While the increasing interest in contemporary art from Turkey has centered on explicitly political works, discussions on the limitations of the freedom of expression have likewise come under the spotlight, not least with regard to Turkey's EU candidacy. In contrast to the attempts of complete suppression marking the 1980 coup d'état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions (and their circulation) that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state, and to turn their producers into targets. This article investigates selected images produced in the contemporary art world between 2005 and 2008, which were taken to transcend the limits of what constitutes tolerable depictions of Turkey's socio-political realities. It examines current modalities of censorship in the visual arts and the different actors involved in silencing efforts. The cases show that within these fields of delimitation there are considerable contingencies: The domain of the unspeakable remains unclearly mapped. I argue that it is because, not despite, this arbitrariness that delegitimizing interventions are successful, in that they (a) create incentives for self-censorship, and (b) produce defenses of artistic freedom that, by highlighting the autonomy of art, to some extent consolidate a conceptual separation of art from politics.

Turkish constitutions have generally sought to limit the executive branch’s emergency powers by codifying and subjecting them to judicial and parliamentary supervision. In practice, however, ever since the single-party regime of the interwar years, cabinets have wielded wide powers to suspend rights and exercise discretion concerning both security issues and property and finance regimes. The result has been a legal system that, barred from explicitly embracing executive prerogative as a matter of principle, has instead dispersed “exceptional” powers throughout the fabric of the statutes, temporary laws, regulations, and decrees with which the state articulates its authority. The task of maintaining a semblance of normality and coherence within this scattered and contradictory system has been left to legal theoreticians. This article examines how three such theoreticians—the law professors Sıddık Sami Onar, Ali Fuad Başgil, and Ragıp Sarıca—responded to the cabinet’s recourse to emergency powers during the troubled 1930s and 1940s. Instead of defending rule-of-law principles, I argue, these formative figures integrated prerogative into the sphere of ordinary legality, thereby transforming exceptional powers into a normal mode of governance.

This paper discusses the consequences of EU migration control policies on irregular and transit migration in Turkey by focusing on African migrants. Our argument is that the EU's concern with transit migration through the Mediterranean and hence its externalization and securitization of migration control have contributed to Turkey's becoming a waiting room for irregular and transit migrants. Based on the findings of a survey with African migrants in İstanbul and analysis of secondary sources, we show that many African migrants get stranded in Turkey. In the absence of an institutional setup for migration management and the prevalence of a security approach, migrants are faced with humanitarian problems and human rights violations.

The number of grandmothers who provide regular care for their grandchildren and do housework for their daughters or daughters-in-law is increasing in Turkey. While perpetuating traditional gender roles for themselves as a surrogate daughter, wife, or daughter-in-law, these women nonetheless enable younger women to distance themselves from obligatory care work at home. The sociocultural concepts of kinship ties, economic need, or love for grandchildren do not fully explain why grandmothers assume the role of caregiver for their grandchildren. Drawing on interviews with 25 grandmothers from middle-class families in urban Turkey, this article shows, first, that these women’s gendered subjectivity is formed by both habitual and intentional actions that defying the oppression and resistance duality within patriarchal Turkish society. Second, in dialogue with the scholarship on the “classic patriarchal bargain”1 and feminist analyses of neoliberal social policy, the article suggests that these grandmothers’ inarticulate desire to live in solidarity with the younger generation of women may be turned into a government instrument in the context of Turkey’s increasingly family-centered neoliberal social policy environment.

Soon after coming to power in 1994, one of the first actions of the Islamist municipality in Istanbul was to paint the cobblestones around the municipal area green. The semiotics involved in this seemingly unimportant alteration from the usual yellow or white was immediately recognized by the media, which in turn drew the public's attention to the issue. The municipality was harshly criticized for marking out its territory with an Islamist symbol, i.e., the color green. The mayor, in return, responded by asserting that green was one of the colors that was legally designated for this particular purpose. Yet, instead of arguing further in terms of the lawfulness of this action and democratic rights involved in the administration of a municipality, he declared that the green cobblestones in fact symbolized the environmentalist aspect of the municipal policy.

