This article examines the local context that led to the expulsion of Jews from Eastern Thrace in 1934. Going beyond the conventional state-centric narratives, it unearths the local socio-economic tensions that triggered the locals to target their Jewish neighbors. It highlights three major factors that fueled already-existing nationalist sentiments in the region: some Jewish merchants’ involvement in usury, Turkish–Muslim agricultural producers’ growing indebtedness due to the devastating impact of the Great Depression, and the government’s failure to support producers with appropriate credit policies. Faced with the danger of indebtedness and dispossession, the locals in this context deemed the small Jewish community as “the easy target,” scapegoating it for their ongoing problems amid Turkey’s nationalist political climate in the 1930s.

There is scientific consensus that an earthquake of a magnitude of at least 7 will soon occur on the North Anatolian Fault, which runs south of İstanbul. This earthquake would render one-fifth of İstanbul’s buildings uninhabitable, which means that approximately 200,000 buildings would be expected to suffer moderate or severe damage. As a part of preparedness for the anticipated earthquake, people in İstanbul are invited to have their buildings risk tested. This article, pivoting on cultural anthropology and science and technology studies, investigates how earthquake-proneness of buildings in İstanbul is technically and legally examined and determined. It ethnographically analyzes the risk assessments and demonstrates that the risk is enacted differently through distinctive engineering practices and legal regulations in different networks. When the two different risk assessment processes are examined in İstanbul, a building that is categorized as risky due to its earthquake vulnerability could be regarded as sturdy in the other assessment.

The care crisis intersects with economic, social, and refugee crises, necessitating focused attention to bolster care infrastructure and address the multifaceted challenges. Women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work, exacerbating gender inequalities in labor markets and education. This paper applies the International Labour Organization–UN Women (2021) policy tool to Turkish data, estimating coverage gaps in education and healthcare, associated costs, and employment generation potential in the care sectors and related sectors. We identify a coverage gap in education affecting 5.8 million children. The required investment to address this gap is estimated at 2.28 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In all, 303,000 healthcare workers are needed, requiring an investment of 1.23 percent of GDP. These investments have the potential to generate 1.740 million direct and 152,000 indirect jobs. This would result in a substantial 6.7 percent increase in total employment. Considering the current gender composition, women are expected to fill 65 percent of these jobs, leading to a 14 percent improvement in female employment. Incorporating 3.7 million Syrian refugees, Turkey’s investment cost rises to 3.74 percent of GDP, creating 1.878 million new direct jobs – an 8 percent boost over the non-inclusive scenario. Prioritizing public investments in care services promises to promote gender equality, human development, and inclusive economic growth.

This article examines the complex relationship between Sufism, secularity, and psychiatry through Refik Halid Karay’s 1956 novel, Kadınlar Tekkesi (Women’s Lodge). The article argues that Kadınlar Tekkesi recontextualizes Sufism by medicalizing and pathologizing it through psychiatry and psychopathology. This analysis draws upon discourse analysis and Michel Foucault’s exploration of abnormality and power dynamics. The article contends that this approach diverges from previous anti-Sufi agendas of Turkish novels, which were primarily motivated by religious and moralistic criticisms. The article argues that the application of psychiatric terminology to Sufism suggests a shift in Turkish secularism’s attitude toward Sufism, which transitions from dismissing Sufism as obsolete to engaging with it systematically through scientific study. Informed by modern scientific rationality, this shift signifies a redefined interaction between knowledge and power and the gendered aspects of the medicalization process. The article underscores that interactions between the discourses of secularism, Sufism, and psychopathology suggest a new regime of truth based on secular and scientific thought, while implicitly supported by orthodox Islamic principles.

This article looks at Topkapı Palace as a showcase reflecting the changing cultural heritage policies of the Allies, as well as of the İstanbul and Ankara governments, during the occupation of İstanbul from 1918 to 1923. It analyzes the military, archaeological, and cultural facets of the occupation, focusing first on the military takeover of the Topkapı gardens, then on the French archaeological mission at the Seraglio, and finally on conflicts over the possession of the imperial treasures and sacred relics. Drawing on primary sources from Ottoman, Turkish, French, and British archives, memoirs, letters, newspapers, and visual material, this article explores the versatility of cultural heritage policies during the occupation and the entangled relations among various power groups, institutions, and actors. The military, strategic, cultural, and historical significance of the royal complex, together with its invaluable imperial collections, made the historic palace a place of rivalry and contestation, as well as deception and cooperation, among various agents and actors, including the Ottoman military and bureaucratic officials, local and foreign archaeologists, the dynastic family, the Interallied government, the occupation forces, and the Turkish resistance forces, ultimately reflecting the military and political empowerment of Ankara.

İstanbul was the only one of the capital cities of the defeated Central Powers to suffer a military occupation for almost five years between 1918 and 1923. The question posed in this Postscript is whether occupied Istanbul resembled cities within the orbit of the British and French empires of the time? The tentative answer we propose is that Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city turned into a colonial outpost of the British and French empires. Within this context, aspects of the cultural life of Istanbul took on a number of political colourations, examined by the authors whose essays precede the Postscript.

