The Covid-19 crisis that led to the loss of thousands of lives and initiated one of the most complex social and economic upheavals has also a created a window of reflection for health systems researchers to revisit our major concepts, frameworks, and underlying assumptions. This commentary reviews two literatures that remain rather separate: comparative health policy and global health. First, I examine whether convergence in circumstances brought about by the spread of Covid-19 creates opportunities for learning “about” as well as unpacking the motivations of policy actors and how they use the cross-national information. However, given the emphasis on national policy actors and processes, this literature may overlook the importance of global actors, institutions and ideas. Second, global health differentiates itself with an emphasis on multilateralism as a political positioning and its multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach. However, the global health field is also challenged to consider its mission, political standing on multilateralism, changing relationships between North and South and its commitment to multidisciplinary approach. I argue that health systems scholars should use the window of opportunity created by Covid-19 pandemic to reexamine their methodologies and rearticulate their positioning by acknowledging the voice and agency of the Global South.

Living groups are an important subject in sociology, demography, economics, social medicine, and anthropology. In many studies, households are chosen as the most suitable unit of investigation, though other choices also have their advantages and limitations (Yanagisako, 1984 pp. 161-205). The household is preferred in the present study, because it enables us to present new information that has been collected by the Turkish census and to discuss its implications for understanding living arrangements during the life course.

Modern conservatism, at least in its philosophical form, is a child of what it attacks—modernity. If the central ethos of modernity is a belief in the plasticity of society and the individual, the central ethos of conservatism is a belief in the sanctity of community, kinship, tradition. Modernity's fascination with the new is matched by conservatism's defense of past tradition. It is on the priority of a past order bequeathed by history, and its traditional institutions, that the conservatives base their critique of modernity. The modernist idea that societies can be shaped, molded, and steered in new directions, and that individuals can direct their own destinies, finds its counterpart in conservative thought in the rediscovery of the past-its institutions, values, themes, structures.

This article focuses on a particular monument in Tophane, the Workers' Monument, which has been subjected to destructions ever since the time it was put in place in 1973 and which still stands in the same place as a crippled and unidentifiable body. Many people have referred to it as a “monster.” The term “monster” points to unacceptable forms of life, cast aside as “abnormal,” and can be of use in tracing how certain memories are crushed or abandoned and become aberrant. Thus, I argue that the story of the destruction of the Workers' Monument cannot be read independently of the performative command of the state, best observed in erecting Atatürk monuments all over the country as visual embodiments of power and furthermore securing and protecting them against destruction by the force of law. Monuments contribute to the closure of the past as a dead body. However, they also forge a regime of memory and desire that serves power. I dwell on the issue of monuments in Turkey in that interstice between life and death, that is, in their “monstrosity,” so as to reflect on what remains unrepresentable within the complex history—in other words, to reflect on the problem of power, history, and memory/counter-memory.

As new elections approach, Turkish political agenda is once again dominated by discussions of election systems and impending changes in the existing one. These discussions are not without consequence. Since the first competitive and fair elections of 1950, twelve general elections have been held and a total of 37 legislative arrangements concerning elections have been implemented. Three of those were passed by the parliament just before the December 1995 elections (Tuncer, 1997, 5). The new early election, expected to be held in April 1999, seems to be no exception to this general pattern. Besides incessant attention in the media paid to the characteristics of the existing election system in Turkey and their political consequences, a number of publications appeared over the past few years following the 1995 election that reflect an intense debate about how the election system should be changed.

This article provides an analysis of Turkish trade deficits from the perspective of technology, with particular focus on the period that began with the new millennium. It draws special attention to the technological structure of Turkish exports vis-à-vis Turkey’s major trade partners and illustrates how Turkish trade deficits are primarily structural in nature and essentially caused by weak technology as compared with Turkey’s partners. Turkish products lack competitiveness, particularly in the case of relatively higher technology goods. The future prospects for Turkey are discussed in relation to the present level of the country’s technology infrastructure, and it is emphasized that, if Turkey is to achieve a better trade balance and a prominent share of world exports in the future, merely increasing its business sector’s weak R&D expenditures will not be sufficient, as the country needs also to provide a sufficient number of researchers in order to increase its technological capacity. Moreover, in the case of both R&D expenditures and researchers, quality as well as quantity is required, with the number and quality of the latter in particular being crucial both for innovating and for absorbing foreign technology.

This paper is a sequel to Fischel and Kark's study on the private lands owned by Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842-1918, ruled 1876-1909) in Palestine and analyzes their fate after his forced abdication. In particular, we examine the court cases that arose around these lands, cases which were initiated by his heirs after 1920. For 28 years the heirs, led by his eldest son, Mohammad Selim and his daughter Amina Namika, approached half a dozen governments in the Middle East and Europe to regain the properties they claimed. The appeals represented a test of the British colonial legal system as well as issues of land settlement and the role of foreign courts in interpreting Turkish and Ottoman law. We furthermore examine the disposition of the sultan's lands from his abdication in 1909 to the last attempts by his heirs to recover them from the State of Israel in 1950, the general context of his lands in the Middle East as a whole, and the legal precedent set by the Mandatory Palestine court cases.

