The influx of hundreds of thousands of people from Syria to Turkey, especially into major cities such as İstanbul, together with the Turkish government’s policies towards Syrian refugees, has led to various changes in urban spaces. This article has a twofold objective: it examines and discusses the everyday lives of these refugees with regards to the processes and mechanisms of their exclusion and inclusion in İstanbul, while employing a multiscalar analysis of migration in terms of combining nation-state policies of migration, citizenship, space, and the concept of the “right to the city.” Relying upon interviews and participant observation in the Kanarya and Bayramtepe neighborhoods of İstanbul between 2011 and 2015, I outline the ways in which Syrian Kurdish refugees have been actively transforming İstanbul’s peripheries through their interactions with the Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their rural homes in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.

As the population of the world ages, the balance between generations is irrevocably changing. Proportionally larger numbers of the no-longer economically active elderly will need to be supported by a shrinking working-age population. Women have increasingly come to outnumber men at advanced ages, presenting elderly women (and their families) with a novel and challenging old-age experience. Indeed, gender is central to understanding the relationship between generations and the glaring imbalance in intergenerational support, material and immaterial.

This paper explores two examples of collective action, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Kurdish movement in Turkey, by focusing on how these movements constructed two particular places, Diyarbakir and Chiapas, after the armed conflict subsided. My first aim is to show how this place-making has affected the discourses and practices of these movements. I argue that place-making is not only about locality or physical setting, but also about constructing a movement and a form of struggle in its own right. My second aim is to discuss the broad outlines of what may be called the “appropriation of space.” This refers not only to the spaces of visibility and solidarity opened up by a movement, but also to its chances of acquiring significance within local, national or global spaces of power. I look at how the Kurdish movement has had an impact on democracy in Turkey and compare it with the Zapatista movements local and transnational effects. I do so by relating physical and metaphorical notions of space to several concepts generated by social movement literature. As such, this study intends to contribute to spatial understandings of collective action. It is also likely to indicate various pitfalls and obstacles for emancipatory social movements in the present neoliberal era.

This study aims to contribute to efforts to understand how redress occurs in local contexts impaired by armed conflict. Its particular focus is on events, dynamics and forms of relationality that (re)create public spheres on a local level. It takes the city of Diyarbakır, the largest in Southeastern Turkey, as the vantage point from which to explore the transformation of a site of violent conflict into a space for the expression of differences that were either nonexistent or suppressed. Since the beginning of the armed uprising of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in 1984, the majority of political actors in Diyarbakır have in effect been polarized into two antagonistic camps (the Turkish state vs. the PKK). With the end of armed conflict five years ago, Diyarbakır has been astoundingly transformed into a paradise for civil society activists. The dynamics through which new urban spaces of existence and of expression have been created have not ceased being conflictual. In exploring the formative function of micro and macro struggles on publicness, the theoretical intent of this study is to argue against the Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere.

This article aims to consider how Turkey has been classified in the welfare regime literature, and on what basis it has been classified. This will then form the basis for exploring whether there appears to be any variation between approaches and methods and/or between the “position” (e.g., location or language) of the authors. Studies of Turkey’s welfare regime exhibit a significant degree of variation in terms of both approaches and conclusions, resulting in little in the way of consensus. Among Turkish-language studies (and some, but not all, Turkish scholars writing in English), there does seem to be a broad consensus that Turkey may be classified as part of the Southern European welfare model, which squares with the modal conclusion of the English-language studies on the topic. However, some “regional” studies conclude that Turkey is part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, while many of the cluster analyses suggest a wide variety of clusters that are not geographically contiguous.

In the last decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Izmir experienced tremendous economic growth, mainly as a result of growth in the world economy. In addition, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the collapse of French economic domination in the area. As a result, Ottoman minority merchants experienced an equally tremendous economic growth (Frangakis-Syrett, 1987, pp. 73-86). Britain replaced France as the principal trading partner of Izmir, while the economic growth of the port-city as well as that of the minority merchants continued strong. It was in this period of increasing commercial activity that the Anglo-Turkish Convention was signed between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire on 16 August 1838 to come into effect in western Anatolia on March 1839. The Treaty, which subsequently was signed by all the European States as well as the United States and the Ottoman Empire, aimed at removing obstacles to free trade in the Empire for the merchants of these states. It was to achieve that by removing an array of local or additional duties paid for the export of Ottoman goods or the import and circulation of all other goods, manufactured or otherwise, and by setting a fixed rate of five percent duty on imports and twelve percent on exports—nine percent on purchasing at the place of growth and three percent on exportation.

