This essay analyzes arabesk, a form of popular music in Turkey, as it pertains to debates around culture, politics, and modernity. I argue that arabesk, rather than being limited to discussions of music as an aesthetic form, reveals important issues as to the historical unfolding of discursive patterns that still very much outline the boundaries of cultural debates in Turkish society. The historic changes of arabesk music corresponds to turning points in the cultural and political history of Turkey. Furthermore, following the historical trajectory of arabesk makes it possible to analyze large-scale transformations in the ideological landscape of Turkey. In order to understand the complexity of these issues, it is important to trace the historical foundations of Turkish cultural politics, especially during the early Republican era (1920-1950), which was formative in establishing and maintaining an extensive regime of cultural classification.

In 1989, Turkey became one of the first—and few—emerging economies to fully liberalize its capital account. Given the adverse macro-economic conditions before the reforms, it is puzzling that Turkish policy-makers implemented policies amounting to a comprehensive and imprudent capital account liberalization. Using in-depth interviews with a significant number of key decision-makers behind capital account liberalization and employing archival material from news sources on the debates surrounding the reform process, this article examines the policy objectives and rationale behind the Turkish capital account liberalization. The main argument is that capital account liberalization represented a political rationality that put a premium on short-term expansion through funds from the rest of the world. This liberalization was a policy response to decreasing rates of economic growth and demands from organized labor and public employees for better working conditions and higher wages. Thus, this article shows that these distributional conflicts and the trajectory of economic growth were important determinants of the timing and scope of capital account liberalization in Turkey.

Some of the literature on neoliberal subjectivity tends to attribute omnipotence and impeccable consistency to neoliberalism. Other recent literature, by contrast, has emphasized how actually existing neoliberal subjectivity combines liberal and non-liberal elements, some of the latter emanating from local culture. However, even this revisionist scholarship holds that the non-liberal elements only lead to a smoother functioning of neoliberalism. A focus on informal workers and small merchants in a squatter district in İstanbul reveals that neoliberal subjectivity harbors contradictory orientations that might actually undermine some aspects of neoliberalism. The mixture of self-reliance, individual responsibility (condensed in an emphasis on hard work and pious patience), and entrepreneurial spirit with extra-market survival techniques, as well as non-liberal orientations toward legal property, land and money, and desire of redistribution (as well as state protection against big capital) all exhibit how marketization is restricted, twisted, and perhaps endangered, even within the process of neoliberalization.

The literature of Europeanization claims that the EU transforms the politics of member and candidate countries through processes such as social learning and socialization. This article questions the emphasis of Europeanization studies on ideational factors by looking at the example of Turkey-EU relations. The reform projects undertaken jointly by the EU and the Turkish police show that the EU seeks to transform the practices of candidate country actors, rather than simply their ideas. Moreover, the candidate country actors are not only passive learners, but they also seek to modify the content of EU reforms according to their interests.

Scholars of Islam in Turkish society have written penetrating analyses on the reciprocal influences and complementary relationships, as well as rivalries between, Alevi Islam, Sunni Islam, Islam of the Sufi orders, Islam of student activists, Islam of “Islamist intellectuals”, Islam as embedded in the oral culture and daily practices of the “mahalle”, Islam of the scriptures, and so on. There are clearly different ways of knowing Islam, distinct yet intertwined. My concern in the present study is with a particular knowledge of Islam—as constructed on the landscape of commercial television in Turkey.

This article aims to explore the conditions and roles of Gypsies in the economy of Turkey through a focus on street flower sellers in two central districts of İstanbul, Şişli and Taksim. It proposes a multidimensional analysis that demonstrates different dynamics of social exclusion, socio-economic and political relations, and agency positions. After first reviewing several approaches to Gypsies’ roles in non-Gypsy economies, Gypsies’ conditions in Turkey are then examined in relation to their roles in the economy. Finally, their positions in the flower-selling sector in the two districts, Şişli and Taksim, are analyzed through working conditions, socioeconomic dynamics, social exclusion, and perceptions of Gypsyness.

