This article analyzes the reemergence of the film industry in İstanbul since the mid-1990s. In exploring the industrial and spatial dynamics of this process of reemergence, we employ the perspective of path dependence, conducted with the aid of historical analysis and in-depth interviews with the key actors of the sector. By zooming in on the details of this industry’s reemergence, we uncover the specifics of the process of revival in terms of both the industry itself and of location. Analysis of the industry reveals the impact on the revival of İstanbul’s film sector of system-wide developments, the key roles played by the advertising and television sectors, and entrepreneurial initiatives. Analysis of location, on the other hand, reveals that, following the collapse of Yeşilçam—the historical center of İstanbul’s film industry—two new clusters have emerged, one located in the vicinity of the old center (Beyoğlu) and the other in a rising commercial district (Levent).

Ottoman poetry is an empty sign. It floats, unfettered by the correspondence between words and things conventional to the typically modern signification of historical realities. But the sign (under which many of the other written Ottoman humanities—philosophy, literary-critical writing, fine art literature, and thought in general—tend to be subsumed) is not exactly empty. It carries double, or overdetermined, meaning. Though empty of poetry the term Ottoman poetry does not, for most people, call Ottoman poetry to mind—it is full of other things in so far as the sign is “read” as a rhetorical figure, a symbol, an allegory of the national narrative. And since the middle of our century, at the latest, when the first generation born into the Turkish Republic had come of age, it has continued to be read this way. That is, the allegory continually displaces the reality. Either the poetry is not known and there is no poetry in mind to recall, or, if it is known, the experience of recall is overdetermined in ways that can be connected with the poetry only through an analysis of the history of its modern reception, probably beginning with Young Ottoman polemic c. 1860's-1880's.

This article is based on an ethnographic study in the Turkish hospitality sector and examines the employment of simple forms of labor control in hospitality service work from the perspective of labor process analysis. It introduces ethnographic data from two holiday villages on the southern coast of Turkey serving international customers. The two holiday villages were workplaces that employed mostly young workers for low-skill, routine tasks that demanded intense physical and emotional labor, but without due remuneration, career chances, and employment security. Data based on participant observation and in-depth interviews point to an increasing managerial reliance on simple forms of labor control. This happens as a result of intensifying competition among hospitality firms in a market with volatile demand and managerial perceptions regarding employees’ lack of customer service skills due to routinization and simplification of tasks after the introduction of the all-inclusive boarding system. Such market-related developments encourage employers to use simple control mechanisms that help in adjusting staffing levels, imposing loyalty, cutting costs, and ensuring efficiency.

In the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, British entrepreneurs were prominent in all the major sectors of the Izmir economy, forming one of the most important western communities in the city. They played an active role in the city's large commercial sector, not only in imports and exports, but also in complementary sectors such as insurance and maritime transportation. They also participated in money-lending and tax-farming. As the light-industrial sector of Izmir's economy grew, British entrepreneurs took advantage of the new opportunities offered there. They were particularly prominent in sectors that needed large capital resources and technological expertise, such as mining or infrastructure projects. Despite their strong economic presence, at no time did they monopolize any sector. Their dominance in various sectors was constantly challenged and at times checked by strong competition from other capital, both western and local. Nevertheless, the larger British houses attempted to dominate the sector in which they specialized, and constantly diversified their economic activities and patterns of investment. Despite intense competition, the British maintained a primary position in Izmir's economy throughout this period.

This paper discusses the role played by the extensive, nation-wide network of sales agents organized by the leading Turkish manufacturer of consumer durables, Arçelik, in the formation of mass consumption markets in the post-Second World War era. The case study attempts to draw attention to a relatively less explored dimension of the industrialization experience of developing countries by shifting the usual emphasis on the structure of production toward the organization of consumption. This shift of emphasis serves to highlight certain society-specific mechanisms of market formation which compensate the limitations of the market-forming role of the state in the context of twentieth-century late industrialization.

Two frequently discussed issues in Turkish electoral studies concern the instability and geographical cleavages in electoral preferences. Turkish voters are not strongly identified with political parties and frequently vote for different parties due primarily to patronage distribution. Their vote is also strongly influenced by parochial ties. Despite various regulations in electoral laws, such as a minimum 10 percent nationwide support for representation in the Parliament, which makes representation of smaller parties in the legislature difficult, fractionalization of electoral support continuously increased over the last two decades. Consequently, formation of stable governments became more and more difficult.

In a recent book detailing the massive war migration in the South-East of Turkey, Kemal Öztürk questions: “Has an Islamic position been made clear on the Kurdish problem, which for the last ten years has assumed the highest place on the national agenda?” and goes on to ask: “In the fifteen reports suggesting solutions to the Kurdish problem is there one representing muslims?” He concludes by saying, “Unfortunately the answer to both questions must be ‘no’” (Öztürk 1996, p. 104). Öztürk's comments are interesting for three reasons: first, is his assumption that a distinct Islamic stance is possible regarding the Kurdish problem. Second is his deploring of the fact that such a position has not been enunciated. And third is the rather disingenuous claim that the lack of a clear response in the name of Islam is synonymous with no position at all by the religious camia (community), as if the ‘de facto’ positions of muslims, i.e. their actual practice, could be dismissed quite so unproblematically.

