This study concerns how olive oil producers and local bureaucrats in western Turkey use geographical indications (GIs) as a localist strategy to strengthen their position in global markets by challenging conventional agricultural practices. The study employs the disarticulation approach of global commodity chain analysis in order to understand which factors delink people and places from conventional commodity chains/industrial chains and link them instead to GI chains. The results of the study indicate that regional disadvantages—e.g., high production costs due to land characteristics—are the main factor delinking local actors from the conventional olive oil commodity chain. Furthermore, certain dynamic rent opportunities that are related to characteristics of territorial quality and to local cultural characteristics also contribute to the linking of the region and producers to GI chains.

Women’s intra-household care burden is one of the main reasons behind women’s low employment rates in Turkey. Many empirical studies have tested this relationship by focusing on the existence of dependent household members, if any. They have largely overlooked the use of care services and the time spent on caring for dependent household members to evaluate women’s care burden.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between women’s care burden and employment prospects and status in Turkey from the perspective of access to care services and the time dimension of the care burden. This relationship is analyzed through the logit model by using latest available data from the 2014–2015 Time Use Survey. The article shows that the time spent by women caring for dependent household members, and access to care services, are the most important factors influencing women’s employment probability in Turkey. Benefiting from informal childcare services increases the employment probability of women approximately twenty-seven times, while benefiting from formal childcare services increases two times and informal adult-care services 2.6 times. Ensuring the accessibility of institutional care services improves women’s employment status by enabling women’s transition from part-time to full-time jobs, and from unskilled to professional jobs.

This article assesses the recent performance of the Turkish economy, questioning whether the currently observed unusual boom conditions will lead to a process of sustainable growth. The latest phase of Turkish neo-liberal transformation in the post-2001 era is placed in a broader historical and global context; at the same time, the performance of the economy in recent years is compared with that of other key emerging markets, based on selected macroeconomic indicators. Utilizing the East Asian experience as the principal benchmark for comparison, this paper examines whether Turkey is on its way to accomplishing tiger-like development performance. Given the current challenges to sustainable growth, we conclude that it is premature to suggest that the impressive performance of the recent years will lead to durable success and tiger-like performance. While the focus is on the Turkish experience, the paper also probes the very nature of tiger-like performance itself, highlighting the fact that in setting standards for exceptional economic performance we need to extend our horizons beyond high rates of economic growth sustained over time, to broader indicators of social, political and human development.

The effects of the Great Depression of 1929 on peasants in Turkey is an area of study that has remained neglected, despite the fact that peasants then constituted 75 percent of the population. The reason why the condition of peasants has not attracted much attention is the dramatic change between the economic policies of the 1920s and those of the 1930s. The immediate consequence of the stock-market crash and the sudden drop in prices was the shrinkage of international trade. Governments dealt with the depression by implementing quotas on imports, and liberal economic policies were no longer considered successful. Protectionism became the most popular policy for the management of economies in difficulty. The change in economic policies during this period constituted a break with the past and therefore has been the principal focus of studies on the Great Depression.

The article deals with the decline in the military's influence on the foreign and security policy making process in Turkey. Turkey's harmonization process with the EU that gained momentum in the early 2000s and the US invasion of Iraq in April of 2003 seem to have played a key role in this transformation. While the EU reforms provided for the gradual elimination of legal prerogatives of the military, the increasing US influence in Iraq limited the military's operational power and led to a situation in which it could not exert influence in Northern Iraq, a key area for Turkeys security.

This article discusses the recent politics of space in Turkey during the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) through a focus on the capital city of Ankara. In order to analyze the recent politics of space in Turkey, the article elaborates upon the recent politics of toponym changes and the discourse over space and place in the Turkish capital. Particular attention is paid to the spatialization of neo-Ottoman, Islamist, and populist discourses and to the production of various representational and counter-representational spaces. One of the key foci of the article is its elaboration on the new Presidential Complex (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi) as a case that, in its representational and conceptual aspects, reflects the spatialization of Islamist and populist discourses and symbolizes the recent transformations of social space and the emergent sociospatial order in Turkey.

