This paper studies the idea of Turkishness as one thematic element that commonly characterizes recent Turkish box-office champions. The preoccupation with the idea of Turkishness in recent popular cinema can be seen as a reflection of Turkish society's bafflement with the process of rapid and intensive transformation during the 2000s. In this period, Turkish society has grown increasingly confused about how to assess its own worth in the contemporary world. The paper makes use of the terms “magnificence” and “monstrosity” to make sense of the excessive representations of Turkishness in Turkish box-office champion action films and comedies of the second half of the 2000s. The term “magnificence” stands for aspirations in Turkish society during the last decade about the revival of the glory of the Ottoman past and becoming a powerful actor again on the world scene. The term “monstrosity” is employed in relation to Turkish society's cynical indifference to the violence perpetrated by the Turkish state, which is often rendered acceptable through the presumption of “Turkish peculiarity.” The paper points to the continuity between recent blockbuster action films and comedies in their representations of Turkishness by suggesting that magnificence and monstrosity appear in these films as two sides of the same coin.

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.

The rise of Islamist political movements through open electoral competition has constituted a challenge to the political systems of numerous Middle Eastern countries in recent years and has led to a rethinking of the question of compatibility between Islam and democracy. Esposito and Voll (1996, pp. 193-94) have pointed out that while many unquestioningly believe that Islam and democracy are fundamentally opposed, “many Muslims have made advocacy of democracy the litmus test for the credibility and legitimacy of regimes and for political parties and opposition.”

This paper surveys the private lands owned by of Sultan Abdülhamid II in Palestine and analyzes their spatial distribution and impact, in the context of regional imperial policy. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire faced serious external and internal problems. Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) used various traditional and modern methods in order to increase the internal cohesion of the empire and strengthen it vis-à-vis external threats.

One unique measure taken by the sultan was the purchase of large tracts of land. He became one of the largest landowners in the empire. In Palestine alone, the sultan purchased around 3% of the total area and initiated measures to increase these lands' productivity for his Privy Purse. In addition to gaining economic profit, Abdülhamid II employed his private lands to solve problems which challenged the sovereignty of the empire. These included attempts to settle the Bedouins, the establishment of new towns in order to subjugate nomads in regions where they threatened rural settlements, settling Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Balkans, and protecting strategically sensitive lands located on the frontiers, by purchasing them and thus keeping them out of the hands of others.

This article provides an overview of the way in which post-liberalization urban restructuring is determined by middle class imaginations and lifestyles in Kolkata, India. It charts how the conjunction between planning, politics and private investment made middle class hegemony in the new urban politics possible, and how the processes that have been set in motion create new spatializations according to class through exclusions and reformulate citizenship as social relationships are redefined in the language of markets.

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the economic aspects of armament expenditures in Turkey in recent years. There are two forms of arms acquisitions: purchasing from abroad and purchasing from domestic arms producers. In both cases, the government is the sole purchasing and/or ordering body. When purchasing from domestic producers, the government expresses a preference in terms of promoting a new industrial activity. Hence the acquisition decisions of the Turkish armed forces are reflected onto the markets through the government. This is the main reason why armament decisions do not remain solely in the political and/or military domain, but have serious economic implications, the means of financing being the most important.

The world's natural freshwater resources available for human use are more scarce than is generally assumed. This statement has already become a cliche, yet the truth it reveals is getting more apparent every day, just as is the case with other global problems which require solutions above and beyond the parochial and short term interests of individual nation states. Water scarcity has two important aspects, both with political connotations at different levels, with worldwide maldistribution of economic and natural resources being at the core of the problem.

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.

The effects of the Great Depression of 1929 on peasants in Turkey is an area of study that has remained neglected, despite the fact that peasants then constituted 75 percent of the population. The reason why the condition of peasants has not attracted much attention is the dramatic change between the economic policies of the 1920s and those of the 1930s. The immediate consequence of the stock-market crash and the sudden drop in prices was the shrinkage of international trade. Governments dealt with the depression by implementing quotas on imports, and liberal economic policies were no longer considered successful. Protectionism became the most popular policy for the management of economies in difficulty. The change in economic policies during this period constituted a break with the past and therefore has been the principal focus of studies on the Great Depression.

