The limited success of employment-based social protection measures under the diverging patterns of post-COVID-19 recovery rekindled interest in a social policy framework known as the Basic Income (BI) support. We test the potential of the BI program using five alternative scenarios ranging from households with income less than half of median income to all adults with estimates of their respective fiscal costs. We then employ an applied general equilibrium model to analyze the economy-wide effects and welfare implications for Turkey in the long run through 2030. We evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare effects of both a business-as-usual fiscal program and an alternative (green BI scenario) comprising of (i) carbon tax levied on the fossil fuel producing industry; (ii) corporate income taxation policy reform that aims at expanding the revenue base and consolidation of the fiscal space of the government; and (iii) restructuring of public consumption expenditures by introducing rationality and efficiency in the structure of fiscal expenditures. Our model solutions reveal that a green BI scenario not only achieves a higher GDP and welfare in the medium to long run but also helps Turkey to reduce its carbon emissions in line with the global policy challenges of a green recovery.

During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.

Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imaginations? In this article we argue that in shaping the family and urban space, Çukur’s masculinities remain precarious vis-à-vis the hegemonic masculinity in “New Turkey.” Rather than being the society’s building blocks, Çukur’s families are suffocating spaces. At the same time, as opposed to cultivating neoliberal responsibility, Çukur’s familialism emerges as a space of solidarity in a precarious neighborhood to which state forces can hardly enter. Therefore, the neighborhood (mahalle) is not a space of consumption and surveillance but a haven against urban precarities. Despite their hierarchies and authoritarianism, Çukur’s men reject unquestioned political loyalty, conspicuous consumption, and entrepreneurship while endorsing the various impasses in family and urban life. Showing that absolute political obedience and economic dependence is not the only way out of neoliberal authoritarianism, Çukur confirms popular culture’s power in representing liminal spaces outside the state’s oppressive power and the markets’ commodifying logics.

This article contributes to the existing literature on the populist online communication of governments. We look at the role of the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter under the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the wider Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) during the peace process. We carried out a rhetorical analysis of the Twitter posts of four key AKP actors – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Yalçın Akdoğan, and Efkan Ala – between July 1, 2012 and November 1, 2015. First, we show that the AKP actors persistently label the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and in Syria as a threat to the national security of Turkey, reflected in their rhetoric toward the remilitarization and resecuritization of Turkey’s Kurdish question within and across its borders. Second, we argue that the AKP used the peace process and various persuasive communicative techniques not only to consolidate Kurdish electoral support, but also to reach its aim to remove the Kemalist military–bureaucratic tutelage in Turkey that was replaced with hyper-presidentialism under the strong personality cult of Erdoğan. Third, we argue that Erdoğan’s increased one-man power has been reflected in the AKP’s branding itself as the only viable choice for the Kurdish region’s stability, which has blocked more constructive dialogue toward a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question.

This study investigates why and how entrepreneurial municipalism is manifested in the case of Turkey despite limited local government autonomy and capacity in the area of migration governance. This article suggests four entrepreneurial strategies to understand and explain the variation in municipal practices: local networking, community engagement, organizational adaptation, and city branding. The most common strategies adopted by municipalities are local networking and community engagement often based on external funding alternatives that bring rapid and locally contingent, yet less durable and future-oriented solutions to challenges of forced displacement in urban settings. Against this background, this article highlights the importance of pathways that cultivate a culture of diversity and inclusion in the context of sustainable local integration by investing more resources in organizational adaptation and city branding. Finally, this study suggests redefining the concept of municipal capacity in terms of performance by focusing on the entrepreneurial strategies employed by local governments in their day-to-day practices.