This article focuses on an alphabetically ordered collection titled The Lügat of İstanbul Fifty Years Ago, published in 1942 by the prolific Turkish historian and writer Reşad Ekrem Koçu. Despite its rich and lesser-known descriptions and stories of İstanbul’s historical spaces, people, and events in each entry with anecdotes, quotes, and comments, the Lügat has remained relatively unknown. Koçu drew on the memoirs and journalistic essays of Turkish journalist Ahmed Rasim, who vividly captured the essence of the city in his writings during the 1890s. This article examines Koçu’s endeavor to establish a methodology for urban historiography by rearranging and re-animating the depictions of the mundane urban past in a new encyclopedic genre, Lügat, while placing it within the wider framework of urban history literature in İstanbul. Through a critical analysis of the narratives portraying the perils and pleasures of İstanbul in the Lügat, this article illustrates how Koçu’s classifications are intertwined with subjective interpretations rather than rational objectifications.

This essay challenges the ethnocentrism of the dominant literature on hikmet-i cedide, or the new philosophy, in the late Ottoman Empire. Hikmet-i cedide was “new” in the sense that it did not confine itself to theological discussions and interpretations of holy books. Instead, it found its source of inspiration in the principles of modern Western philosophy, and especially the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Auguste Comte’s positivism. The dominant literature reduces this hikmet-i cedide to the philosophical writings of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals. Problematizing such ethnocentrism, this essay gives an account of hikmet-i cedide from the perspective of Ottoman–Armenians’ early engagement with positivism and the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. It argues that Armenians’ philosophical discourses in the second half of the nineteenth century were characterized by a belief that the principles of the new philosophy were the sine qua non for national survival in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious context of the Empire. They were also characterized by a commitment to reconciling modern Western philosophy with religious attachments. However, this characterization should not be thought to be confined to so-called “Armenian philosophy” but may be generalized to broader late Ottoman thought.

This article studies how Allied archaeological activities in Ottoman lands between 1918 and 1923 were part of the post-war negotiations over those territories. It uses the occupation of İstanbul as a reference point to understand the larger reconstruction of the Middle East through the inspection of practices and policies used by the Allies in the realm of cultural heritage. It explores the changes that World War I brought to this realm and asks what kind of practices were used and why. Using archival documents and archaeological literature, it argues that the Allies used institutions like museums and schools of archaeology, scholarly activities such as excavations and publications, and laws and regulations on cultural property to make geopolitical claims in the region and legitimize their occupation while acquiring as many antiquities as possible. By comparing the motivations, practices, and results of Allied archaeological activities in the capital to those elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, this study shines a light not only on the making of the post-war cultural heritage regime but also on the emerging geopolitical system in the Middle East.

This article analyzes Turkish foreign policy during the Iranian oil crisis of 1951–1953 and argues that Turkey shaped its policy based on Cold War politics. While Turkey cared less for Iran’s nationalization of oil, it was more concerned about the political implications of the crisis. At the beginning of the crisis, Turkey was focused on guaranteeing its own NATO membership. After joining NATO in 1952, the country assumed a more active role in the crisis. As the coalition behind Premier Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh dissolved, Turkey became more concerned about both the internal situation in Iran and the broader Middle Eastern context following the July 21, 1952 events in Iran and the 1952 Egyptian coup. The strongest opposition to Mosaddegh came from Ayatollah Abul Qassim Kashani who was both an important religious figure and the speaker of the Majlis. Turkey was concerned about Kashani’s politics of a “third bloc” and supported Mosaddegh’s pro-American position. Keeping Mosaddegh in power was in line with Turkey’s general Middle Eastern policy which aimed at forming a Western-oriented regional defense organization. This article will analyze the shaping of Turkish foreign policy towards the Iranian oil crisis within the context of this regional rivalry.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.

Focusing on the long aftermath of the July Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, this article examines the intellectual and popular climate of protest in the context of a crisis of sovereignty over Crete. Keeping the geographical focus on İstanbul and on the regions receiving tens of thousands of civilians displaced from this Mediterranean island around the turn of the twentieth century, I discuss how multiple segments of a refugee population animated a mass protest movement. Pursuing a multi-class perspective, the article demonstrates how the mobilization of the displaced rested on the actions of mutually reinforcing social clusters: an upper-class cohort of Cretans based in İstanbul and more numerous but equally vocal underprivileged groups from the provinces. Approaching displacement as a condition that generates not only victimhood but also impetus for collective action, I argue that the displaced Cretans became the leading agents of mass politics in the post-revolutionary Empire.

