Governing through criminal selectivity and lawfare: non‐democratic politics to entrench authoritarian populist imagination

Across much of the Global South and increasingly in the Global North, authoritarian populist imagination blurs boundaries between legality and illegality, weaponising law to suppress dissent while tolerating violence by allied actors. This imagination establishes a symbolic boundary mechanism between punitive/eliminative violence for political dissidents and marginalised groups, and the impunity of violence for privileged groups aligned with incumbent political power. Non-democratic politics in Turkey demonstrate how the incumbent regime's shifting sense of power due to declining popular support translates into more explicitly coercive strategies and the masculinist entrenchment of authoritarian populist imagination. Criminal selectivity and lawfare are utilised for this purpose; however, their effectiveness is underpinned by cultural intimacies that reflect the cultural and political processes of negotiation and recognition between the top-down majoritarian–authoritarian–securitarian political agenda and its bottom-up receptions. Cultural intimacies rooted in masculinist entrenchment involve both the enactment of familial codes as a cultural template for the masculinist protection of the family, state and nation, and the performance of swashbuckling masculinity as a cultural script for righteous aggression against targeted groups. Both reframe the mechanism of criminal selectivity and lawfare, reinforcing the incumbent regime's authoritarian populist imagination by constantly presenting itself as an indispensable and invincible ruling actor.