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.

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.

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.

This article analyzes the practice of suretyship (kefalet), surveillance and taxation in early nineteenth-century İstanbul. It deals with how the practice of suretyship functioned to achieve social control; it provided shelter for some but at the same time marginalized others with little or no social status. This article also analyzes the extent to which the state maintained order through suretyship. In this way, it intends to capture where and how state and society interacted through social and state control mechanisms. To this end, this article takes into consideration two particular events, the Greek uprising of 1821 and the abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826, and demonstrates a growing tendency towards impersonal relations in terms of governmental practices of surveillance. Briefly, it illustrates how suretyship changed over time and how a gradual transition took place from personal to impersonal relations as well as within governmental practices. Furthermore, this article provides examples of similar practices by focusing on an institutional development that involved the government systematically accumulating knowledge about the population. Finally, it explores taxation practices by the government in order to. show how the pre-modern (contractual) and the modern (statutory) state were not substitutes for each other, but rather shaped each other.

Drawing on the insights of the growing critical literature on urban governance and housing policy, this article seeks to analyze the specific field of social reform in Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in which housing shortages for working class families were depicted as constituting a new social and moral question. Housing policy was born in the early 1950s, as links were established between external sanitary and moral conditions and the homes of the poor, and as rival parties competed to attract the votes of the growing laboring masses. However, neither the middle class reformers nor the political elite supported direct state intervention to provide social housing for low-income citizens. T h e chosen solution was encouraging home ownership through minimum public subsidies to workers' cooperatives. Yet, cooperatives continued to build largely middle class housing during the period, which was far too costly for workers, while unauthorized land appropriations and squatting became the primary mechanism through which the working poor could be incorporated into the urban fabric.

This article examines an important attempt at the political engineering undertaken in Syria during the Great War. It focuses on the experience of the Arabs exiled to Anatolia by Cemal Pasha to redesign Syrian society in line with the Committee of Union and Progress’ idea of empire, which imagined an authoritarian regime. The members of the Arabist parties were removed from Syria to eliminate their contemporaneous and future resistance to the emerging despotic regime. The article sets out to analyze what the exiles experienced in Anatolia using their memoirs in Arabic and the Ottoman documents describing their conditions in Anatolia, and to what extent the aims could be realized. It argues that the purpose was to put a politics of “normalization” into practice by depoliticizing the Arab notable families through “relocation” to Anatolia, although the resistance of the exiles and varying attitudes in Ottoman bureaucracy significantly differentiated outcomes. It also uncovers many untold stories with regard to the daily life of the exiles and adds much to our knowledge on the experience of Arab exiles in Anatolia. It is the first serious examination of the experiences of the Arab exiles using their own texts and narrative.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 helped transform the time-honored Ottoman petitioning system. The reinstatement of parliamentary life, the reintroduction of the suspended constitution of 1876, and the lifting of the ban on the press and political action all generated profound political and social changes. Subjects’ petitions reflected these changes vividly and in often surprising detail. As the sultan became a figurehead with little actual power, petitions which hitherto had been addressed to the sultan either directly or through the grand vizier and had requested his benevolence and mercy, while also granting him much needed legitimacy, now began to be sent instead to the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet), the parliament, and various government ministries. Their content changed as well, as will be shown in this article through an analysis of dozens of petitions from Ottoman Palestine. Petitions now sought to obtain political rights and ensure civil equity and constitutional rights. In focusing on rights, the rule of law, and the deficiencies of the former system, the petitions echoed changes in popular discourse and mirrored the transformation from justice as a sultanic prerogative to constitutional and civil law.

The “East Asian miracle”, involving the phenomenal growth experience of countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, has attracted enormous intellectual attention in recent years. What has been striking in the development experience of countries like South Korea and Taiwan is not only their ability to achieve extremely high rates of economic growth, an average of nine to percent per annum sustained over the course of three decades, but also their capacity to combine these high rates of economic growth with equally striking performances in relation to other major indicators of development. These, in turn, include a relatively egalitarian pattern of income distribution, eradication of absolute poverty on a broad scale, significant employment creation as well as the virtual absence of macroeconomic crises. The Turkish experience also constitutes an interesting case of late industrialization from a comparative perspective. It is clearly a case of moderate success judged by the East Asian standards of economic growth. Furthermore, Turkey has displayed patterns of income inequality and macroeconomic instability that are, in many ways, closer to “Latin American” standards. Yet, from a different perspective, when we exclude the East Asian superperformers from our sample, Turkey’s growth performance, an average of five to six percent per annum over time, compares favorably with other late industrializers. Indeed, what makes Turkey particularly interesting and somewhat unique from a comparative perspective is that these reasonably high rates of economic growth and the creation of a substantial industrial base over time have been accomplished within the framework of broadly democratic institutions during the post-war period.