On the night of July 15, 2016, the Republic of Turkey experienced yet another military coup attempt. However, this attempt failed, mainly due to civilian protest and casualties. Their sacrifice, according to the Turkish state, led to the creation of a new national celebration in Turkey, the “Democracy and National Unity Day.” Following the growing interest of historians in the field of national celebrations, this paper examines the creation of this holiday. It argues that the AKP government used this new holiday to shape the Turkish collective national memory and to introduce a national celebration that does not revolve around the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who symbolizes the secular camp in Turkey, but rather around the Justice and Development Party government and its more traditional and religious ideology, in the guise of celebrating Turkish democracy.

The role of conflict has been integral to the state and nation formation in Turkey since the inception of the Republic in 1923. Faced with the twin tasks of democratic legitimacy and maintaining control, or security and civil-centered politics, the state has historically opted for authority and control. Ironically enough, while Republican politics has emphasized unity and uniformity to limit diversity and conflict caused by class, ethnicity and Islam, the result has been the opposite. So much so that the present conflict between the state and the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which has cost nearly fourteen thousand lives since 1984, has reached an abysmal point: “in the end Turkey's victory may be a Pyrrhic one. If the conflict continues without exploration of other avenues, it will most likely jeopardize Turkey's relations with Europe and the United States” (Brown 1995, p. 128). Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that Kurdish nationalism is not just a simple expression of discontent and opposition but also a challenge to the very premises on which the Turkish nation-state has been built. In that sense, the resolution of the Kurdish “problem” is of concern not only to the Kurdish population of the Republic, but involves the future shape and substance of the Turkish state and society in their entirety as well.

The main purpose of this paper is to present some basic information about the population of Turkey and its interpretation in a manner which readers of New Perspectives will find interesting for their purposes. One way to do this is to notice how certain population issues are handled in the public and scholarly discourse. Then, as a demographer and social scientist I will comment on some of these issues and hope to clarify them. Second is to present some of the main features of the macro-demography of Turkey. The account is unavoidably quantitative, but I hope digestible even by those who have aversions to numerical analysis. When the truly large changes in the size and age structure of the population are seen, important questions about the effect of these changes on other fields arise, and it is interesting to think about them. Third, the urbanization of Turkey is one of the central and most important changes in the demographic structure of the society during the last 40 years. I mention its characteristics along with a brief look at the effects on the demography of Istanbul.

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ottoman Turkism has been well-documented by studies focussing on their pioneering leaders, publications and institutions. Efforts aimed at the making of a Turkish nation, however, coincided with the period following the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. This new phase of Turkish nationalism differed from the preceding nationalist movements of the late Ottoman era, in its concern with the consolidation of a form of its own. It borrowed elements from, but also deviated from, the expansionist, pan-Turkist tendencies of the earlier era.

Herkesin bir tarihi var.

Herkesin bir dili.

Ne anlatır size yalnızlık

Bana, beni.

Ne anlatır size ölüm

Bana, kederli annemi.

Dokunsak ışığa…

Silinse yüzlerimiz.

Ah o gözlerimiz.

Gözlerimiz.

-Kemal Kahraman

A small, dark office in the basement floor of an apartment building in Taksim. The sound of traffic filtering in from the busy street outside. Color photographs tacked to a wall next to a secretary's desk: two young girls in red posing in the lush grass, with mountains in the background. These are the two worlds of Gülümser Kalık. One, the workaday world of the center city. The other, a small village in eastern Turkey. Memories and the dream of return.

The Tanzimat reform period, initiated with the Gülhane edict of 1839 and continuing up until the Ottoman-Russian war of 1876, was an important stage in the reorganization of the provincial administration of the Ottoman Empire. In order to increase state control, the modernizing and centralizing Tanzimat reforms addressed several areas of administration including the formation of a central bureaucracy, regulation of tax collection, and the pursuit of social and economic development in the Ottoman provinces.

One prominent intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, argued that the new Republic should be “a Republic of fine arts.” Indeed, the early Republican project in Turkey perceived culture and art as media through which the Republic could not only represent its achievements but also “create” itself. The present study focuses on the cultural policies and elite perceptions of culture during the single-party regime in Turkey. More specifically, it looks into the developments that took place in the plastic arts and in elite approaches towards aesthetics. This is done in order to shed light on young Turkey's cultural modernization. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and power, this discussion stands at the intersection of political studies and cultural history.

