This article contributes to the literature on rural politics in Turkey by investigating peasants’ land occupations between 1965 and 1980. We show that agricultural modernization after 1945 created the structural conditions for land conflicts by enabling the reaching of the frontier of cultivable land and facilitating landlords’ displacement of tenants. The 1961 Constitution’s promise of land reform and the rise of the center-left and socialist politics helped peasants press for land reform by combining direct action and legalistic discourse. Moreover, the vastness of state-owned land and the incompleteness of cadastral records allowed peasants to challenge landlords’ ownership claims. During land occupations, villagers often claimed that contested areas were public property illegally encroached upon by landlords, and that the state was constitutionally obliged to distribute it to peasants. Although successive right-wing governments decreed these actions to be intolerable violations of property rights, their practical approach was more flexible and conciliatory. Although nationwide land reform was never realized, land occupations extracted considerable concessions via the distribution of public land and inexpensive land sold by landlords.

Recent studies have shown that the media in developing countries recognizes the anthropogenic impact on climate change, while ignoring the mitigation and adaptation responsibilities of national political actors. This article addresses the discursive motives underlying the disconnect between the impact of climate change and the responsibility of those in positions of political power. This study analyzes Turkish news articles and columns on climate change published in three newspapers with different political orientations between June 2018 and January 2020, a period during which the school strike movement and other local uprisings and debates began. It claims that news related to national climate policy largely omits or obscures references to the anthropogenic causes of climate change, to the degree that the political responsibility of tackling it remains unaddressed and absolves readers and politicians from taking action. The article also aims to underline the impact of political parallelism in terms of the print media’s approach to the government’s neoliberal economic policy and its duty to tackle climate change. Finally, it argues that these approaches generate specific types of environmental discourses which are embodied in newspapers’ conceptions of nature, their solutions to climate change, and the actors of those solutions proposed by newspapers.

Food price increases stem from economic, agricultural, and political factors. Understanding the dynamics behind the food price formation process and assessing how potential factors contribute to food price changes will significantly affect policies formulated to manage food price increases. High food inflation rates have been a chronic problem in Turkey over the last decade, with unprocessed food prices rising faster than general price levels. In this article, we use exploratory analyses based on economic principles rather than econometric analyses. First, our results indicate that exchange rates are strongly associated with domestic food prices due to dependence on imported inputs. Second, deep-dive analyses on select products show that global price movements and pass-through prices from producer to consumer are not solely responsible for price increases.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was followed by an increased volatility in capital flows, posing considerable macro-financial risks, especially for emerging markets. Turkey addressed these macro-financial risks between 2010 and 2011. Principal decision makers at the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey took policy actions by introducing policy mixes that trigger causal mechanisms informing the behaviour of bankers and their customers at the macro level to contain such risks. Utilising insights from causal mechanisms theory, critical realism, and realist evaluation, this article explores how the Central Bank implemented the policy mix. Our central argument is that at the macro level (i.e., structural and institutional contexts), causal mechanisms link actions with micro-level contexts (i.e., perceptions and reasoning of the target audience), whilst at the micro level, multiple causal mechanisms link policy outcomes with actor behaviour through non-linear feedback mechanisms. Our article contributes to the causal mechanisms literature by linking policy mixes and policy outcomes via causal mechanisms that informed agential actions and outcomes containing macro-financial risks.

This article applies a critical approach to rethinking the relationship between nationalism and Ottoman architectural historiography by examining the intellectual medium during the late Ottoman period. More precisely, it examines how the history and theory of Ottoman architecture were initially established by Tanzimat (Reform) intelligentsia with the publication of Usûl-i Mimâri-i Osmani (Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture) (1873). It addresses how the text was later comprehended and criticized by their successors, who utilized it to constitute their own vision of Turkish national architecture. By detailing the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement and the transition from Ottomanism to Turkism as the dominant identity, this article highlights the demand for the materialization of a national architecture as a component of the cultural construction of a national architectural style and the role of new public buildings as the site of nationalizing endeavors at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, this article problematizes the extent to which these new constructions can be deemed “national” by investigating the works of a pioneer figure of architecture, Kemaleddin Bey’s writings and the design and construction of his dormitory building, the Fifth Vakıf Han, in Istanbul.