The essay deals with Zabel Yesayan's supposed feminism, both in her literary production and her political activity. It shows that any attempt at a discourse of reconciliation on the basis of women's solidarity became impossible after 1909. This explains the tone of her 1911 testimony on the events in Adana and the powerful appeal to her Turkish compatriots for a future citizenship. Here Yesayan spoke as a witness, not as a woman any more. The fact that after 1911 Yesayan slowly opened for herself a new field of “feminine” writing should be interpreted along that line, as an unexpected consequence of her turnabout.

The shift to a market economy is a more complex story than the standard “transition” narrative implies. Shopping tourism is a socio-cultural phenomenon that illuminates the shifting relationship between the state, its citizenry, and the market. Its existence is predetermined by a weak state and incorporation into a global economy. Shopping tourism offers a link between the socialist economy of shortage and the post-socialist informal economy. It has opened a survival niche for the unemployed and constitutes a school of entrepreneurship and consumer practices. The discourses surrounding shopping tourism have reflected anxieties about incorporation, social reordering, and blatant consumerism; recreational tourism mirrors their normalization. The Bulgarian suitcase trade to Turkey also elucidates the interplay between new consumerism and old nationalism and their insertion into the debates about Bulgaria's ideological reorientation. Bulgarian Europeanness in the 1990s was constructed against two principal foils—the socialist past and the Ottoman legacy. Ironically, the stereotypical East was constructed as the stereotypical West in a way in which market and ideological categories intermingle and foreshadow a Bulgarian consumerist “Return to Europe.” To elaborate these arguments, the article draws on an analysis of newspaper ads, statistical data, travel guides, internet travelogues, and interviews.

After the 2001 crisis, Turkey continued to pursue the radical market-oriented reform strategy that had started in the early 1980s and followed the philosophy of the Washington Consensus. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the post-2001 period was relatively high, but it was a “jobless” growth caused by substantial productivity increases generated largely by intensifying the work process rather than by technological advancements. Economic growth in the post-2001 period benefited society very unequally. The growth regime of Turkey is vulnerable owing to high current account deficit; high currency mismatch, particularly in the corporate sector; high income inequality; high unemployment; and an unsatisfactory development of the industrial sector, despite some successes. We recommend a new development regime with selective capital controls, a balanced current account, an active industrial policy by the government, stronger trade unions and employers’ associations engaged in social dialogue combined with coordinated wage bargaining on the sectoral level, and last but not least, redistributive policies aiming to achieve a more equal income distribution.

This article uncovers the relationship between the intra-paradigm power struggle of two rival political parties in 1970s Turkey and their identity formations. Given the economy-laden context of Turkish–European relations in the 1970s, the (re)production of Europe as an identificatory reference between the National Salvation Party (NSP) and the Justice Party (JP) is of special interest. This investigation will help shed light on how the power relations—that both actors were situated in—can be mirrored through their struggle for identity. Moreover, will it contribute to highlighting the functionality of foreign policy in the production of identity. In analytical terms, this study borrows case-restricted concepts from the post-structuralist theory of international relations, and gathers its case data from the 1970s National Assembly records.

Considerable research has examined Turkey’s discursive governance of the Syrian refugee crisis, identifying the central themes and metaphors in top officials’ refugee-related messages. However, since they tend to rely on qualitative analyses based on convenience or purposive samples, prior studies have failed to assess the relative frequency of these themes and fall short of reliably gauging the shifts and continuities in the official discourse on refugees. Moreover, while several studies have noted the growing emphasis on the repatriation of Syrian refugees in recent years, no research has yet explored how the Turkish government has sought to reconcile this with its pro-refugee posturing. This paper addresses these limitations via a mixed methods analysis of 382 speeches President Erdoğan gave from September 2014 through December 2022. Quantitative findings show that Islamist and neo-Ottomanist themes have played a major role in Erdoğan’s refugee discourse throughout his presidency. However, since 2018, there has been a sharp increase in Erdoğan’s remarks about repatriating Syrian refugees. A critical discourse analysis of these remarks indicates that Erdoğan has appropriated the language of international law and standards on refugee returns so that he can continue to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously advocating mass repatriation of the Syrians.

