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.

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.

Of the many European states that interacted with the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era, few did so as extensively as the Most Serene Republic of Venice, La Serenissima. The two empires shared a lengthy border and a common historical trajectory for almost 500 years, during which time the political and economic fortunes of both were intimately intertwined. While occasionally interrupted by brief periods of open hostility, for the most part this relationship was characterized by peaceful coexistence. Venetian historiography at present, however, is unable to explain this reality. Rather, in painting the picture of Venice’s relations with the Ottoman Empire, scholars have relied on broad strokes that depict a series of rather simple, binary relationships—East/West, Muslim/Christian, Venetian/Turk. This dichotomy is readily apparent in the titles of important monographs on the topic: Islam and the West, Europe and the Turk, Venezia e i turchi.

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.

Nicknaming is a social practice that presents an area for comparative historical research. From a communal perspective, nicknames can be evaluated as markers of status in social hierarchy. On a personal level, they play a crucial role in defining personal identities. This article evaluates some examples from Ottoman archival documents from these perspectives. It focuses not only on the impact of dynamic elements on local community, as in cases of migration and conversion, but also on the question of how social prestige in a local setting could be perceived through the prism of nicknames.

During the early years of the Turkish Republic, modern architecture became an active tool in the representation of the bourgeois ideal of domesticity. The most significant component of the new Turkish family was the image of the “republican woman” as a nationally-constructed icon. By comparatively examining Ernst Egli's İsmet Paşa Girls' Institute (1930) and Ankara Girls' High School (1936) with Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's unbuilt annex project for the latter (1938) this paper argues that girls' technical schools and girls' high schools contributed to the making of this much idealized image in considerably different ways. Such diversity enabled the governing elite in Turkey to make a class-based and spatially constructed categorization of women as economic actors: enlightened housewives specialized in one of the so-called “female arts” and upper-class professional women who would participate in public life. It is further argued that this categorization allowed Schütte-Lihotzky, in her design for the unbuilt high school annex in Ankara, to rework the broader “redomestication” issue which marked her earlier career in Weimar Germany.

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.

In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).

In Turkey, Japan has often been perceived as an industrial country that developed economically while keeping to its traditions. This perception has been especially strong among Islamists and conservatives who have been critical of the process of Westernization since the nineteenth century. In their view, Turkey understood modernity as imitation of Western culture but failed to industrialize. Japan, on the other hand, proved that it was possible to modernize while preserving one's tradition, religion, and culture. Hence, according to this analysis, Japan's successful transition from agrarian to industrial society was in stark contrast to the Turkish course of modernization.

No period was more decisive in the modern history of Palestine than the British Mandate, which lasted from the end of World War I until 1948. Not only did British rule establish the political boundaries of Palestine, the new realities forced both Jews and Arabs in the country to redefine their social boundaries and self-identity. But the cataclysmic events that continued through 1948, with the creation of Israel and what Arabs called al-Nakba (the catastrophe of dispersal and exile), took shape in the wake of key changes stretching over the last century of Ottoman rule. What was to be Palestine after World War I became increasingly more integrated territorially during the nineteenth century. And Arab society in the last century of Ottoman rule underwent critical changes that paved the way for the emergence of a Palestinian people in the twentieth century.

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.

How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these constraints.