This article explores how Islamic art was produced and used in Turkey within the context of modern warfare during World War I, the War of Independence, and the nascent Republic – a subject still relatively understudied in Turkish history, as well as in international cultural histories of modern warfare and histories of modern art in the Middle East. Drawing on previously overlooked visual and textual sources such as calligraphic panels, miniature paintings, war posters, and religious timetables produced during the years 1914–1924, we examine the ways in which Islamic arts were articulated with the experience of war through both individual actions and official policies, revealing how Ottoman artists tried to make sense of war and how Islamic genres and motifs were appropriated, and sometimes subverted, in the service of the nationalist cause. We show that far from exhibiting a sharp discontinuity, the transition from Ottoman–Islamic to Republican–nationalist artistic content was gradual, involving the reappropriation and repurposing of Islamic motifs and techniques in a manner that reflected the religious mindset of the elites and masses in the early twentieth century.

The typical view of the Turkish economy in the 1930s generally has been that it not only performed well while coping with the hardship brought about by the Great Depression, but that it also received a big boost from the state's industrialization program. This usually has been characterized as the success of the economic policies implemented by the new republic in the 1930s. These policies have been considered successful because the young republic not only recovered from the wounds it suffered during the turbulent transition period from the Ottoman Empire, but it also began to realize considerably higher growth rates-mainly in industry, but also across the national economic spectrum.

Anyone who watched the televison coverage of, or read about the African famine some years ago could not help but be appalled by the many obstacles erected to impede the progress of getting food to the starving millions in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan. While it is true that the difficult terrain, an inhospitable climate and the lack of rain were partly responsible for the large-scale spread of famine and dearth in the African sub-continent, it is also true that local governments were responsible for creating impediments to the alleviation of mass hunger and starvation. Governments waging war against secessionist regimes and rebel armies used political means—primarily blockades of grain and other foodstuffs—to starve the enemy forces, creating misery among the military as well as civilian populations in the rebel areas.

One of the main objectives of the Stabilization and Structural Adjustment Program (SSAP) introduced in Turkey in January 1980 was to transform the industrial trade strategy from archetypal import-substitution to export-orientation and to attain a higher level of integration with the international economy through market-based policies. International financial institutions like the IMF and, in particular, the World Bank have been closely involved in this process. Apart from a number of stand-by agreements with the IMF, Turkey received five successive structural adjustment loans from the World Bank during 1980-84 with their conditionality extending into a wide range of spheres like import liberalization, export promotion, and financial liberalization. Not only was Turkey one of the first to conclude such agreements with the World Bank, it was also identified as one of the countries complying with their provisions with “low slippage”.3 Even when there were no formal agreements, successive governments since 1980 have had very close and amicable relations with both of these Bretton Woods institutions.

This article discusses the development of social policy in Turkey from a gender perspective. Focusing on continuities and changes in the formal social security system and the labor market regulation, it aims to describe the place of women in social policy until today. I argue that social policy measures from the late Ottoman era to the single-party period laid the foundation for later gendered policy approaches through specific assumptions on women's roles and position. With the introduction of a modern social security system in the post-World War II period women have increasingly become integrated into the system, either as workers or as dependents of workers; however, assumptions about women's place in the family and the labor market did not change much. Familial dependency and traditional gender norms were assumed and reinforced through certain gender-differentiated policies, and women workers have been encouraged to go back home. Over the last two decades, however, the conceptualization of women in social policy formulations has shifted towards a policy that encourages female labor and equal treatment of genders.

A world renowned author once described “a migrant's vision” in terms of a “triple disruption,” one that occurs when migrants lose their place in the world, enter into a language that is alien to them, and find themselves “surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to,” their own. The author in question—let's call him X—then proceeds to explain how the creative work of a lesser known author—let's call him Y—is informed by such “a migrant's vision.”

This article explores how mothers in Turkey respond to the current atmosphere of food fear and the neoliberal rhetoric of the individualization of risks, as well as interrogating the class dimension of the varying ways in which mothers experience pressures regarding feeding their children in an organic manner. The article primarily suggests that mothers adopt different organic food strategies across class divisions—particularly through class-specific definitions of “organic”—so as to deal in stratified ways with the challenges organic feeding brings. It indicates that organic mothering practices have been incorporated into the lifestyle and cultural distinctions of middle-class families and reinforced by rural nostalgia. Contrary to this, ideas about “the organic” and rural nostalgia are mostly translated as “home-made” for lower-class families. Relying on sixteen in-depth interviews with mothers in İstanbul and on an analysis of posts and comments found on a mothering blog, this article offers empirical findings on analyses of organic mothering and risk from a standpoint and location that have been largely ignored in the existing literature. It also contributes to analyses about neoliberal transformations in the Turkish food market and the growing literature on family and neoliberalism under the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) by bringing a research-based view on the subjective experiences of mothers into a discourse that is rather political in nature as well as into policy research discussions.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.