This paper explores modes of autobiographical writing by female authors in the early republican period. Women's autobiographies draw a strict distinction between the narration of the private and the public self, as they promote the narration of the undomestic, professional self at the expense of the private. Ironically, even if the autobiographers in question were politically active in suffrage, women's autobiographies either do not represent the authors' involvement in such campaigns, or praise state feminism for granting emancipation. “Personal is political” only becomes a maxim for a later generation of women writers, with autobiographies and autobiographical novels of the post-1970 period underscoring the importance of exploring the subjectivity of the adult woman/narrator. More recent examples of auto/biographical writing blur the boundaries between private and public and narrate gendered accounts of republican history.

Human smuggling is a complex process. Made up of actions both organized and chaotic, it compels migrants to deal with different structures and agents of power, among them smugglers, the state(s), and migrants’ own social networks. The current literature on human smuggling provides a detailed analysis of the different phases of this process, within which discussion of the structure and operation of this “business” can be situated. However, only minimal attention has been paid to migrants’ agency in the smuggling process. Engaging with recent perspectives in migration studies, which emphasize the need to conceptualize human smuggling by focusing on the interdependencies between the different actors involved, the analysis developed in this article aims to explore the different phases of the human smuggling process by focusing on the multilayered relations between smugglers and undocumented people. Drawing upon qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted with migrants on the Turkish-Iranian border, the article examines how the physical and sociopolitical conditions of border crossing affect people’s ways of thinking, behavior, and engagement with different structures of power. In doing so, the article attempts to further our understanding of how smuggled migrants mobilize their agency in such a way as to manipulate and challenge the system, as well as of how this process transforms migrants’ capacity to simultaneously recognize and unsettle state bordering practices.

This article traces the struggle of the people of Vranje to unseat their governor, Hüseyin Pasha, in the 1840s. It situates this struggle within the context of the Tanzimat reforms, one primary objective of which was to use financial and legal means to bring powerful local governors under the control of the central government. The case of Vranje, this article shows, provides a particularly colorful example to observe the disrupting effects of the center’s intervention in the provinces, to investigate the various dynamics and difficulties the center confronted in its attempt to control the periphery, and to understand the ways in which the new political discourse of the Tanzimat shaped local resistance. This article also traces the stages of political mobilization and dissent through the various strategies the people of Vranje employed, from petitioning to armed resistance, in order to fight perceived injustices.

The main objectives of this article are to delineate the economic activities of the port of İzmir in the eighteenth century and to show that İzmir, during the course of the century, developed into the most important port in the import and export trade of the Ottoman Empire with western Europe. The French, operating out of Marseilles, were the principal trading partners of both İzmir and the Ottoman Empire at the time. Among the other most important western European communities that did business in İzmir were the British and the Dutch. İzmir was also the centre of complex and diverse financial transactions that were as important as trade and sometimes even more. Furthermore, this study shows the key role that non-Muslims played in the economic activities of the city-port. İzmir's close commercial relations with major western European economic centres makes the city-port of great importance for the study of Ottoman economic history in the eighteenth century.

This article suggests that Turkey’s queer times are co-constitutive with Jasbir Puar’s queer times of homonationalism. If the queer times of homonationalism correspond to a folding of some queers into life and respectability at the cost of rising Islamophobia in the “West,” Turkey’s queer times witnessed the increasing marginalization and “queering” of variously respectable subjects in the name of Islam and strong LGBT organizing against such marginalization. It discusses the epistemic challenges of studying Turkey’s queer times that stem from a theoretical suspicion that “queer” operates as a tool of colonial modernity when it spreads to the “non-West,” a suspicion that is due both to a perception of Islam as a target and victim of Western neocolonialism and to an ahistorical and rigidly discursive understanding of language. In turn, scholarship on Turkey’s queer times has the potential to truly transnationalize queer studies, both getting us out of the binaries of global–local, colonial–authentic, and West–East and reminding scholars that hegemonies are scattered.

During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.

This paper aims to propose a political economy framework to analyze environmental problems in Turkey. A political economy approach seems to be the appropriate way of investigating environmental issues, as not only are economy and the environment interwoven entities, changes in one affecting the other, but also collective actions are almost always required in dealing with such problems. With this integrated approach one can thus better understand the causes of such a degradation and subsequently search for the economic and political conditions that are conducive to halt environmental degradation.

