This article contributes to the existing literature on the populist online communication of governments. We look at the role of the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter under the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the wider Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) during the peace process. We carried out a rhetorical analysis of the Twitter posts of four key AKP actors – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Yalçın Akdoğan, and Efkan Ala – between July 1, 2012 and November 1, 2015. First, we show that the AKP actors persistently label the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and in Syria as a threat to the national security of Turkey, reflected in their rhetoric toward the remilitarization and resecuritization of Turkey’s Kurdish question within and across its borders. Second, we argue that the AKP used the peace process and various persuasive communicative techniques not only to consolidate Kurdish electoral support, but also to reach its aim to remove the Kemalist military–bureaucratic tutelage in Turkey that was replaced with hyper-presidentialism under the strong personality cult of Erdoğan. Third, we argue that Erdoğan’s increased one-man power has been reflected in the AKP’s branding itself as the only viable choice for the Kurdish region’s stability, which has blocked more constructive dialogue toward a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question.

This article offers a critical reading, from the perspective of gender studies, of films produced in the politically charged environment of the 1990s and 2000s by directors Tomris Giritlioğlu and Yeşim Ustaoğlu. Giritlioğlu’s Ms. Salkım’s Diamonds (Salkım Hanımın Taneleri, 1999) and Autumn Pain (Güz Sancısı, 2008) were based on Yılmaz Karakoyunlu’s novels Salkım Hanım’ın Taneleri (1990) and Güz Sancısı (1992), while Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds (Bulutları Beklerken, 2004) was inspired by Yorgo Andreadis’ biography, Tamama (1993). The films claim artistic license in presenting individual stories, yet they embellish their representation through documentary footage about silenced historical traumas, depicting female subjects as the store of traumatic national memories, such as the exodus of Pontic Greeks in 1916, the anti-minority Wealth Tax of 1942, and the anti-Greek pogroms of 1955. Underscoring Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “feminine” as a crucial aspect of these films, this article traces two strategies used by the directors: (1) recording personal stories in order to complicate nationalist narratives and their appeal to essentialized identities, and (2) gendering trauma as female suffering inflicted by patriarchal authority. The article concludes that, regardless of their public positions to the contrary, the directors engage in feminist politics by questioning the relationship between women and the nation, by broaching issues of social justice, and by highlighting the hybridity of identities and plurality of cultures.

A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones … In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element (Gramsci 1971, p. 178).

The gist of what I want to say by way of introduction was suggested to me during my recent visit to Hong Kong and China. Reading about the events which led up to the establishment of the British presence on the South China coast in the 1830s and 1840s, I was struck, once again, by two things. The first is the way in which the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Convention was so obviously part of a world-wide movement of European self-assertion, spearheaded by a coalition of merchants, military men and politicians. The second concerns the essentially dramatic nature of the confrontation between European might and the declining power of the states and empires whose commercial practices it sought to control—the kind of drama which doesn't always get properly represented in history textbooks, let alone works of political economy.

On May 31,2010, Israeli Defense Forces raided the ship Mavi Marmara, part of a six-vessel flotilla aiming to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and to deliver supplies to Gaza. Using comments posted on Turkish online discussion forums in the aftermath of the raid that resulted in the death of nine passengers, this article analyzes how the incident was appropriated to negotiate between Turkishness and Islam as two alternative, yet coinciding forms of collective identity. Particularly, the article will compare different discursive strategies that were utilized in “general-interest” and “Islamic-leaning” online discussion groups. A deductive thematic analysis of 585 posts in general-interest and Islamic-leaning forums found significant differences in how metaphors of the body—blood, sacrifice, and martyrdom—as well as in-group/out-group comparisons were used in order to support a territorial-based nationalism versus a religion-based identity. The analysis also discusses the rhetoric that enabled discussants in general-interest forums to negotiate the tensions between the two collective identities.

