This article examines extradition in nineteenth-century Ottoman diplomacy by exploring an illustrative legal conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the United States. The Kelly affair, which revolved around the murder of an Ottoman subject by an American sailor in Smyrna (Izmir) in 1877, sparked a diplomatic dispute that lasted for several decades. The controversy stemmed from conflicting interpretations of the treaty of commerce signed in 1830. The inability to reach a consensus pushed the parties to resort to the 1874 Extradition Treaty, which was the only official Ottoman extradition agreement. The Kelly affair poignantly illustrates how extradition, an issue of international law that touched on territorial jurisdiction and subjecthood, was a complicated and ill-defined matter when addressed in practice. By investigating the confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the USA, both putative secondary powers on the international stage at the time, this article challenges the existing historical narratives on interimperial relations that highlight Europe as the locus of power and agency. Even though ad hoc political actions overshadowed the binding force of the treaty text, it demonstrates how both governments adopted a political strategy that moved beyond the intrinsic arguments and logic of the capitulations to embrace a novel legal discourse.

Focusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

On the night of July 15, 2016, the Republic of Turkey experienced yet another military coup attempt. However, this attempt failed, mainly due to civilian protest and casualties. Their sacrifice, according to the Turkish state, led to the creation of a new national celebration in Turkey, the “Democracy and National Unity Day.” Following the growing interest of historians in the field of national celebrations, this paper examines the creation of this holiday. It argues that the AKP government used this new holiday to shape the Turkish collective national memory and to introduce a national celebration that does not revolve around the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who symbolizes the secular camp in Turkey, but rather around the Justice and Development Party government and its more traditional and religious ideology, in the guise of celebrating Turkish democracy.

This study presents a new theoretical framework for understanding one of the ways in which populists generate support in elections. It argues that populist movements securitize elections by triggering perceptions of ontological insecurity among voters. Through this strategy, populist movements amplify voters’ negative image of the country they live in and the challenges they face, which contributes to populist movements’ electoral success. Building upon this theoretical framework, this study offers an explanation for the 2015 double general elections in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) experienced disappointment after losing its parliamentary majority in the June 2015 elections. However, the AKP increased its votes by 8.6 percent in the November 2015 elections. Between these two elections, the AKP had used the Kurdish question to trigger perceptions of ontological insecurity, which enabled it to securitize the elections in November. This strategy helped the AKP win the November elections.

Studying changes in the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) politics within the general context of the long-lasting history of neoliberalism-neoconservatism in Turkey, this paper aims to provide a new perspective for analyzing the party’s recent drift to authoritarianism from the perspective of its gender politics. For many feminist scholars and activists, the recent changes in the AKP’s gender politics are a matter of an increase in the AKP’s oppression and patriarchal power. These analyses give no explicit account of why there has been an increase or if it is only a matter of an increase in the level of the oppressiveness of patriarchal power. From a perspective that questions this quantitative assumption (i.e. with an argument that the AKP’s politics has been equally oppressive for all women and from the very beginning of its rule), this paper aims to give insights into this complex process which led, first, to the emergence of neoliberal feminism as a new subjective position, and, later, to the modification of this official politics on women’s issue and the emergence of neoconservative feminism along with the AKP’s drift to authoritarianism in response to certain contradictory effects of neoliberalism and its eventual crisis.

The Covid-19 crisis that led to the loss of thousands of lives and initiated one of the most complex social and economic upheavals has also a created a window of reflection for health systems researchers to revisit our major concepts, frameworks, and underlying assumptions. This commentary reviews two literatures that remain rather separate: comparative health policy and global health. First, I examine whether convergence in circumstances brought about by the spread of Covid-19 creates opportunities for learning “about” as well as unpacking the motivations of policy actors and how they use the cross-national information. However, given the emphasis on national policy actors and processes, this literature may overlook the importance of global actors, institutions and ideas. Second, global health differentiates itself with an emphasis on multilateralism as a political positioning and its multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach. However, the global health field is also challenged to consider its mission, political standing on multilateralism, changing relationships between North and South and its commitment to multidisciplinary approach. I argue that health systems scholars should use the window of opportunity created by Covid-19 pandemic to reexamine their methodologies and rearticulate their positioning by acknowledging the voice and agency of the Global South.

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.