The issue of regional connections and cooperation among the rural population in different parts of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century has thus far not received adequate attention. This article presents case-studies of several villages in the sub-district of Gaza, which submitted joint petitions about common concerns to the Grand Vizier in İstanbul. It examines the significance of these petitions and discusses their characteristics, uniqueness, and historical context. It then moves on to discuss other forms of regional cooperation and nuclei of regional identification among the rural population, which in part had previous roots, and explores their repercussions for the development of regional identity alongside more commonly known identities concomitantly held by Palestine's population at the time. The submission of joint petitions to İstanbul, it is argued, was one of the key manifestations of a tendency toward greater regionalism in some regions of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, an occurrence which was less likely to happen prior to the Tanzimat reforms. While the literature has primarily focused on the activity of the urban educated circles in the process of regionalization, this article presents a unique bottom-up perspective that underscores the everyday experiences, practices and mechanisms of cooperation in a rural region which is rarely investigated.

During the last few years the Turkish Flag has gained incessant public attention and visibility. Events in both foreign and domestic Turkish politics are often discussed in relation to the honor of the ay yıldız, the ‘Star and Crescent’, and sometimes the banner itself is to be found in the very center of ongoing events. Among recent examples from the realm of foreign policy, one could refer to the crisis of January 1996 between Turkey and Greece over an uninhabited cliff in the Aegean Sea, which culminated in a commando operation to plant the Turkish flag on the cliff; or to the latest incident on the Turkish-Greek border in Cyprus where a young Greek trying to tear down the Turkish colors was shot dead. In the domestic arena, one of the most shocking and disturbing events of recent Turkish politics has centered on the insult to the flag during the last political rally of the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democracy Party, HADEP, in June of 1996. At the rally, the Turkish “Red Banner”, the al sancak, was cut down, and replaced by the flag of the banned Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK. The scene was captured by television cameras and repeatedly broadcast by different channels, in slow motion.

Turkey’s association over the past thirty years with what is now known as the European Union has further stimulated the debate about the nature of European-Turkish relations. This debate began early in the nineteenth century, intensified after the modern Turkish state was founded, and has continued throughout the post-war period.

Because it derives from a conceptual heritage developed within a cohesive world of academic reviews, political journals, research projects, institutes, and other bodies and organizations, the body of literature accumulated during the last two decades, particularly during the 1980s, can be deciphered and its overt as well as latent reasoning sketched. The basic elements of this conceptual heritage come primarily from students of Turkish-European relations and Turcological historians, but also from public officials (such as diplomats and bureaucrats), military personnel, and researchers in social sciences.

Until recently, much of the discussion on globalization has been focused on trans- or supra-local forces at work, with relatively little attention paid to questions of locality—that is, people and groups situated in networks of social relations in a specific time and place. In most analyses, ‘the local’ was conceived in highly abstract and general terms, as the presumed site of reaction, resistance and opposition to the homogenizing forces of globalization. Today, mechanistic interpretations of globalization as an outside threat that engenders ‘local reactions’ has come under increasing criticism. The need to examine the specific socio-economic and cultural-ideological configurations, within which global flows are accommodated, in order to understand how people negotiate meaningful lives amidst changing power relations, has become apparent. The present study is an effort in this direction.

One of the most significant developments in literary studies over the last twenty years has been the postcolonial discourse that emerged with Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism, which has been enormously beneficial in heightening awareness of a set of Western assumptions that had gone virtually unquestioned for centuries.

One of Said's role models, whom he mentions in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and discusses at greatest length in his essay “Secular Criticism,” is Erich Auerbach, the Jewish-German scholar who wrote the literary history Mimesis during his exile in Istanbul. Auerbach's own explanation of his situation in exile occurs at the very end of Mimesis: “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not equipped for European studies …. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library” (Auerbach 1953, p. 557).

This is an age of identity crisis. Who am I? What are my roots? These are the central questions of our age. The search for identity is mixed with a wave of skepticism about development, technology and environment. This is a universal phenomenon. Questions about one's roots, about ecological and technological and demographic limits of growth and development (Olson and Landsberg, 1973; Schumacher, 1973) are being asked in the mass consumption societies of the developed world (Scitovsky, 1976; Hirschman, 1977). And they are being asked in the post-colonial societies of the developing world.

The timing of the global identity crisis is paradoxical. In the developed world economic affluence was expected to liberate man for leisure and creativity. In the search for material satisfaction, western man has lost his soul to “technomania” (Grant, 1969, p. 39). Christian fundamentalism and born-again Christianity are on a rising curve.

After experiencing serious macroeconomic imbalances in the 1977-1980 period, fundamental policy changes were introduced in Turkey on January 24, 1980. The problems addressed were typical of a middle income country constrained by its balance of payments: inability to service foreign debt and inability to finance imports required for production, high inflation rates, and all other related macroeconomic imbalances. The reasons for the 1977-1980 crisis and subsequent developments, including post-1980 developments, have already been studied extensively by a number of researchers. We shall, therefore, refer the reader to the relevant literature (e.g. Celasun and Rodrik, 1989; Ekinci, 1990; Uygur, 1991) and concentrate on the narrower topic of external financial liberalization or capital account liberalization and the related topic of exchange rates which has attracted much less attention.