Despite its theoretical and implementational problems, conventional economic theory has a well developed body of tools for examining environmental degradation, i.e. pollution and overuse of natural resources. But the theory assumes the existence and competence of a rather sterile political authority which enforces corrective measures. The corollary of this assumption is that the enforceability of these measures will become lax should there exist various forms of government failures. This paper will focus on Turkey as an example of a country where such government failures have been a priori accepted.

The main objective of this essay is to point out the missing links between neoliberalism on the one hand, and a comprehensive analysis of poverty and effective policies to tackle it, on the other. After identifying the main channels through which neoliberalism affects poverty, I will draw attention to the inadequacy of the neoliberal approach in coming to terms with the main reasons behind poverty, as well as in developing a comprehensive and effective mechanism for its alleviation. I emphasize the role of international institutions in determining the dominant development discourse and changes in the importance given to the issue of poverty over time. The essay links the ineffectiveness of existing poverty alleviation policies to distributional imbalances at both the global and domestic levels. Against the background of the main constraints and opportunities for effective poverty alleviation policies in individual countries, it emphasizes the need for a poverty alleviation strategy as an integral part of a broader development strategy and identifies its main premises. It calls for action on the academic, domestic and international fronts and stresses the central role of the state, a more balanced reliance on domestic and international markets, emphasis on productive employment creation, the development of effective redistribution mechanisms, and the creation of effective domestic and international constituencies as the main components of such a strategy.

Much of the recent debate on the labor market issues of developing countries has revolved around the interaction of the labor market with stabilization and structural adjustment policies, introduced mostly in conjunction with the IMF and the World Bank. In particular, there is a growing body of literature on the interaction between structural adjustment policies and employment performance in these countries.

According to the dominant view in this literature, the favorable employment effects of these policies stem basically from the shift of industrial trade strategy from state-led import substitution towards market-based export orientation.

Peasant migration was the subject of careful regulation in the Ottoman Empire. The government tried to control peasant movement in order to ensure the supply of agricultural labor; peasants, on the other hand, used migration as one weapon against government abuses. This article examines Ottoman policy towards migration and recorded instances of peasant migration in sixteenth-century Palestine.

Peasant migration is most commonly considered in the context of seasonal labor movements, responding to large-scale agricultural enterprises or temporary labor shortages. Alternatively, migration may occur as a result of some disaster: war, famine, drought, or flood. Temporary migration suggests a short-term move, wherein people pull up stakes for a denned period and retrace their steps after some months or years. This article, however, examines migration as the action of individuals who appear to have left their former homes permanently.

In the present paper, we deal with traders who crossed the border between the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These merchants are at once a topic of much scholarly debate and virtually unknown. Little trace has survived of their everyday activities, but they are repeatedly mentioned in Niels Steensgaard's well-known work on pedlars and European companies, in which he has analyzed the activities of merchants who confronted two great “protection-producing” and “redistributive” empires, namely the Ottoman and the Safavid, and who also needed to cope with competition from the European regulated companies (Steensgaard, 1974, pp. 22-59). Larger capital resources, advance knowledge of markets, and a commercial organization which enabled traders to take advantage of seasonally low prices were the companies’ advantages, while peddling merchants had but limited resources and were therefore vulnerable.

Ottoman society and its medical system of the early modern period and the nineteenth-century demonstrate the marriage of medicine and power. I present the view from the imperial center and focus on the aims and wishes of the Ottoman elite and imperial authorities in İstanbul as they were embodied in state activities, such as formal decrees and policies meant to be implemented all over the empire. For the Ottoman elite, medicine was always a significant imperial tool, but it was neither the only tool of control, nor the most important one. The extent to which the Ottoman elite used medicine in its social policies changed over time. A comparison between the Ottoman use and distribution of health and food from the early modern period until the nineteenth century illustrates this point. It was especially during the nineteenth century that medicine was intentionally-and successfully-implemented as a mechanism of control in the Ottoman Empire.