Drawing on a growing cross-national literature on the social impact of economic crises, this paper investigates the social structuring of economic hardship among urban households in Turkey following the 2001 economic crisis. My goal is to compare the Turkish crisis to other recent crises, particularly in Latin America and Asia, and to assess competing claims about the vulnerability of different social groups. Using data from the study entitled Turkish Family Life under Siege—a nationally representative sample of urban households of work-aged married couples—the results paint a picture of widespread social devastation as measured by key labor market outcomes: job loss, unemployment duration, earnings instability, and under-employment. The findings suggest that existing patterns of social inequality related to class and status—education, age, ethnicity, and occupation—were reinforced and exacerbated by the 2001 macro-economic crisis. In contrast to claims that the impact was skewed towards higher socio-economic groups, the brunt of the 2001 crisis was felt by disadvantaged social groups with few assets to buffer economic hardship. Economic hardship was higher among labor force participants who are younger, less educated, male, Kurdish-speakers, private-sector employees, and residents of non-central regions. I discuss the implications with respect to the previous research on economic crises, the role of Turkish contextual factors, and the need for social policy reform, particularly in the context of the current global economic crisis.

The Turkish novel became a national chronotope proper with the founding of the Republic in 1923 and the emergent conception of the national geography following the War of Independence (1919-1922). This was the Anatolian territory, with Ankara as the new capital of the nation instead of İstanbul which had been the Ottoman Empire's center for almost five centuries. Anatolia became the motherland on which the national consciousness of the new nation would be inscribed. In the novels of the republican era, Anatolian iconography and mythography illustrate how this setting became a persistent element of narrative structure as a significant topos in both senses of the word: as place and theme. An inquiry into the permutations of the theme of Anatolia since the War of Independence will reveal the changing attitudes and ideas related to Turkish nationalism and its most outstanding component, the cult of the father personified by Atatürk. This essay, however, does not only aim at a survey of an ideology's history via literature; it also investigates the Anatolian iconography and mythography, as they figure in the Turkish novel of the republican era, and touches upon the various narrative strategies that major Turkish novelists have employed in their search for the right form for this important content, the right form to either reinforce or undermine a sacred story.

Evliya Çelebi is known to historians as an observer of public buildings, such as mosques, medreses and city walls, as a valuable source on languages and dialects and, much too rarely, as an artist of narration. Commerce was not his main area of interest, though when describing Anatolian towns, he paid due attention to covered and open-air markets, to khans and sometimes even to shops. As a member of the Ottoman upper class, he could finance his travels by minor official appointments and did not need to trade—or if he did occasionally engage in buying and selling, he did not discuss these activities in his travel book. But things were somewhat different when at the age of approximately sixty, he undertook the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the caravan from Damascus to Mecca and in the return caravan to Cairo, Evliya did not hold an official position, which means that he had to find his own mounts, equipment and supplies. In the sixteenth century, prominent (vacibûrreayet) personages had sometimes been offered mounts by the Ottoman administration, but by the year 1081/1670-71, when Evliya journeyed to Mecca, grants-in-aid of this kind only covered part of the expenses (Faroqhi, 1990, p. 60). Therefore Evliya acted in the same way as many less prominent pilgrims had done over the centuries, and engaged in trade as a sideline. After the pilgrimage had been completed, he visited Jiddah for the express purpose of buying some bales of coffee, which he proposed to resell in Cairo (Evliya, p. 796).

Bulgarian historiography began to professionalize itself after the creation of an independent Bulgarian state (de facto in 1878, de jure in 1908), and the foundation of scholarly institutions. Until then historical writing had been dominated by enthusiasts (clergymen, teachers, local dilettanti), passionately serving the ideas of cultural revival and political independence through historical knowledge. Thus, Bulgarian historiography at its inception was shaped both by its romantic predecessors, whose noble (and only) aim was to stir national consciousness and legitimize national aspirations, and by the influence of the positivist and romantic historiographies then prevalent in Europe.