Turkey and Japan have comparable histories of modernization beginning in the nineteenth century. They have since then produced modernities that are considered a mix of “Eastern” and “Western.” Over recent decades, both faced the question of what comes after modernity and began manufacturing their versions of authenticities and cultural exports. This paper comparatively locates two symptoms of this process. “Neo-Ottomanism” refers to the increasing cultural consumption of Turkey’s imperial past while “Cool Japan” emphasizes popular products in entertainment, fashion, youth culture, and food, intending to shift Japan’s image to a “cool” place. Both projects, in different ways, are sponsored by the state; yet their reception in popular culture illustrates the vexed relationship between the state and culture: while states endeavor to colonize culture for their own interests, popular culture provides avenues to outwit the state’s attempts. Popular culture’s autonomy in both contexts has to do with the collapse of traditional hierarchies, which has paved the ways for the promotion and export of new identity claims. Local and global representations of neo-Ottomanism and Cool Japan differ. Internally, they are fragmented; externally, they are linked to international “soft power,” and offer alternatives modernities in Turkey and Japan’s regional areas of influence.

The first labor code of the Turkish Republic was enacted in 1936 and became effective in 1937. The most significant feature of this code was the time taken by the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) to legislate it. Negotiations began in 1925 with discussions of the Service Code draft bill. In the course of fifteen years TGNA discussed five draft bills and in 1936 a final draft was accepted. Between then and 1950, when the Republican People's Party (RPP) lost the election to the Democrat Party (DP), the scope of the labor code was extended without any alteration in its ideological content.

O College dear, we praise thee
For pointing to the stars
With faith and hope unswerving
Which no weak vision mars
Thy service unrestricted
By race or class or creed;
Thy love so freely offered,
Its only claim-our need.
-Anthem of the American College for Girls, Istanbul

Halide Edib (1883-1964) was one of modern Turkey's most celebrated women. Author, feminist, nationalist, modernist, educator, and member of the National Assembly, she identified her person and career with the transformation of Turkey into a modern secular republic. Educated in the internationalist spirit of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, she was, throughout her life, a cosmopolitan intellectual with an international audience. Edib's personal transition from Ottoman society to the new nationalist elite, and her homeland's transition from empire to republic, posed no insurmountable historical, social, and cultural discontinuities; hers was a nationalism that, although grounded in Western notions of emancipation and self-determination, asserted with confidence its distinct identity and autonomy from the West.

My intention in this article is to read Nazlı Eray's works in terms of her revision of the role and function of the Turkish intellectual. Eray's revision also serves as a critique of the Western notions of the intellectual, not only because Turkish definitions are influenced by Western debates, but also because she deliberately situates her writing in an international and cosmopolitan context. This article falls into three parts. The first part presents a general sketch of the tendency to particularize the universalist definitions of the intellectual in the West. From the 1920's to the present, the Western conception of the intellectual has moved towards a demystification and deprivileging of the intellectual's function and contribution to society. His image is reduced from an idealist and selfless leader who thinks in terms of the whole to a highly specialized expert in a limited field. In the second part, I show that the dynamics of defining the role of the intellectual in the Turkish context works conversely. From the 1920's to the present, the intellectual has been the spokesperson and implementor of specific ideologies, party or class politics. As embodied in İlhan and Batur's discussions of the intellectual, this is viewed as a problem in the Turkish context. The answer they propose to the supposedly blind and self-interested particularity of the Turkish intellectual is to push him toward a more universalist vision. I focus in this section on Atilla İlhan and Enis Batur because they have been vocal in the recent discussions of the role of the intellectual in Turkey. They are also symptomatic of the Turkish tendency to elevate the place of the intellectual. In other words, they are representative of the position undermined in Nazlı Eray's works. The last part of the article focuses on the ways in which Nazlı Eray deconstructs both the Turkish and Western narratives of the intellectual in order to reconcile a universalism of wide human definitions with the particularity of specific contexts and actions.

At the end of World War I, senior Ottoman military officers and bureaucrats led the Turkish Muslim inhabitants of Anatolia in a struggle for national independence against invading European armies, under the command of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his deputy, İsmet İnönü. Emerging victorious in the war, Atatürk and his associates had garnered sufficient national legitimacy and prestige to end the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate, establish a Turkish Republic, and embark on a series of interventions in politics and society known in Turkish parlance as the Kemalist Reforms/Revolutions. Recrafting the ethos, substance, and goals of schooling into a properly national education (millî terbiye) was one of the central components of this reform.