The purpose of the research on which the present article is based was to collect and analyze socio-economic and cultural data on seasonal and permanent migration within the South-eastern Anatolian Project (GAP) Region and between that region and the Metropolitan areas of Turkey. The absence of social scientific knowledge on intra- and interregional migration in this particular context has already been emphasized in the GAP Master Plan Study Report (SPO, 1989). In addition, the region is interesting for social scientists not only because of radical transformations taking place due to the construction of large dams and irrigation projects but also because of the ethnic identity questions that are raised by some Kurdish speaking groups in the region. The present article presents the framework of the research, carried out in 1993, and some of its findings. The findings reported here do not shed direct light on the so-called “ethnic question” or “Kurdish question”; but they help in understanding the transformation and continuity of socio-economic and cultural structures that shape social and political action in the region.

Can a new generation of countries emerge and establish themselves as major exporters of manufactures on the basis neo-liberal economic policies and thus replicate the outstanding performance of the first generation Asian and Latin American newly industrialized countries (NICs)? The article seeks to answer this question on the basis of a case-study, Turkey, a country which has managed to undertake a significant switch from import-substitution to export-orientation under an essentially neo-liberal reform package. The central argument may be summarized as follows. Neo-liberal reforms, when combined with a number of favourable “external conditions”, are quite successful in terms of engineering a shift of the existing productive capacity from import-substitution towards exports. Yet, such policies, on the whole, are less successful in terms of generating the level of investment necessary to sustain rapid growth in manufactured exports over time and also to achieve a steady process of export deepening. A sustained breakthrough in manufactured export growth cannot be realized by trade liberalization and exchange rate policy alone. Macroeconomic management and strategic industrial policy are likely to play a key role, particularly following the initial and comparatively easy phase of export-substitution.

This study uncovers the neo-conservative “style of thought” informing the ideology of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP). The AKP's politico-cultural strategy in pursuing Turkey's goal of full membership to the EU is constituted on this ideological ground. Based on critical constructivism, this article argues that the AKP constitutes a domestic-foreign policy nexus of change characterized by a neo-conservative “style of thought” that aims to redefine the identity of Turkey. Along this line of politics, Europe appears as a politico-cultural space, as an ideational structure, enabling and limiting the AKP to act as a political and cultural agent. While the AKP adopts and sublimates the position of the “other” in the ideational structure of Europe, it reconstitutes the identity and interests of Turkey through neo-conservative ideas. Both are mutually reinforcing.

In the past decade there has been a resurgence of studies in the social sciences that emphasize the role of “the social” in market exchange and economic development. This is a welcome change from the “asocial” homo economicus of neoclassical theory and finds various expressions, most notable among them being studies on social capital, trust, and networks. Simplified, the argument is that men and women do not enter into economic transactions in a social vacuum; rather, their community ties, their face-to-face relations, and their networks of such relations facilitate gainful exchange and may ultimately contribute to successful economic development in a country or region.

The 1980s witnessed the rise of feminist and Islamic fundamentalist movements in Turkey. In diametrically opposed ways, both movements pushed the debate over women's issues and rights in Turkey into the spotlight of public discussion. The feminist movement made visible, and condemned, acts of physical violence against women, problematized women's lack of substantive rights, and the articles of the Criminal Code that discriminate against women. For the Islamic fundamentalists, on the other hand, women's right to wear headscarves in educational institutions and government offices was a focal and continuous rallying point throughout the 1980s. Less prominent have been campaigns by Islamic groups to segregate men and women in public life, by calling for separate buses, hospitals for men and women. While the feminist movement remained an informally organized, non-parliamentary opposition group, Islamists gained ground within state institutions by virtue of being a vocal constituency of the conservative ruling party in power since 1983. Apparently in response to the heightened debate concerning women's status, in the latter half of the 1980s and especially in the past year the government put legal measures into effect, creating legal obligations at the international level and institutional structures at the governmental level to address issues concerning women.