Recent studies in social and cultural history underscore the modern war experience as a crucial event in which the collective and the individual merge together in an extensive and demanding encounter. This challenging convergence can affect, question, or reshape social and political structures and shared collective identities, as well as different individual self-identities or sub-identities of small communities. This encounter is not molded merely according to the ability and coercive force of the modern state to superimpose its will upon its subordinated citizens; rather, it is formed by an ongoing negotiation between the state, through its various agencies, and the citizens, in order to win the latter's support and willingness to participate in the war effort. With the onset of general mobilization in nineteenth-century Europe, the need to persuade the citizens to join forces with the state produced many new forms of propaganda. An assortment of texts and activities conveyed the establishment's messages, with the intention to garner wide public support for the war's aims and to increase cohesion among its citizens. The various means of propaganda used by the state, combined with diversified responses from below, shaped the cultural arena of the war.

This paper is an examination of the relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1838 and the transformation in Ottoman women's dress which took place during the nineteenth century. Until now, there has been a tendency to assume a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention and other economic treaties of the period, and fashion. The argument has been that the substantial increase in the volume of imported textiles and other goods led to a change in clothing styles, and indeed to changes in Ottoman taste generally, but my study of Ottoman women's dress indicates that the situation was much more complex. It is clear that the transformation in dress was well under way by the time of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, proceeding at its own rate, tied to events other than the treaty. In this context, fashion represents one of a whole complex of components of culture which, although affected by economic developments, are primarily social phenomena. Examining an area such as fashion (or painting or theater, for instance) will lead to a richer understanding of the period of the Anglo-Turkish Convention.

This paper explores how the staff of İstanbul’s food banks perceive the donors and the donations. The paper begins by exploring the literature on food banks; what food banks recover and redistribute; and the role food banks play in managing food insecurity. Next, how these three issues are represented in different models of food banks are discussed: in the non-profit model, the donors are “socially aware citizens” who contribute to the common good by helping to feed the hungry; whereas, for the for-profit model they are “caring capitalists” doing their best to reduce their carbon footprint and eliminate food waste while effectively managing the costs of waste disposal. In the municipal social markets, in contrast, the donors are “prodigal consumers” who cannot make correct resource allocation decisions and waste food as a result. For all the models, the donors are predominantly individuals or households and waste generation is perceived as a consumer problem, whereas in practice the donors are mostly corporations giving away their surplus stock. The paper concludes by underlining that this misperception shifts the conversation on waste generation and management away from production and supply chain problems and disciplines individuals as consumers.

This article studies how the Cihanbeyli tribe became a crucial economic actor for the meat supply of İstanbul, by focusing on a conflict between the tribe’s leader, Alişan Bey, and the Russian trader David Savalan, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1850s in and around the province of Ankara. Two important processes of the early Tanzimat era had an impact on the Cihanbeyli’s role in animal trade. First, as part of the centralization project of the Tanzimat, the Cihanbeyli tribe was sedentarized in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, although the Ottoman state adopted liberal economic policies during the Tanzimat, the provisioning of meat to the imperial capital continued until 1857. Therefore, the article examines the Cihanbeyli’s role in the animal trade in the light of these administrative and economic changes. Our findings support the argument that tribes were an integral part of the imperial economy, politics, and society. The dependence of the Ottoman state on the supply of meat by the Cihanbeyli increased significantly from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This opposes the conventional view that posits tribes as primordial forms hindering economic and social development in the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The limited success of employment-based social protection measures under the diverging patterns of post-COVID-19 recovery rekindled interest in a social policy framework known as the Basic Income (BI) support. We test the potential of the BI program using five alternative scenarios ranging from households with income less than half of median income to all adults with estimates of their respective fiscal costs. We then employ an applied general equilibrium model to analyze the economy-wide effects and welfare implications for Turkey in the long run through 2030. We evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of both a business-as-usual fiscal program and an alternative (green BI scenario) comprising of (i) carbon tax levied on the fossil fuel producing industry; (ii) corporate income taxation policy reform that aims at expanding the revenue base and consolidation of the fiscal space of the government; and (iii) restructuring of public consumption expenditures by introducing rationality and efficiency in the structure of fiscal expenditures. Our model solutions reveal that a green BI scenario not only achieves a higher GDP and welfare in the medium to long run but also helps Turkey to reduce its carbon emissions in line with the global policy challenges of a green recovery.