This article calls for a critical scholarly engagement with women's participation in the Kurdish movement. Since the 1980s, women have appropriated the political sphere in different gender roles, and their activism is mostly seen as a way of empowerment and emancipation. Albeit legitimate, such a claim often fails to account for the social and political control mechanisms inherent in the new political gender roles. This article presents the life stories of four Kurdish women. Although politically active, these women do not necessarily define themselves through their political activity. Thus they do not present their life story according to the party line, but dwell on the different social and political expectations, state violence and the contradicting role models with whom they have to deal on a daily basis. Therefore, the status associated with their roles, especially those of the “new” and emancipated woman, does not necessarily represent their own experiences and subjectivities. Women who openly criticize the social and political constraints by transgressing the boundaries of accepted conduct face social as well as political sanctions.

It was in 1974 when I first took a look at mercantile militarism in Turkey, emergent in the form of OYAK-Ordu Yardımlaşma Kurumu (Armed Forces Mutual Trust and Pension Fund) (Parla 1974). In the first section of this paper, I shall present the case as it then appeared. In the second section, I will update the data on the phenomenon of OYAK as of 1998. In the third, I shall examine aspects of the second, complementary wave of Turkish mercantile militarism that has manifested itself in the form of TSKGV-Türk Silahlı Kuvvetlerini Güçlendirme Vakfı (Foundation for Strengthening the Turkish Armed Forces). The concluding section will suggest a way in which this subject can be put in the larger context of an all-pervasive militarism in Turkey—political, constitutional, cultural—as well as some of the ways in which critical appreciation of this phenomenon seems crucial for understanding Turkish politics and political economy better.

“The East” is an exceptional territory identified with Kurdish ethnicity within the geographical boundaries of the Turkish nation. This paper focuses on a critical historical moment, circa 2000-2004, when the promise of peace in this region was coupled with the explosive growth of urban consumer markets, to bring into public circulation a host of commercialized images of “the East” and “Eastern people.” It examines how “the East” became codified in popular television melodrama. It also tracks how “Eastern tourism” became incorporated into middle-class leisure practices. By juxtaposing television narratives and tourist narratives, it argues that the commodification in cultural markets both affirms its “exceptionalism” and challenges its taken-for-granted parameters.

This paper investigates the political subjectivities of Kurdish youth in Diyarbakır through the interplay of kinship and politics. We argue that it is through a framework of kinship that young people make sense of the Kurdish issue. We show that the war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) and the Turkish military has reshaped the Kurdish family, leading to a crisis in the life cycle. We suggest that the young feel indebted to the Kurdish movement, which they express using the term bedel (“debt”). Debt is related to the family, as the individual becomes indebted as part of a kinship group. We argue that the expansion of public space in Diyarbakır has created alternative ways of paying debt and doing politics.

Understanding the identity construction of a minority requires an understanding of the intricate interplay between the real and the symbolical groups it belongs to. In such a context, individuals and groups adopt identity strategies (at the personal or/and the collective level) by means of which they assert their existence, their social visibility, and their integration in the wider community, while at the same time valuing and establishing their own internal coherence. The case of the Muslim minority in Western Thrace is a very good example of this identity construction, which arose from incessant dynamic confrontations between the dominant values of the majority and the affirmation of their own individual ones. Taking into consideration the socio-historical context, this paper will try to analyze the complex interplay of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural identities of the minority groups constituting the Muslim minority of Thrace.

Reforming care regimes to cover the care deficit and enhancing the marketization of care to promote individualism and gender equality have been on the European agenda since the 1990s. However, both implementation and results have been path-dependent. This study first underlines some specificities in the Turkish case—namely, the limited welfare state, a large shadow economy, gender roles, patriarchal backlash, Islamization, and neoliberalism, all of which receive little treatment in the welfare state literature. It then analyzes how these specificities interact in the construction of the care regime in Turkey, conceptualizing the outcome as distorted commodification of care—namely, the continuing ambiguity of care services despite these activities producing precarity and positional suffering for caregivers and recipients. Finally, the study provides concrete examples from the less studied topic of long-term disability care. It presents a perspective on Turkey that foregrounds the connections between gendered care imagery and case-specific qualities of the commodification of care shaped by the long-standing shadow economy, the outsourcing of disability services to for-profit private companies, and the introduction of the cash-for-care policy. The study analyzes the outcomes of distorted commodification of care under these conditions in Turkey vis-à-vis visibility, valuation of work, working conditions, and gender inequality.