This paper introduces the two factors of temporality and interaction, which are not well-researched within the Turkey-EU relationship. I suggest that these two factors are important for understanding the process of Europeanization in Turkey and explaining the ups and downs in the long-lasting relationship. After briefly examining the two historical periods of the Turkey-EU relationship — that is, from 1959 to 1970 and from 1970 to 1999 — the paper mainly focuses on the more recent period following the Helsinki Summit of 1999 and shows how the factors of temporality and interaction operated differently between 1999 and 2004, and after 2004, turning from positive to negative. Having presented the historical evidence, the paper concludes by emphasizing the close interaction between the factors of temporality, interaction and the process of Europeanization in the Turkish context and suggesting that the analysis of these two factors opens up new possibilities for comparative research on other accession and candidate countries.

This article analyzes the extent to which Turkey’s irregular migration governance has evolved since the 1990s and the most salient factors in that process. Relying on the methods of process tracing and political ethnography, the article demonstrates that, since the early 1990s, Turkey’s irregular migration governance has been driven by the following factors: 1) responses to the European Union’s (EU) attempts to control migration through externalization; 2) Turkey’s national security concerns, which increased with the advent of mass migration from the Middle East; and 3) the increase in the number of irregular migrants on Turkish territory. The Syrian mass migration that began in 2011 gave momentum to the evolution of irregular migration governance in line with the long-term externalization on the part of the EU. Our analysis sheds light on the interconnectedness of irregular and mass migration, as well as on the outcomes of interactions between international politics and national migration governance. Thus, the article provides insights that will prove valuable for migration studies, EU studies, and studies on Turkish foreign policy.

Over the past two decades, the debate over multiculturalism challenged the justice of neutral, “difference blind” rules in liberal democracies. Allegedly neutral institutions were shown to be implicitly biased toward the priorities, experiences, or interests of the dominant groups in the society. Criticism of difference-blind rules and claims for justice to minority groups defined the relationship between government and opposition in many contexts. Arguments for special rights to protect minorities, women, or ethnocultural groups gained legitimacy (Young 1990, Jones 1990, Phillips 1991, Taylor 1994, Kymlicka 1995, Kymlicka and Norman 2000).

In the space of less than a decade, the metropolitan cities of Turkey have witnessed a dramatic and continuing change with the entry of international retailers into the Turkish retailing sector. This development was both sudden and surprising for a society in which retailing had always been dominated by small and independent domestic retailers. For years, the only structural change which had been anticipated by politicians and academics was an increasing role of public authorities in retail distribution, with the objective of eliminating middlemen and connecting producers more directly with consumers. In the late 1970s, there were doubts as to whether distribution should be left to the workings of the capitalist market. Even in the mid-1980s, people had only just started to learn how to pronounce the names of the largest international retailers. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, foreign retail companies became involved in Turkish retailing.

The aim of this article is to analyze the results of a survey conducted in the slum areas of six metropolitan cities in Turkey— Adana, Ankara, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, İstanbul and İzmir—in order to unveil the multifaceted aspects of social exclusion processes as experienced by their inhabitants. The evidence documented in this study suggests that a significant number of people living in these areas are distanced from jobs, income, education, and training opportunities, with little access to power and decision-making bodies; this inevitably pushes them to the edge of society. Individuals with a relatively better socio-economic standing tend to be excluded to a lesser extent, while they themselves have intolerant attitudes towards others.

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.

This paper re-evaluates the party system change in Turkey based on Sartori’s framework. It also explores the role of opposition parties in this. The paper suggests that, while a fragmented opposition may lead to the emergence of a one-party government and/or military intervention because of the high levels of polarization it induces, bilateral opposition prolongs one-party governments. The paper relies on an analysis of party programs and public opinion surveys in order to position the parties in terms of spatial distance and to understand the level of polarization.

Currently, a mass media campaign is underway in Turkey using a new communication means called the “public spot” (kamu spotu). This article concentrates on the public spots produced by Turkey’s Ministry of Health, and more specifically on those that advocate quitting smoking and preventing obesity. Drawing on interviews with Ministry of Health personnel and analyzing the content of these spots, we suggest that they operate as risk caveats. They caution individuals against smoking and obesity’s potential harms and guide her/him towards self-health governance by encouraging the maintenance of a particular lifestyle that embraces a balanced diet, regular activity, and no smoking. As such, we read these spots as a technique of neoliberal governmentality. This technique works primarily by responsibilizing individuals as health entrepreneurs investing in risk free lifestyles; that is, by conceptualizing health as a matter of self-conduct where personal responsibilities are emphasized.

