This paper explores how the state employs digital technologies in its pacification of dissident political bodies, subjectivities, and communicative capabilities. It explores strategies of resistance to the surveillance practices which come to the fore as a state form, as a means of social control, and as a mechanism for creating manageable and disciplined crowds. Drawing upon ethnographic data, it focuses on the contemporary politics of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. In particular, it analyses the digitized surveillance and resistance of Kurds, both of which function as crucial components of contemporary power regimes in Turkey.

When the movie [Domu' al-hubb (Tears of Love) (Turkish title: Aşkın Gözyaşları) (Muhammad Karim, 1936)] was first released in Istanbul's Şehzadebaşı district, the movie theatre's windows were broken and the traffic was jammed [because of the crowd]. The audience, who had not been able to watch any Turkish films for the last three years, loved this type of movie, which was not much different from those made by our theatre artists, and starring some Arab singers, and people wearing the fez and local dress (Özön 1962a, p. 760).

This article explores the discursive reasons behind the paradoxes in Turkey’s foreign policy since the onset of the Syria crisis. By looking at representation of Turkey’s Syria policy in two prominent pro-government newspapers, Star and Yeni Şafak, the authors highlight the significance of the February 2012 episode, after which Ankara experienced deep discursive dilemmas for three reasons: the uncertain portrayal of the dyadic context, the ambiguous framing of third-party roles, and ambivalent agenda building. Despite the shadow of imminent civil war, Turkey’s foreign policy elite refrained from framing the real risks arising within Syria. Idealistic-normative calls appealed to massacre rhetoric in order to legitimize humanitarian intervention. However, the geopolitical framing of third-party roles did not assist in the building of diplomatic ground for international intervention. Quite the contrary, it led to the shaping of public opinion toward realistic-utilitarian interference. Swinging between intervention and interference, Ankara pushed itself toward a liminal position. Even though the Turkish government’s rhetorical ambivalence helped to sway anti-war domestic public opinion, it did not help to control the spiraling of Syria into civil war. That is to say, the ambivalent agenda building in the critical February 2012 episode perpetuated paradoxes in Turkey’s Syria policy and left lingering implications for the transformation of the Syrian crisis in the years to come.

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.

We thought “isms” were dead after our disillusionment with socialist utopian thinking in practice. But in the last two decades, new “isms,” Islamism, feminism and postmodernism, each very distinct, have changed our lives as much as our conceptions of ourselves and our societies. Feminism redefined woman's identity and, by the same token, changed the relations between man and woman; Islamism brought Muslim actors to modern politics, in which the veiling of women blurs habitual distinctions between public and private, traditional and modern; and post-modernism-by pursuing the critique initiated by new social movements for egalitarian, progressive, emancipatory values of enlightened modernity-challenged the central and hierarchical place occupied by the West as standard-bearer of modernity. Despite their differences, each movement—feminism as a social movement, Islamism as an anti-systemic movement, and postmodernism as a movement of ideas—changed definitions and perceptions of woman, Islam and modernity.

The main goal of this article is to highlight the importance and implications of a debate that is ongoing in Turkey over the meaning, social-political role, and regulation of Turkey's ethnic-cultural diversity, especially that of its Kurdish component. By itself, this debate can neither bring about any significant change in the political realm nor have a major influence on the “mainstream” Turkish social-political discourse. Despite significant changes during the last decade or so, this discourse continues to predominantly reflect the diversity-phobic, dominant beliefs and values of Turkish nationalism.

This article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.

The aim of the present study is to reconsider and reconstruct the economic history of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period. Scores of scholars have already interpreted the decay in terms of imperial expansion. The decay paradigm is part of empire histories. Therefore, it is strongly imprinted with political discourse.

Below, I will argue that the Ottoman case would be better understood if viewed within the context of a more dynamic process of change versus inertia rather than decay, and that such an approach to Ottoman economic and social history would be less tainted with political concerns.

The ultra-nationalist approach to Ottoman economic history, has always blamed the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty for the “under-development” or “dependency” of the late Ottoman Empire. This scenario with a xenophobic hint and backed by Marxist as well as nationalist historiographies, finds the main scapegoat of modern Ottoman-Turkish economic history in the 1838 Treaty.

This article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.

According to official data, urban poverty has been rising in Turkey since the 1990s. Macro-level causes include repetitive economic crises, the implementation of neoliberal policies recommended by international financial organizations, the failure to create employment and the increasing inequality in income distribution. The intensity of poverty in different provinces is related to the specific conditions of a particular region. In the 1990s, there was an influx of internally displaced people (IDPs) into the cities of Southeast Anatolia. The lack of employment opportunities, the state's reluctance to address the problems of IDPs and the IDPs' loss of kinship/community networks contributed to the deterioration of their condition in the new urban setting.

