Globalization versus the nation state has emerged as one of the central areas of controversy and debate in the field of international political economy in the context of the 1990s. The pace of technological change, the speeding up of communications and the extent of international economic integration have brought into question the effectiveness of many traditional national economic instruments. A number of investigators point towards the erosion of economic sovereignty and question the nation state as the main building block of governance. It is undoubtedly the case that the nation state is under pressure; yet it is also the case that the process of globalization is much more in evidence in some areas than others. Whilst we observe significant increases in the volume of trade and foreign direct investment over the past decade, the process of globalization has arguably proceeded further than anywhere else in the sphere of financial capital. Computerization, advanced telecommunications, and associated pressures for financial deregulation have resulted in a major increase in both the scale and mobility of financial capital across national boundaries. Capital is now so mobile that markets will ensure that holders of financial assets receive broadly the same risk adjusted real return anywhere. Any country that offers significantly lower returns will experience capital outflows and a rapidly depreciating exchange rate. It is now virtually impossible for countries to return to exchange controls as an instrument of economic regulation.

This article focuses on a scandal surrounding the airing of an episode of Germany's most famous TV crime series, in which there occurred a murder in an Alevi immigrant family originally attributed to a Sunni Muslim who had just arrived from Turkey. The Alevi father and head of the family was then found out to have murdered his own daughter after she had threatened to reveal that he was sexually abusing her sister. The episode was met with an enormous outcry from Alevis based in Germany as well as in Turkey. This essay analyzes the protests for what they reveal about the trans-nationalization of stereotypes and immigrant demands for fair media representation in Germany. It is argued that it marks a new stage in the development of border-crossing public spheres in which the politics of cultural struggle in relation to ethnic and religious hierarchies lose some of their national moorings.

The typical view of the Turkish economy in the 1930s generally has been that it not only performed well while coping with the hardship brought about by the Great Depression, but that it also received a big boost from the state's industrialization program. This usually has been characterized as the success of the economic policies implemented by the new republic in the 1930s. These policies have been considered successful because the young republic not only recovered from the wounds it suffered during the turbulent transition period from the Ottoman Empire, but it also began to realize considerably higher growth rates-mainly in industry, but also across the national economic spectrum.

This article develops a typology of migrant smuggling. Six generic types of migrant smuggling that were originally produced in the early 2000s are reviewed against more recent empirical findings. These six types were developed in the context of the profound transformation faced by Europe over the course of the 1990s in terms of its geopolitical landscape, when the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia resulted in an unprecedented magnitude of asylum migration, irregular migration flows, and migrant smuggling. Today, in the aftermath of the Arab spring protests and the outbreak of civil war in Syria, the phenomenon of migrant smuggling toward Europe has regained notoriety and relevance. The article concludes that the fundamental mechanisms and types of migrant smuggling that were identified more than a decade ago have persisted over time, but that certain changes in the modus operandi of migrant smugglers can be observed, changes that are linked to geopolitical, market, infrastructural, and other factors.

This paper analyzes the processes of integration of the poor into the market, as instigated by their involvement in microfinance projects. This analysis is based on the findings of an ethnographic study of the Turkish Grameen Microcredit Project (TGMP), conducted in Diyarbakır at different time periods between September of 2004 and July of 2005. By analyzing in detail the nature of economic life revolving around the microfinance practices, this paper intends to elucidate the way in which the integration of the microcredit borrowers into the market is guided by societal processes. The findings of the field research show that in everyday practices the borrowers adjust the microfinance system to their own needs and accommodate the economic activities originating in microcredit into their wider social structure. Thus, one can conclude that they are integrated into the market in their own way, guiding the integration process with their own socio-cultural institutions.

The advent of democracy in Turkey has been far from tranquil. Since the transition to multiparty politics in 1946, democracy has been interrupted by three military interventions (in 1960, 1971, and 1980)- unless we count as the fourth intervention the more recent incident, euphemistically labeled “the 28 February Process,” in which the military played a crucial role in forcing the resignation of the governing coalition led by the Islamist-oriented Welfare Party (WP). Not only has Turkish democracy followed a cyclical pattern in which breakdowns and transitions succeeded each other, the degree or the quality of democracy that was in place never ceased to attract bitter criticism.

Women figure centrally in representations of modernity and of nations. This has caught the attention of researchers both in the West and in the context of “Third World” nationalisms. Yuval-Davis states: ”[I]t is women –not just (?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia—who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically” (1997, p. 2). However, an analysis of “women” as the subjects of the nation differs from a perspective that dwells on the representations of women produced by a (mostly) male elite. Jordanova argues that the Enlightenment in the West was a set of mental and practical activities of the male elite “who gained influence because of their ideas and ‘knowledge’” (1995, p. 64), and whose concern was “to establish the validity of their vision of the world” (p. 64). She shows convincingly that these activities were “sexual” in nature.