Düzgün Türkçe (proper Turkish) is an expression used to refer to well-formed linguistic structures and orthography. On Twitter, where the digital language is visible, language users, by employing the expression, comment on others’ spelling styles about what is “true” or “false.” In the context of Turkey’s ongoing conflict on the use of Latin scripts after Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) policymakers’ voices over the alphabet, I argue that the expression has gained social meanings associated with two diametrically opposing ideologies: Kemalism and neo-Ottomanism. Further, I also assert that there is a semiotic contrast between these two ideologies in the context of orthography. Thus, by being aware of this contrast and operating on the semiotic resources available to them, language users deploy their language ideologies. Drawing on interactional data on Twitter, this study brings an understanding of the process of how language users deploy their language ideologies by commenting on others’ spelling styles. In explaining the outworkings of this process, the study builds on the concept of indexical order.

This article analyzes how the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) 2023 election propaganda utilized political homophobia as a populist tool to construct and reinforce political antagonisms and carry out a crisis-driven politics in search of continued hegemony. Relying on critical discourse analysis of qualitative data, it demonstrates that during the 2023 election period the AKP’s antagonistic operationalization of anti-LGBTI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) discourse unfolded in three modalities: as a culturalist rhetoric and a nativist technology of othering at the intersection of Islam and anti-genderism; as a tool of defining and vilifying political opponents as “inner enemies”; and as a policy perspective and path towards legal action and institutionalization of political homophobia. Within this frame, the article demonstrates that the gendered performance of crisis-driven politics is a core mechanism of the current democratic erosion in Turkey. It argues that homophobic propaganda is a key tool for the AKP not only to enact the processes of othering through fearmongering and scapegoating, but also to restructure politics through crisis-driven imaginaries, post-truth epistemologies, and emergency legislation that lacks political responsiveness.

Focusing on the years between 1895 and 1897, this article reconstructs what happened after the arrival of Young Turk revolutionaries into the cities of the Danubian hinterland, particularly centering on Rusçuk (Ruse in today’s Bulgaria). In tracing the footsteps of İbrahim Temo and Mustafa Ragıp, two self-exiled figures from İstanbul, this study captures a particular moment when the Danubian cities became the hotbed of transnational radicalism, as a number of assassination plots began to be hatched by Muslim revolutionaries. A well-connected port city serviced by regular steamship links, Rusçuk was where professional revolutionaries met with the local Muslims, much to the ire of Ottoman diplomats in the region. In capturing their encounters, the goal is to point to the significance of Young Turk activities in the Balkans before the turn of the century, a phase which remains understudied in the existing literature. By focusing on a secondary port city that became home to failed assassination plots, this article also seeks to contribute to ongoing discussion in global history that warns against narratives of unhindered globalization. In studying fin-de-siecle radicalization, I hope to contribute to these debates by reflecting upon the limits of globalization as a productive field of historical inquiry.

Approximately 70,000 people were displaced from Greece to Turkey and the Middle East during World War II. Following a presentation of the geography, statistics, and timeframe of the displacement, and Turkey’s interwar demographic policies, the article studies Turkey’s management of this refugee movement. Based on Greek, Turkish, and British archival material, the article argues that Turkish wartime refugee policy took shape in the intersection of two occasionally contradictory attributes. On the one hand, there were the state’s demographic desiderata and policies that differentiated incoming refugees on account of their ethnic and religious identities. On the other, Turkey’s reaction was necessarily conditioned by the military, political, and diplomatic conjuncture of the war. It was this conditionality that explains the inconsistences and shifts in refugee management and its rationale during the war, for instance, the differentiation in the treatment of Jewish and Christian refugees, but also in the management of Greek Muslims in 1941–1942 and in 1944–1945.

This article investigates the Ottoman Greek Orthodox internal exiles, focusing on the deportees’ experiences and the intricacies of their agency during the Great War (1914–18). It does so by examining deportees’ understudied ego-documents, taken either from the collections of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens or from family archives. Organized into labor-battalions or housed in open internment camps in town quarters, the inland exiles were deported to secure the rear front and homogenize the country, but their deportation was characterized by local influences and inconsistencies. Several of the Greek Orthodox exiles managed to survive and maintain their cultural ties by exploiting such inconsistencies, either by selling their skills or by resisting exile through solidarity, desertion, and resistance.

Considerable research has examined Turkey’s discursive governance of the Syrian refugee crisis, identifying the central themes and metaphors in top officials’ refugee-related messages. However, since they tend to rely on qualitative analyses based on convenience or purposive samples, prior studies have failed to assess the relative frequency of these themes and fall short of reliably gauging the shifts and continuities in the official discourse on refugees. Moreover, while several studies have noted the growing emphasis on the repatriation of Syrian refugees in recent years, no research has yet explored how the Turkish government has sought to reconcile this with its pro-refugee posturing. This paper addresses these limitations via a mixed methods analysis of 382 speeches President Erdoğan gave from September 2014 through December 2022. Quantitative findings show that Islamist and neo-Ottomanist themes have played a major role in Erdoğan’s refugee discourse throughout his presidency. However, since 2018, there has been a sharp increase in Erdoğan’s remarks about repatriating Syrian refugees. A critical discourse analysis of these remarks indicates that Erdoğan has appropriated the language of international law and standards on refugee returns so that he can continue to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously advocating mass repatriation of the Syrians.