Islamic fashion and lifestyle magazines enable the global circulation and consumption of newly emerging images of, narratives about, and discourses on Muslim women across the globe. Such magazines also trigger debates by making visible the language of commodification and consumerism that is increasingly shaping Muslim subjectivities. In particular, Âlâ—the pioneering Islamic fashion magazine in Turkey—has been the target of extensive criticism by Islamic intellectuals and columnists. This study contextualizes these criticisms within the broader debate on veiling fashion and Islamic consumerism in the context of 2010s Turkey, a context in which the Islamic bourgeoisie has been strengthened and class cleavages among veiled women have been further sharpened. The study analyzes the opinion columns focusing on Âlâ published in the Islamic, pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak, as well as the responses of Âlâ’s editors and producers to such criticisms. The findings demonstrate that the magazine is criticized for making visible the surge of consumerism among the Islamic bourgeoisie, for blurring the boundaries between Islamic and secular identities, and for fragmenting an idealized imagination of Islamic collectivity by emphasizing class cleavages among veiled women. I argue that these criticisms of Âlâ in Islamic circles reflect a concern with the erosion of the symbolic connotations of veiling in Turkey, particularly in terms of marking the boundaries that define the imagination of an Islamic collectivity.

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.

In this article, we investigate economic and political developments in Turkey’s construction sector over the last decade and consider their implications. We find that during the first term of the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), thanks to administrative and economic incentives, both private and public construction rose considerably. Despite the construction sector’s contribution to growth, there is also evidence of a transfer from the industrial sector toward the construction sector, which led to significant decline in the trend growth of the industrial sector in the era prior to 2006. Such evidence disappears in the post-crisis period, when the growth of private construction slows. However, overcentralization, clientelism, an absence of transparency, and limitations on citizen participation in urban planning remain as problems that need to be addressed through urban reform.

Liberalization programs are aimed at the removal of the restrictions placed upon the working of the market mechanism. These restrictions may be broadly classified under two categories. The first category of restrictions is aimed at the control of domestic markets, particularly financial markets. The underlying idea behind liberalization programs is that the removal of such restrictions will have a positive impact on the efficiency of domestic markets. The second group of restrictions are of an indirect nature and are aimed at the protection of the domestic economy from the effects of developments in international markets. Liberalization programs advocate the removal of the restrictions that prevent the integration of these markets. The removal of these restrictions is expected to increase competition, and enhance efficiency in resource allocation.

This article aims to explore the views of the Turkish elite on the state of polarization in Turkey. By identifying four political frames—namely, harmony, continuity/decline, conspiracy, and conflict—that selected Turkish political and civil society elites use in discussing the phenomenon of polarization in the country through their contributions to a workshop and in-depth qualitative interviews, the article finds that there is a considerable degree of polarization among the Turkish elite regarding their views on the presence of polarization in Turkey. Moreover, this overlaps with the divide between the government and the opposition in the country. An analysis of the justificatory arguments employed in constituting the aforementioned frames shows that, while those elites who deny the existence of polarization seek its absence in essentialist characteristics of society, in reductionist comparisons with history, or in internal/external enemies, those who acknowledge polarization’s presence look for its roots in political and institutional factors and processes. The article highlights how, given the denial of polarization by the pro-government elite and the substantial gap between the two camps’ justificatory narratives, the currently reported high rates of polarization in Turkey can, at best, be expected to remain as is in the near future, barring a radical change in political constellations.

The growth in the numbers of asylum seekers to Western European countries over the past decade (Castles and Loughna, 2002) has underlined the significance of “political” and other non-economic factors in shaping migration flows, drawing attention to the inadequacy of theoretical explanations based on socio-economic differentials. The need to reassess earlier research on labor flows to take into account the existence of migrants obliged to flee from situations involving political persecution has become apparent, whether the migrants be directly or personally a target of persecution or whether they feel threatened by association for reasons of ethnicity, geography, etc. My main aim in this article is to raise the issue of the role of “Kurdish ethnicity” as one instance of such political forces in shaping migration flows from Turkey to Germany. During the 1970s and 1980s, research on patterns of migration between the two countries was almost exclusively concerned with the “incorporation of guest workers” into German labor markets and the contribution of their remittances to the Turkish economy.

What is the export-oriented manufacturing potential of provinces that have historically claimed a minuscule share of Turkey's industrial output? The answer is relevant to the ongoing re-evaluation of the country's growth strategy. On one side are the optimists who see the spatial expansion of the industrial base as evidence of Turkish entrepreneurs' ability to respond to new opportunities in an increasingly globalized market. On the other are the pessimists who read the same evidence as proof that Turkey's place in the global division of labor is as shaky as ever because it rests on low productivity-low wage labor.