multi-layered framework, blending post-structuralist political theory, critical digital and media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the anthropology of ritual and belief. It destabilizes assumptions about state, authority, technology, and subjectivity, particularly where sacred legitimacy, biopolitical calculations, and algorithmic control converge. Turkey’s unique history and rapid digital adoption demand an approach accounting for both hyper-modern interfaces and theological residues.

Rhizomatic Statehood: Deleuze and Guattari

The state, in its digital form, resembles a rhizome—a decentralized, non-hierarchical multiplicity connecting diverse points. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept challenges classical state theory’s verticality, framing Turkey’s digital state as a system of affective, theological, and algorithmic connections. Apps like Diyanet Mobil, e-Nabız, and gocmen.gov are rhizomatic nodes, embodying and extending state functions. They exercise “interface sovereignty,” where power operates through screens, notifications, and databases, often with user participation.

Confessional Algorithms and Governmentality: Foucault

Foucault’s governmentality and biopower illuminate how digital platforms mediate state-subject relations. As modern apparatuses, these tools deploy confession, normalization, and visibility, rendering individuals knowable and governable. Diyanet Mobil extends governmentality into belief, producing state-sanctioned piety legible to databases. e-Nabız enframes the body for data production, aligning health practices with public directives. This is not just surveillance but a co-produced moral and social order.

Surveillance as Production and Affective Capital: Zuboff and Beyond

Building on Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, we view Turkey’s digital governance as transcending commercial logics to serve state objectives of sovereignty and identity. Citizens, believers, and migrants become data-emitting subjects within theological, biopolitical, and administrative loops. Interactions—clicks, logins, submissions—act as micro-rituals, affirming presence within the state’s digital sensorium, producing “devotional,” “biometric,” and “classificatory” surplus.

The App as Exception and Digital Threshold: Agamben

Agamben’s state of exception finds resonance in platforms like gocmen.gov, where rights and presence hinge on interface engagement. Apps become digital thresholds, mediating inclusion and exclusion. System errors or pending decisions can render individuals digitally non-existent, exercising sovereign power through code, databases, and algorithmic rhythms.

Methodology

This study adopts a multi-modal qualitative approach—interface ethnography, digital semiotics, and discursive frame analysis—reflecting the rhizomatic, performative nature of Turkey’s digital state power. We examine e-Nabız, Diyanet Mobil, and gocmen.gov as state-performative devices shaping subjectivities, norms, and boundaries.

Data Sources

The corpus includes publicly accessible app interfaces, state communiqués, press releases, and UX/UI elements. Supplementary materials encompass instructional videos, user reviews from app stores, archived khutbahs, and semantic traces from notifications and guidance, interpreted as a discursive ecology where meaning, authority, and affect are contested.

Analytical Framework

Analysis unfolds in three stages:

Interface Ethnography: Examines UI/UX flows, workflows, error messages, and data interactions, coding their directive, extractive, symbolic, and affective functions.

Discursive Frame Analysis: Uses grounded theory to identify themes in app descriptions, FAQs, and policies, focusing on theological, medical, and legalistic framings.

Semiotic Patterning and Comparative Reading: Analyzes design motifs and aesthetics, situating Turkey within global techno-political formations.

Positionality and Reflexivity

The researcher, a digitally mediated subject, leverages this positionality, adopting “reflective immanence” to produce knowledge from within the assemblage, critically reflecting on its logics.

Case Study I: Diyanet Mobil: The Theology of Push Notifications

Diyanet Mobil, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs’ app, delivers divine reminders and guidance, aligning Islamic ritual with state mechanisms. Its UI—serene tones, mosque iconography, calligraphic flourishes—blends reverence with UX efficiency, offering prayer times, fatwas, and khutbahs. Push notifications act as micro-sermons, timed to mirror prayer rhythms, subtly shaping routines. Content, centrally vetted, standardizes belief, positioning users as recipients of state-managed theology. The app becomes a ritual object, its sacredness tied to software updates and connectivity, synchronizing faith with state prompts.

Case Study II: e-Nabız: The Biopolitics of Healing and Calculation

e-Nabız, the Ministry of Health’s platform, renders the body a site of algorithmic truth and biopolitical governance. Its dashboard—test results, vaccinations, health indicators—produces a data-rich body, co-constructed by algorithms and user interaction. Users become complicit in legibility, feeding a “bio-public” of aggregated metrics. Recommendation engines nudge normalization, reconfiguring care into data management. Time is restructured—health histories archived, futures predicted—making the citizen a performative archive of state-legible data.

Case Study III: gocmen.gov: Border Management as Digital Ontology

gocmen.gov transforms migrants into computable, precarious statuses within a data regime. Categories—refugee, temporary protection—carry legal and social weight, altered by administrative actions or biometric scans. Migrants, opaque to the interface, are interpreted objects, their status defined by third-party inputs. The system exercises sovereignty through visibility and categorization, producing “administrative limbo” via delays and pending statuses, a digital state of exception. Classificatory violence inscribes identities, reducing migrants to database entries.

What If This Paper Wrote Itself? A Meta-Reflexive Interlude

What if Diyanet Mobil, e-Nabız, and gocmen.gov co-authored this text? This interlude reflects on this paper’s entanglement with digital governance logics. Composed via machinic systems—language models trained on vast corpora—this text bears the imprint of interface-based cognition. It is an interface, shaped by digital platforms, tracking engagement like the apps it critiques. Academic writing, with citations as hyperlinks and peer review as consensus-building, mirrors computational plausibility. This paper, a critique, may extend the apparatus, formatted for algorithmic legibility, implicating author and reader in parallel regimes of visibility.

Conclusion: The Apparatus Within, The Prototype Revealed

This paper updates rather than concludes, versioning an ongoing inquiry. In post-Kemalist Turkey, the state rules through interface logic, repositioning individuals as users and data points in loops of extraction and nudging. “Interface sovereignty” reprograms authority, blending the imam, bureaucrat, and app. Compliance means legibility; resistance risks exclusion. Turkey’s digital governance, a ritual apparatus, echoes globally—India’s Aadhaar, China’s social credit, Estonia’s e-governance. Turkey prototypes digitally mediated rule, fusing ambition, security, and ideology. This text, shaped by academic-digital interfaces, submits to their logic, implicating you, the reader, in its circuit. A click. A log. A trace.