This article makes use of two different data sets on Turkey to explore the relationship between the tax structure and issues such as democratic representation, citizenship rights, and poverty and social exclusion. The first of these data sets is the extensive Household Consumption Survey (2003) by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT). This extensive survey data allows a very comprehensive quantitative analysis of the tax burden on the consumption baskets of households in different income groups, as well as in different regions of Turkey. The second data set incorporates qualitative data on Turkish citizens' views and attitudes towards different aspects of the Turkish tax system—such as its fairness (justice), transparency, and efficiency in generating funds for public activities—obtained through focus group meetings and in-depth interviews conducted with citizen groups and various stakeholders in cities in different regions in Turkey. The quantitative findings presented in the study clearly reveal that, if anything, taxes are expected to exacerbate the problem of inequality and poverty in Turkey. Heavily relying on regressive consumption taxes results in the poor paying a disproportionate amount of their income as indirect taxes, more so for those in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia where poverty is more extreme. On the other hand, the qualitative part reveals that ordinary citizens find the current tax system highly unfair and feel that they receive very little in terms of public services in return for the taxes they pay. In spite of the merits attributed in theory to taxation as a means to provide services and thereby legitimize the state, the payment of taxes is met with considerable reluctance. Most of this reluctance is attributable to factors such as the citizens' inability to pay, and a lack of clarity with respect to the obligations and reasons for paying. It also emerges that the unwillingness to pay is a protest against the degradation of public services and the perceptions of unfairness, corruption, and other administrative failings.

The recent rise of Islamic Radicalism in the Middle East is generally associated with anti-Western sentiment and interpreted as a continuation of the traditional conflict between Christian and Islamic civilizations. It is thought to reflect a traditionalist opposition to the modernization process which originated in the West and then was introduced to the Islamic countries (for an example of this literature, see Youssef, 1985). But this view cannot explain the historical timing and specificity of the current Islamic political revival. In this paper I suggest that Islamic radicalism is not a traditionalist plea to return to a pre-modern era. Quite the contrary, it is a product of the contradictions of Third World modernization and represents a post-modern reaction to the specific form of modernization experienced by the Islamic Third World. In the Islamic countries, where modernization has been synonymous with westernization, the response to the contradictions of modernization has taken the form of a “politics of identity.”

From a folkloristic point of view, memory is a repertoire, a potential knowledge that we store, only to perform when we choose. The selective process that defines what to tell is in folklore a function of the performance context. Why we choose to tell a particular story depends on who listens to it and how it is situated within the performative event. From an archeological-historical perspective, however, what we choose to preserve in our landscapes, archives and museums reflects choices made through historical-political processes. Within this framework, for an ethnographer in search of memory, there is an ongoing dialogue between narratives on what people remember and the material cultural context in which these narratives are produced. This essay is an attempt at writing an ethnography of memory in a small Black Sea town, Tirebolu/Tripoli, whose material culture and demographic structure radically changed since the 1900s through the effects of war, harsh climate, forces of modernization, and nationalism. To sum up very briefly, communities in Tirebolu—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—have been displaced at different times, temporarily or permanently since the First World War.

Attempts at common agreements to phase out fossil fuel subsidies (FFS) have been increasing, as the topic generated momentum through the Rio Dialogues prior to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and following the Paris Agreement in 2016. This study quantifies the magnitude and the relative importance of FFS in the Turkish economy and produces a relevant national FFS synthesis for policy design. FFS form a complex system of a self-contradictory nature that stands in stark contrast with the Turkish government’s statements regarding sustainable development. Based on available data from the 2000s, we find that Turkey provides state support for coal and the exploration of oil and natural gas that represents roughly 0.2 percent of its nominal GDP per year. Continuing to subsidize fossil fuels narrows down the fiscal options that could otherwise be used to support cleaner technologies and mitigation actions. Given the fact that fossil fuels have significantly negative implications for the environment and health, eliminating those subsidies has the potential to help combat environmental pollution, climate change, and related problems.

We commemorated in 1988 the sesquicentennial of the Convention of Balta Limani, the ground-breaking Ottoman-British commercial agreement that set a pattern for Ottoman agreements with other powers in the years immediately following. The Convention sprang from British interests and from Ottoman needs during the 1830s in the Near East. My function is to sketch the general international background for the Convention, to look at the situation of the Ottoman Empire, at British foreign policy in the early nineteenth century, and in particular at the development of British policy in the Near East in the years from 1827 to 1841. A subtitle indicating the desirable breadth of view might read “From Navarino (1827) to Nezib (1839), and from Hercules’ Pillars to Hormuz and Herat.”

Nınçir mangig im sirasun, Oror yem asum, Baydzar lusinn e meğm hayum, Ko ororotsum.

By analyzing the transmission of Armenian lullabies within the changing contexts of identity and cultural politics in Turkey, this paper addresses displacement and loss as two interrelated experiences shaping the sense of being an Armenian in Turkey. I criticize the liberal multiculturalist perspective that represents cultures in a way that cuts the link between the past and the present, by dissociating different cultures from the history of their presence in Anatolia and the destruction of that presence. I argue that in such a context where cultures are detached from lived experiences and memory, it becomes impossible to share the stories of violence and pain in the public sphere; hence, the loss itself becomes the experience of being Armenian. Finally, I try to explain how today young generations of Armenians in İstanbul, in their search for an Armenian identity, have developed a certain way of belonging to the space and culture, a way of belonging that is very much shaped by the experience of loss.