During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.

This article suggests that Turkey’s queer times are co-constitutive with Jasbir Puar’s queer times of homonationalism. If the queer times of homonationalism correspond to a folding of some queers into life and respectability at the cost of rising Islamophobia in the “West,” Turkey’s queer times witnessed the increasing marginalization and “queering” of variously respectable subjects in the name of Islam and strong LGBT organizing against such marginalization. It discusses the epistemic challenges of studying Turkey’s queer times that stem from a theoretical suspicion that “queer” operates as a tool of colonial modernity when it spreads to the “non-West,” a suspicion that is due both to a perception of Islam as a target and victim of Western neocolonialism and to an ahistorical and rigidly discursive understanding of language. In turn, scholarship on Turkey’s queer times has the potential to truly transnationalize queer studies, both getting us out of the binaries of global–local, colonial–authentic, and West–East and reminding scholars that hegemonies are scattered.

Recent studies have shown that the media in developing countries recognizes the anthropogenic impact on climate change, while ignoring the mitigation and adaptation responsibilities of national political actors. This article addresses the discursive motives underlying the disconnect between the impact of climate change and the responsibility of those in positions of political power. This study analyzes Turkish news articles and columns on climate change published in three newspapers with different political orientations between June 2018 and January 2020, a period during which the school strike movement and other local uprisings and debates began. It claims that news related to national climate policy largely omits or obscures references to the anthropogenic causes of climate change, to the degree that the political responsibility of tackling it remains unaddressed and absolves readers and politicians from taking action. The article also aims to underline the impact of political parallelism in terms of the print media’s approach to the government’s neoliberal economic policy and its duty to tackle climate change. Finally, it argues that these approaches generate specific types of environmental discourses which are embodied in newspapers’ conceptions of nature, their solutions to climate change, and the actors of those solutions proposed by newspapers.

This paper focuses on a little-known aspect of the first constitutional period in the Ottoman Empire: the introduction of idare-i örfiyye (an equivalent of the state of siege) into the Ottoman legal system. With a name rooted in the Ottoman legal tradition and a definition clearly inspired by the nineteenth-century French “état de siège,” the idare-i örfiyye was a case of legal hybridization that combined the Ottoman political and legal tradition with transnational (or transimperial) legal circulation. This paper seeks to understand how and why different legal references were combined in order to make it possible, under exceptional circumstances, to suspend the ordinary legal order. At the same time, it analyzes the first application of the idare-i örfiyye, which occurred during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, to show how local and diplomatic reactions to this exceptional state of affairs were crucial for the further definition of the notion. Through a critical approach to legal texts and archival documents, the article discusses how various legal sources, the political context of the early Hamidian reign, and local experiences all shaped the notion of idare-i örfiyye, soon transforming it into a tool of government for exceptional and (more frequently) non-exceptional times.

In July 1910 a letter, signed by Şamlı Abdülkadir Hikmet'ul-Hatib, arrived at the ministry of Şeyhülislam (Bab-ı meşihat or Bab-ı fetva) in Istanbul. The writer notified the ministry about the death of his father, the former shari'a judge (naib) of Jaffa, Hatibzâde Ebu'n-Nasr Efendi, adding that before his father died, he had appointed him as executor of his will. Accordingly, he asked the officials to allocate him financial support on behalf of his father's dependents: two widows and three orphans, a son and two daughters (SA dos. 3720, 3 Temmuz 1326/17 IIV 1910). The letter was passed on to the Council for Orphan Affairs (Meclis idare-i eytam), the body in charge of supporting the widows and orphans of deceased ulema. From there, it was transmitted to other departments in the ministry with requests to provide information about the late judge's career path, apparently in order to calculate the financial support for which the judge's relatives were eligible (ibid., doc. 1852, 19 B 1328/27 IIV 1910; doc. 417, 4 Ş 1328/11 IHV 1910; list, 17 Ş 1328/24 IIIV 1910). This letter, with the comments and information added by the clerks, was the last document filed in the personal dossier of the late judge in the archive of Bab-ı meşihat.

In the late nineteenth century, the religion, nationality, and citizenship of abandoned children became a contested terrain over which much effort was spent by local authorities, foreign missionaries, religious and civil leaders of the communities, municipalities, the police force, and the central state. Relying on Ottoman and French archival sources, together with periodicals and contemporary literature, this paper discerns the elevated political significance of abandoned children within such realms as demographic politics, politics of conversion, and national identities. The state's new preoccupation of properly registering new-born infants, in line with the new Regulation on Population Registration created controversy over the nationality and citizenship of abandoned children. As new administrative reforms challenged the customary jurisdiction and the autonomy of the communal authorities and as the power of the governmental bureaus, police departments, the municipality, and the foundling unit of the Dârü'l-aceze increased, non-Muslim leadership resisted these practices: they both submitted official appeals to the government and opened or strengthened their own foundling facilities. Furthermore, the child gathering efforts of Catholic missionaries created an atmosphere of self-defense on the part of the communities, as they felt threatened with losing prospective members of their newly conceived and idealized imagined communities. In this context, abandoned children attracted interest hardly due to pity, or disinterested charity. Institutional solutions, policies, and strategies of diverse and competing actors were closely related to the emergence of a modernized governmental structure and attempts to strengthen communities as its mirror image.