The failed coup of July 15 has shocked the current state apparatus in Turkey. This shock has culminated in the public demand for administrative reform, which would make previous public designs and policy failures a matter of the past. The state crisis has transpired in the middle of a political transition process whereby the ruling party envisioned systemic change in the political system from the parliamentary to a presidential system. The constitutional amendments also imply changes in the administrative order, with further political hold on bureaucratic cadres. The coup attempt and the massive purges in its aftermath brought the state to its breaking point. In light of such deficits and challenges, this paper discusses the ways, means, and prospects for capacity development and institution-building to overcome the state crisis in Turkey. The reform and restructuring process entails cooperation and a level of understanding between the government, opposition, and bureaucracy. Polarization and disenfranchisement are recipes for further fragmentation in Turkish politics. A cooperative model based on a working relationship between the government, opposition, and bureaucracy would facilitate a return to normalcy.

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people's waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.

In the process of neoliberal transformation in Turkey, what differentiated the 2000s from the previous two decades were the block sale privatizations of large-scale state enterprises such as PETKİM, Türk Telekom, TÜPRAŞ, and ERDEMİR. These block sales, the conditions of which were shaped by political struggles at different levels, were also constitutive political and ideological moments per se, helping to reproduce a particular perception of social reality at the expense of others. This paper will overview and critically problematize the privatization processes of these four enterprises, all completed under the successive AKP governments in power since 2002. By focusing on the apparently technical and economic aspects of the block-sale processes, such as valuation, efficiency enhancement and marketing, the paper calls into question the increased concerns over their transparency, and wonders whether such concerns can be understood as attempts to mask the substantially corrupt nature of capitalist relations of production, which inescapably makes itself felt during these processes.

Theorizing about nationalism must now incorporate phenomena brought about by the break-up of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of formerly socialist states and the emergence of so-called “ethno-nationalisms”. Previously, nationalism was mostly addressed in terms of modernization, nation-building and post-colonialism. In these interpretations, the presence of a modernizing state was a given, although the success or failure of these states in mobilizing the loyalties of their populations was seen to vary. What is now troubling to the older paradigms is how to interpret the phenomenon of nationalism sans state, or at least in the absence of the political, economic, ideological construct of the nation-state.

In a democracy it is through the process of voting that people find an opportunity to register their likes and dislikes of domestic and foreign policy decisions most effectively. In Turkey, the recent national elections on 22 July 2007 provided an opportunity to observe the nexus between voters’ choices and foreign policy issues. Questions pertaining to problems facing the country and the campaign issues fail to give any clue as to whether people paid attention to foreign policy in making their choices among the political parties of the country. However, a closer examination of the factors determining the vote indicates that, although party identification and satisfaction with the performance of the economy and the expectations of the government in managing the economy played major roles, attitudes towards the European Union (EU), nationalism, and globalization closely followed in magnitude those two factors in determining the voters’ party preferences across the left-right spectrum. While AKP supporters had the most favorable attitude towards the EU, MHP supporters appeared highly nationalistic, and CHP voters seemed most influenced by positive orientations to openness to the world.

Women’s intra-household care burden is one of the main reasons behind women’s low employment rates in Turkey. Many empirical studies have tested this relationship by focusing on the existence of dependent household members, if any. They have largely overlooked the use of care services and the time spent on caring for dependent household members to evaluate women’s care burden.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between women’s care burden and employment prospects and status in Turkey from the perspective of access to care services and the time dimension of the care burden. This relationship is analyzed through the logit model by using latest available data from the 2014–2015 Time Use Survey. The article shows that the time spent by women caring for dependent household members, and access to care services, are the most important factors influencing women’s employment probability in Turkey. Benefiting from informal childcare services increases the employment probability of women approximately twenty-seven times, while benefiting from formal childcare services increases two times and informal adult-care services 2.6 times. Ensuring the accessibility of institutional care services improves women’s employment status by enabling women’s transition from part-time to full-time jobs, and from unskilled to professional jobs.

In the 1930s, the attention of Turkey’s politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by “Western” planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the “city-beautiful” planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners’ work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.