The privatization of security services, which implies the dispersal of the legitimate right to use force, has been traditionally understood as operating at the expense of state sovereignty. The increasing privatization of security services around the world and the substantial growth of the private security sector in Turkey create the need to reassess the nature of this privatization. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and other scholars of governmentality, as well as our own field research, we try to make such an assessment, without falling back on the traditional state-market (state-society) duality. Research shows that the Turkish private security sector, reported as being tied to both the exigencies of the state and the rules of the market, has an amorphic nature marked by intricate relationships, formal and informal, with public law enforcement agencies. We argue that the sector's privatization, although defended by some as a way to grant accountability and transparency to security services, is neither a remedy for those gaps, nor does it imply a straightforward decline of the state; rather, it is proof that the idea of an autonomous, unitary “state” should be revised and a sign that a different and intricate network of state apparatus and private experts continue to govern our lives in ways unique to neoliberalism.

It is the aim of these notes to make a balance sheet of the development problems which Turkey is currently facing and to assess medium-term growth prospects for the Turkish economy. Such a balance sheet necessitates a retrospective look into the recent past, in which a distinction should be made between the pre- and post-1980 periods since it was early in 1980 that a major reorientation of economic policies into an orthodox “structural adjustment” line took place. Hence we investigate roughly two seven year periods covering 1973-79 and 1980—86 (with more emphasis on the second period), being fully aware that with respect to certain variables the year 1980 may not always serve as a dividing line.

The European public debate on Turkey's EU accession either emphasizes Turkey's political (in)competence for EU membership, or marks its cultural difference. Based on the discourse analysis of this debate in the German mass media, this paper questions the dominant European perspective, by placing emphasis on how and where the symbolic borders of an imagined Europe become visible. I will argue that the debate surrounding Turkey's accession to the EU reveals an ambivalent discursive process as it places the construction of the self-definition of Europe at the frontier of its Turkish-Islamic “Other.”

During the interwar years, U.S.-Turkish relations had been confined within the boundaries of conventional diplomacy. By the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the military assistance agreement that drew on it marked the beginning of a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that bound the two nations together in the military as well as political, economic, and cultural fields. However, relations between the two states did not always proceed on a smooth path. Hence, the relatively optimistic, formative years of 1947-1960 were followed by the troublesome decades of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, mutual relations settled back on an upward track, reaching a peak during the Gulf War of 1990-91. With the demise of the Soviet system, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, some commentators expected the eventual dismantling of NATO and with it the waning of the American connections with Turkey. Turkey's “strategic value” in the eyes of the Americans, it was being argued, would necessarily diminish as the Soviet threat-the main component of this “value”-was disappearing. Developments throughout the 1990s, however, did not fully justify those pessimistic scenarios. In fact, by the mid-1990s, Turkey and the United States, with the occasional participation of other states such as Israel, began to build a so-called strategic partnership to contain regional and local threats (arising in the areas surrounding Turkey and ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East and the Caucasus) that had been unleashed by the destabilizing forces of the post-Cold War period. It should be noted that, during about the same period, U.S.-Turkish relations gained unprecedented new dimensions, economic and cultural, complementing and sometimes overshadowing the military one.

Questions of modernization have been closely related to issues of identity and therefore of internal order and foreign policy in Turkey ever since the nineteenth century. For Ottoman reformers and their successors in the Turkish Republic, modernization, in turn, has meant the fashioning of the polity along European lines or “westernization.” This transformation of the land of the infidel from enemy to a societal blueprint to be emulated has brought in its wake serious problems regarding identity and appurtenance. Over a period of a hundred years, the polity has transformed itself from an eastern empire to a modern nation-state seeking inclusion within the institutional and cultural fold of the West. This makes Turkey an interesting case to look at, especially since, in many other countries outside the West, identity has largely been defined in terms of opposition to the West.

Since the Customs Union came into effect on 1 January 1996, Turkey has effectively become part of the European Union's single market. This high degree of economic integration has not been matched in the sphere of political and social integration. Turkey was omitted from a list of countries with which accession negotiations began in March 1998, and the Cardiff European Council of May 1998 confirmed Turkey's marginalization from the current process of enlargement.

The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marks the official construction of a new community and new forms of belonging that were expected to replace the communities and forms of belonging characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. The convention signed at the end of the First World War on January 30, 1923, concerning “the compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox Religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory” can be seen as the hallmark of this republican attempt to create a new homogenized republican community called the nation. Exchanging populations meant the mutual exclusion of the largest ethnic and religious minority groups from the post-World War I nationalized lands of Greece and Turkey.