This paper discusses state-sponsored social work and its relation to social exclusion in contemporary Turkey. Linking state-sponsored social work to the dynamics of social exclusion, this discussion points to two contrasting sets of practices within the Turkish social work system. First, I focus on the contemporary reform of the child protection system: I examine the current restructuring of institutional care for children, showing its link with the neoliberal agenda of reducing state social spending and shifting social care from state to familial resources. The current emphasis on and the specific implementation of the policy of transforming institutional care perpetuate the processes of exclusion as experienced by the women and children who are the major clients of the social work system. Yet, examples of the ways in which social work can address social exclusion do exist in the system, and I try to offer a glimpse into these limited benefits which at least some clients receive through the system. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to better address the negative results of social exclusion, both the redistributive and interpretive underpinnings of the Turkish state social work system should be subject to critical scrutiny.

The concept of “millet” rivals other ideas, such as “the ghazi state” and “the decline paradigm,” as one of the principal formations around which Ottoman historiography has been constructed. Significantly, it was the Ottomans themselves who originated, and manufactured powerful illusions around, each of these notions. Fifteenth-century post-Interregnum (1402-1412) historians probably invented the view that the Osmanlılar of the previous century had constituted the pre-eminent ghazi principality along the Byzantine frontier; late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman critics certainly concocted the proposal that the state was decaying after a brilliant epoch under Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Süleyman I (1451-1566); and post-Tanzimat (1839) reformers formulated the construct of millet as a defining characteristic of Ottoman society. Modern historians have tended to accept these models rather uncritically; only recently have we begun to examine the contents and contexts of such Ottoman self-portraits.

This article examines the Ottoman state's increasing involvement in caring for the poor and the needy and the emergence of modern relief institutions and hospitals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The particular focus will be on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) and the second constitutional period (1908-14) up until World War I.

Rather than presenting the emergence of poor-relief institutions in the Ottoman Empire as a function of increasing poverty and need, or as a function of the state's desire to control and regulate the urban population for various concerns, I concentrate on the dynamics of the political sphere. I will focus particularly on the political conflict between the sultan and the new political elite, whose identity was defined in relation to newly structured state functions and services.

While the increasing interest in contemporary art from Turkey has centered on explicitly political works, discussions on the limitations of the freedom of expression have likewise come under the spotlight, not least with regard to Turkey's EU candidacy. In contrast to the attempts of complete suppression marking the 1980 coup d'état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions (and their circulation) that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state, and to turn their producers into targets. This article investigates selected images produced in the contemporary art world between 2005 and 2008, which were taken to transcend the limits of what constitutes tolerable depictions of Turkey's socio-political realities. It examines current modalities of censorship in the visual arts and the different actors involved in silencing efforts. The cases show that within these fields of delimitation there are considerable contingencies: The domain of the unspeakable remains unclearly mapped. I argue that it is because, not despite, this arbitrariness that delegitimizing interventions are successful, in that they (a) create incentives for self-censorship, and (b) produce defenses of artistic freedom that, by highlighting the autonomy of art, to some extent consolidate a conceptual separation of art from politics.

On 6 March 1995 the EU-Turkey Association Council took a decision regarding the inauguration of a customs union between the EU and Turkey, following the pattern set out in the Ankara Agreement of 1963 and the Additional Protocol of 1970. The Council's decision received the European Parliament's assent on 13 December 1995, enabling it to enter into force on 1 January 1996. Following the Association Council's customs union decision, the Turkish government has launched a series of democratizing and liberalizing reforms. It is apparent that the tactical goal of the Turkish government for initiating the reforms has been to persuade the European Parliament to give its consent to the Association Council's customs union decision. The government's strategic goal, on the other hand, has been to fulfill the necessary political conditions, such as those formulated in the June 1993 Copenhagen meeting of the European Council, of Turkey's qualification for full membership in the EU.

Soon after coming to power in 1994, one of the first actions of the Islamist municipality in Istanbul was to paint the cobblestones around the municipal area green. The semiotics involved in this seemingly unimportant alteration from the usual yellow or white was immediately recognized by the media, which in turn drew the public's attention to the issue. The municipality was harshly criticized for marking out its territory with an Islamist symbol, i.e., the color green. The mayor, in return, responded by asserting that green was one of the colors that was legally designated for this particular purpose. Yet, instead of arguing further in terms of the lawfulness of this action and democratic rights involved in the administration of a municipality, he declared that the green cobblestones in fact symbolized the environmentalist aspect of the municipal policy.