How can we explain the mass appeal and electoral success of Islamist political parties? What are the underlying sources of the Islamist political advantage? Scholars have provided numerous answers to these widely debated questions, variously emphasizing the religious nature of the discourses in Islamist movements, their ideological hegemony, organizational capacity, provision of social services, reputation, and structural factors. However, one key aspect of Islamist movements has been underexplored in the current literature; namely, Islamists’ promises to resolve ethnic questions that remain unresolved in secularist nation-states. In this article, we argue that the extent to which Islamists govern ethnic unrest significantly shapes their electoral success and ability to establish broader hegemony. Based on ethnographic and sociological data, this article explores one particular recent electoral puzzle that reveals the limits of the scholarly literature on Islamist political advantage, examining the ethnic politics of the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey.

This article examines working-class entrepreneurialism in Turkey from a comparative perspective. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a working-class neighborhood of İstanbul, the article focuses on the perceptions, aspirations, and entrepreneurial attempts of manual workers employed in formal jobs. It aims to contribute to the understudied literature on working-class entrepreneurialism, which is often overlooked or underestimated by the critical research on labor and the working class. First, the article demonstrates that the level of entrepreneurialism among manual workers is rather high. Alongside revealing the popularity of aspirations for self-employment and the working-class roots of many self-employed individuals, I present an ethnographic account of five workers’ transition from wage work to self-employment. Second, the article finds that a colloquial phrase, “el işi” or “a stranger’s business,” is widely used to refer to wage work. I argue that this phrase perfectly manifests the popular resentment felt toward wage labor in a social milieu where self-employment seems accessible. Finally, by drawing on a review of a scattered set of studies, I claim that entrepreneurialism among working-class men seems to be quite common, especially in peripheral countries.

It is widely held in the public policy and political economy literatures that the Turkish state is weak and cannot adopt a proactive approach in the financial services industry by steering and coordinating the financial policy network. However, it is puzzling that this seemingly “weak” Turkish state, which is often marked by fragmentation, conflict, and a lack of policy coordination within the state apparatus, acted strongly between 2010 and 2016 by taking pre-emptive measures to contain the macrofinancial risks arising from hot money inflows and bank credit expansion. Examining the organizational policy capacity of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, this article argues that proactive policy design and implementation are more likely to complement state capacity when the principal bureaucratic actors have strong organizational policy capacities.

This article studies how the Cihanbeyli tribe became a crucial economic actor for the meat supply of İstanbul, by focusing on a conflict between the tribe’s leader, Alişan Bey, and the Russian trader David Savalan, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1850s in and around the province of Ankara. Two important processes of the early Tanzimat era had an impact on the Cihanbeyli’s role in animal trade. First, as part of the centralization project of the Tanzimat, the Cihanbeyli tribe was sedentarized in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, although the Ottoman state adopted liberal economic policies during the Tanzimat, the provisioning of meat to the imperial capital continued until 1857. Therefore, the article examines the Cihanbeyli’s role in the animal trade in the light of these administrative and economic changes. Our findings support the argument that tribes were an integral part of the imperial economy, politics, and society. The dependence of the Ottoman state on the supply of meat by the Cihanbeyli increased significantly from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This opposes the conventional view that posits tribes as primordial forms hindering economic and social development in the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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.