In search of justice in income distribution and easy access to necessities by everyone, basic income (BI) has become one of the main topics of conversation. However, there is no comprehensive study on the cost and effect of BI in Turkey. This study aims to set a theoretical framework for BI, compare different views on the topic, evaluate implementations from the world, and analyze the feasibility of a BI program in Turkey by estimating its costs and distributional consequences using a tax–benefit microsimulation. The results show that, although it improves the income distribution, implementing a basic income scheme financed by income tax would impose a significant burden on the upper half of the income distribution due to widespread poverty and income inequality. In the baseline, individual-based scenario, every individual aged 15 or above is granted a BI equal to the poverty line, while children below age 15 are granted 30 percent of this amount. This plan costs 17.77 percent of the gross domestic product and it is covered by multiplying current income tax by 3.54. Implementation of this plan decreases the poverty rate from 12.43 percent to zero and the Gini index from 0.388 to 0.181.

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.

This article examines an important attempt at the political engineering undertaken in Syria during the Great War. It focuses on the experience of the Arabs exiled to Anatolia by Cemal Pasha to redesign Syrian society in line with the Committee of Union and Progress’ idea of empire, which imagined an authoritarian regime. The members of the Arabist parties were removed from Syria to eliminate their contemporaneous and future resistance to the emerging despotic regime. The article sets out to analyze what the exiles experienced in Anatolia using their memoirs in Arabic and the Ottoman documents describing their conditions in Anatolia, and to what extent the aims could be realized. It argues that the purpose was to put a politics of “normalization” into practice by depoliticizing the Arab notable families through “relocation” to Anatolia, although the resistance of the exiles and varying attitudes in Ottoman bureaucracy significantly differentiated outcomes. It also uncovers many untold stories with regard to the daily life of the exiles and adds much to our knowledge on the experience of Arab exiles in Anatolia. It is the first serious examination of the experiences of the Arab exiles using their own texts and narrative.

This article examines extradition in nineteenth-century Ottoman diplomacy by exploring an illustrative legal conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the United States. The Kelly affair, which revolved around the murder of an Ottoman subject by an American sailor in Smyrna (Izmir) in 1877, sparked a diplomatic dispute that lasted for several decades. The controversy stemmed from conflicting interpretations of the treaty of commerce signed in 1830. The inability to reach a consensus pushed the parties to resort to the 1874 Extradition Treaty, which was the only official Ottoman extradition agreement. The Kelly affair poignantly illustrates how extradition, an issue of international law that touched on territorial jurisdiction and subjecthood, was a complicated and ill-defined matter when addressed in practice. By investigating the confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the USA, both putative secondary powers on the international stage at the time, this article challenges the existing historical narratives on interimperial relations that highlight Europe as the locus of power and agency. Even though ad hoc political actions overshadowed the binding force of the treaty text, it demonstrates how both governments adopted a political strategy that moved beyond the intrinsic arguments and logic of the capitulations to embrace a novel legal discourse.