The Circassian Beauty, attributed to the women of the Caucasus, is a historical image of idealized feminine aesthetics that has prevailed in Orientalist literature, art and knowledge production as well as Turkish popular culture. This article argues that this image has been central to the gendered construction of diasporic identity among Circassian diaspora nationalists in Turkey. It aims to explore the multiple meanings attached to the image of the Circassian Beauty, and the ways in which these meanings are historically transformed in line with the political and historical transformations of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.

This paper explores the democratic capacities, demands, and aspirations of citizenship movements in relation to deliberations within a formal political system whose territorial boundaries have become blurred as a result of global political and economic restructuring. The case of the mobilization of a group of people from 17 villages located in the hills of Bergama in the northern Aegean region of Turkey in opposition to Normandy Mining Corporation, an Australian-based multinational consortium operating a gold mine in the region, provides an empirical context for the discussion. Normandy Mining Corporation uses the controversial cyanide-leaching method to extract gold, a method that allegedly has damaged the environment and has resulted in health problems for local residents. For more than a decade, Bergama villagers have been struggling to drive Normandy out of their region, as they are concerned about their own health and the well-being of the land on which they live and work.

The leading intellectual and ideologue of the Japanese Asianist agenda of Japanese imperialism until the end of World War II, Okawa Shumei (1886-1957), was tried in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial as a war criminal but found to be mentally disturbed. The post-war memory about Okawa is an alien image-Okawa spending his days translating the Qur'an while detained in a mental hospital in solitary confinement. The clinical description of Okawa's hallucinations on 13 March 1947, while under psychiatric treatment, is a telling climax of the narrative on the fusion of Japanese Pan Asianism and Islam. The examination report describes in detail the psychological state of Okawa, who might have been suffering from syphilis-induced hallucinations: “Okawa believes Mohammed comes to him. In his vision, he states that he sees Mohammed dressed in a green mantle and white turban. Mohammed's eyes glow brilliantly, and his presence fills him with courage, enthusiasm, and contentment […] Patient believes that this is a religious experience. Mohammed enables him to understand the ‘Koran’ as he was never able to understand it before. There is no conflict with his Buddhist faith because he states there is only one God: and Mohammed, Christ, and Buddha are all prophets of the same God.” The report notes that the prisoner's principal interest is now in “Mohammedanism and the translation and interpretation of the Koran.”

The gradual implementation of new pedagogical methods in Ottoman schools during the second half of the nineteenth century brought about significant changes in the organization of teaching time. The first part of this paper focuses on some of these changes and demonstrates that the adoption of time-tabled instruction facilitated increased levels of surveillance and centralization, and a more efficient pedagogical process. The same temporal constructs also served as an implicit curriculum, imbuing students with a keen time consciousness. The effect of the structure, I maintain in the second part of the article, was reinforced by time-related educational contents. Late Ottoman textbooks attached moral value to regularity, punctuality and efficiency and weaved such traits, now praised as virtues, into the ideological agendas of both the Hamidian and the Young Turk regimes. Thus, through the mutual reinforcing effect of form and content, the Ottoman education system contributed to the formation of new elites that identified temporal order with ideas of progress and patriotism, as well as authoritarianism. Similar time-related material was taught to female students in an attempt to mobilize them for the Ottoman project of modernization, while constantly reminding them of the limited roles they could actually play in that project.