This paper investigates the labor and marriage market incorporation of individuals originating from Turkey in comparison to other migrant groups in Sweden. Using high-quality register data from Statistics Sweden, the progress of and challenges facing this group are analyzed in comparison to their European and Middle Eastern counterparts, both over time and over generations. The descriptive results point to the economic progress of individuals from Turkey over time and over generations, especially in the case of native-born females. The results show that native-born individuals with an origin from Turkey are more likely to be employed as compared to their counterparts from the New 10 EU member states, Bulgaria and Romania, and the Middle East. However, those originating from Turkey are less likely to intermarry as compared to other groups. Further analyses indicate that individual characteristics are more important for native-born individuals, as compared to immigrants, in explaining the observed gaps in the labor market as well as the marriage market. However, the role of individual characteristics in explaining differences across groups varies by gender as well as by generation.

This article is about an aspect of the Ottoman-Rashidi partnership in the late Ottoman Empire that deeply influenced the order of things in Arabia and resulted in both the Ottomans and the Rashidis becoming more significant actors in regional politics. The main argument is that this partnership made a great contribution to the visibly increasing Ottoman influence in Najd (i.e., central Arabia) and the Persian Gulf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, the Rashidi family’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire paved the way for their emergence as a regional power. Since scholarship on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of Najd and the Arab lands has tended to neglect the importance of this collaboration, the article sets out to analyze it from its inception until its end, drawing on documents from Ottoman, British, German, and Austrian archives.

This paper investigates the rise of aesthetic modernism in Turkey’s early republican era (i.e., the late 1920s and the 1930s), with an emphasis on the influence of international cultural currents on Turkey’s intelligentsia. The paper concentrates on the modernist ideas and works of the D Group, who advocated a high modernism in the plastic arts, and the literary modernism of the socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet (Ran). Firstly, it addresses the historiographical argument that aesthetic modernism in Turkey was a derivative enterprise, a low-grade replica of European modernism. Secondly, it argues that the early republican intelligentsia found itself in a dilemma with regard to modernist currents. For them, aesthetic modernism was a sign of the modern epoch, but it also carried a radical potential for a critique of bourgeois modernity. Aesthetic modernism not only promised change, functionality, and renewal, but also manifested such disturbing symptoms of modernity as individualism, melancholy, degeneration, and restlessness. The paper reaches the conclusion that figures such as the D Group artists and Nâzım Hikmet translated the avant-garde international currents of aesthetic modernism into the early republican context, opting for positive and optimistic versions of modernism rather than adopting its more alienating, pessimistic, and despairing features. Through their works, an intellectual debate on aesthetic modernism was initiated in early republican Turkey.

This article analyzes how the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) 2023 election propaganda utilized political homophobia as a populist tool to construct and reinforce political antagonisms and carry out a crisis-driven politics in search of continued hegemony. Relying on critical discourse analysis of qualitative data, it demonstrates that during the 2023 election period the AKP’s antagonistic operationalization of anti-LGBTI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) discourse unfolded in three modalities: as a culturalist rhetoric and a nativist technology of othering at the intersection of Islam and anti-genderism; as a tool of defining and vilifying political opponents as “inner enemies”; and as a policy perspective and path towards legal action and institutionalization of political homophobia. Within this frame, the article demonstrates that the gendered performance of crisis-driven politics is a core mechanism of the current democratic erosion in Turkey. It argues that homophobic propaganda is a key tool for the AKP not only to enact the processes of othering through fearmongering and scapegoating, but also to restructure politics through crisis-driven imaginaries, post-truth epistemologies, and emergency legislation that lacks political responsiveness.

This article contributes to the literature on rural politics in Turkey by investigating peasants’ land occupations between 1965 and 1980. We show that agricultural modernization after 1945 created the structural conditions for land conflicts by enabling the reaching of the frontier of cultivable land and facilitating landlords’ displacement of tenants. The 1961 Constitution’s promise of land reform and the rise of the center-left and socialist politics helped peasants press for land reform by combining direct action and legalistic discourse. Moreover, the vastness of state-owned land and the incompleteness of cadastral records allowed peasants to challenge landlords’ ownership claims. During land occupations, villagers often claimed that contested areas were public property illegally encroached upon by landlords, and that the state was constitutionally obliged to distribute it to peasants. Although successive right-wing governments decreed these actions to be intolerable violations of property rights, their practical approach was more flexible and conciliatory. Although nationwide land reform was never realized, land occupations extracted considerable concessions via the distribution of public land and inexpensive land sold by landlords.

Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imaginations? In this article we argue that in shaping the family and urban space, Çukur’s masculinities remain precarious vis-à-vis the hegemonic masculinity in “New Turkey.” Rather than being the society’s building blocks, Çukur’s families are suffocating spaces. At the same time, as opposed to cultivating neoliberal responsibility, Çukur’s familialism emerges as a space of solidarity in a precarious neighborhood to which state forces can hardly enter. Therefore, the neighborhood (mahalle) is not a space of consumption and surveillance but a haven against urban precarities. Despite their hierarchies and authoritarianism, Çukur’s men reject unquestioned political loyalty, conspicuous consumption, and entrepreneurship while endorsing the various impasses in family and urban life. Showing that absolute political obedience and economic dependence is not the only way out of neoliberal authoritarianism, Çukur confirms popular culture’s power in representing liminal spaces outside the state’s oppressive power and the markets’ commodifying logics.