Anatolia played an important role in German nineteenth-century colonial aspirations that was subsequently blacked out in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the Turkish Republic, due to their political re-orientation. To recreate the important role that Anatolia played in German colonialism, classic approaches to the studies of imperialism, such as tracing government actions through official documentation, are insufficient. This approach must be combined with a close reading of consular archives, travelogues, propaganda leaflets, and personal letters, in order to ascertain correctly the dissemination of motives underlying the Germans' actions in nineteenth-century Anatolia. Based on this approach, one can differentiate between three different roles that Anatolia played in German colonial thoughts and deeds: as an untouched land destined for agricultural settlement; as a source of inspiration for the German Empire to reshape itself in the image of ancient Pergamon; and as a site where German colonialism and Turkish nationalism could cooperate to their mutual benefit.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish Republic was financed largely through the taxes extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey’s economy was largely based on agriculture and accordingly the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Despite the abolition of the tithe, many other agricultural taxes increased remarkably. This paper examines the peasants’ everyday resistance to heavy taxes under the single-party regime in interwar Turkey. It shows that under an authoritarian single-party system, poor and small-income peasants used daily and mostly informal means to cope with the social injustice that resulted from the increasingly burdensome economic demands of the new state. In contrast to the existing accounts, which mostly regard the peasants as being atomized under the absolute control of the state, this paper portrays them as an active social dynamic that annulled the greater part of the taxes in practice and compelled the government to soften its heavy taxes. Based on new archival sources, such as gendarme records, politicians’ reports, citizens’ petitions, and newspaper reports, this paper reveals the peasants’ different forms of politics and the direct and indirect impact of such politics on the social and political transformation of the new Republic and on the modernization of Turkey overall.

The main objective of this essay is to point out the missing links between neoliberalism on the one hand, and a comprehensive analysis of poverty and effective policies to tackle it, on the other. After identifying the main channels through which neoliberalism affects poverty, I will draw attention to the inadequacy of the neoliberal approach in coming to terms with the main reasons behind poverty, as well as in developing a comprehensive and effective mechanism for its alleviation. I emphasize the role of international institutions in determining the dominant development discourse and changes in the importance given to the issue of poverty over time. The essay links the ineffectiveness of existing poverty alleviation policies to distributional imbalances at both the global and domestic levels. Against the background of the main constraints and opportunities for effective poverty alleviation policies in individual countries, it emphasizes the need for a poverty alleviation strategy as an integral part of a broader development strategy and identifies its main premises. It calls for action on the academic, domestic and international fronts and stresses the central role of the state, a more balanced reliance on domestic and international markets, emphasis on productive employment creation, the development of effective redistribution mechanisms, and the creation of effective domestic and international constituencies as the main components of such a strategy.

Literary narratives offer their audience opportunities to surpass existing monolithic social and cultural identities through reflecting on and representing the past from new perspectives. This article aims to elaborate this argument by a discussion of multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, reflective nostalgia, and cultural intimacy in the portrayals of Diyarbakir's “Infidel Quarter” in two literary works: Mıgırdiç Margosyan's Gavur Mahallesi and Mehmed Uzun's Nar Çiçekleri. Both works, the former as a short story collection and the latter as a collection of essays, share autobiographical features and reflect the multiculturalism of Diyarbakır in the 1940s and 1950s from the point of view of an Armenian and a Kurd with similar sensitivities. Margosyan and Uzun's works indicate a cultural pluralism in Diyarbakır where different religious cultures used to exist side by side. The intermingling of languages in this neighborhood shows a kind of “inclusive multiculturalism.” Svetlana Boym's differentiation and discussion of two kinds of nostalgia as restorative and reflective, the former as nationalist and the latter as individual or collective memory oriented, help us to evaluate Margosyan and Uzun's works as alternatives to nationalist narratives. Both of these works, dealing with reflective nostalgia through the depiction of cultural intimacy between ethnic groups, provide their audience with possibilities for the future.

The purpose of this article is to use the household as an analytical construct in order to examine how the process of labor transformation in the tourism industry is experienced within the immediate circumstances of workers in three coastal towns in Turkey. I argue that the recent growth of the tourism industry in Turkey absorbs a major portion of its labor force from agriculture, and factors such as the scale of operation, maintenance of links to the rural background, and the social composition of tourism workers yield different patterns of labor transformation. The best site for evaluating these patterns of labor transformation is the household, which provides access to social as well as economic aspects of labor transformation. Household analysis explains the complexity of labor transformation due to the coexistence of traditional forms of production and the market economy. The article is based on ethnographic evidence on household structures, household composition and division of labor in three coastal towns.