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Dersim is a region within Turkey that has deep meaning for Alevis, Armenians, Kurds, and Zazas. Even the Hittites seemed to have had difficulty governing this mountainous region where today Turkish military drones target suspicious activity. Dersim as an Internal Colony: The Turkish Civilizing Mission (1927-1952) explores how the region had a deep history of autonomy and autarky that was challenged and then crushed by the forces of union and progress trying to keep together and perhaps give rebirth to a dying empire. It focuses on what happened after the Tertele of 1938, also known as the day on which the world ended, and what, was this so-called “Turkish civilizing mission” in action during the First Internal Colonial Period (1927-1952). Did the state in fact bring civilization to this region's people that it had just terrorized? What were the achievements of this Turkish civilization in this historically independent land of high mountains, torrential rivers, oak forests, and goats? This book aims to answer these questions with a critical reading of reports written by the then representative of Tunceli in the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye.

The Everyday Violence of Forced Displacement: Memory, Community and Identity Politics among Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey is based on ethnographic research in four Istanbul neighborhoods in the early 2000s and after. Miriam Geerse focuses on individuals and families that tried to sustain meaningful lives in an urban context marked by political and structural violence. Geerse argues that forces, other than war and forced displacement, instilled in many forced migrants a pressing need and desire to keep hammering home the price and pain of displacement. Much of this book then bears witness to the formation of an oppositionalconsciousness. Geerse's analysis of the mobilization of social capital in times of illness and social conflict offers an understanding of how a dispersed community of people who share the same stories function in an inhospitable urban environment. In laying bare the interconnections between experiences before, during and after forced displacement, and by focusing on people's narratives and their experiences, Geerse provides insight to activists striving to improve the position of Kurds, to academics studying the impact of forced migration and other forms of political violence on civilians, and to all those who argue for a more balanced view of the recent history of Turkey.

This book aims at exploring the logic of political survival in Turkish politics studying the case of the AKP and using evidence from elite interviews, party documents, public speeches, and developments and changes for exploring AKP's political survival in the chapters. These evidences indicate that there are four independent variables of dependent variable which is AKP's political survival; -- the legitimization of AKP's conservatism (2002-2007), AKP's power struggle with Kemalist elites (2007-2011), AKP's populism and authoritarianism (2011-2014) and the instrumentalization of Islamism and nationalism under Erdogan's leadership (2014-2018) -- within the AKP's four terms. In other words, this research offers a cause-and-effect mechanism between the four different policy approaches of the AKP's four periods and the AKP's political survival. Indeed, the AKP has been the most successful political party at the point of ensuring political survival throughout its 16-year rule. In the literature, there are few studies analyzing the 16-year rule of AKP government integrally. As a result of this limitation, the original contribution of this research is that it offers a holistic approach of the AKP government between 2002 and 2018 with using the concept of political survival which is not explored for the AKP case in the literature.

The author draws attention to the strong state tradition and the pluralistic society that both prevailed in Turkey. He argues that the Turkish state tradition envisages centralization, social cohesion and an obedient political culture. Through the modernization process of the last century, it has tried to change the society from top to down, and built an ideological and unitarian public sphere. However, the transition to multi-party system in 1950 and the liberalization policies that followed in the post-1980s have prepared the ground for different social movements to come into existence in the same public arena. Social movements which developed particularly among Kurds, Alevis and women emphasize social diversity, pluralism, participation, limited authority, freedom and human rights. They, thus, have paved the way for the transformation of the ideological public sphere into a plural and a civil public domain. The author follows the traces of all these developments from the Ottoman Empire to the last decades of the Republican Turkey. Moving from the case of Turkey he makes an important contribution to the literature on various issues such as civil society, public sphere, modernization, democracy, and social movements.

A major common misconception in scholarship on Kurdish journalistic discourses is that Kurdish intellectuals of the late Ottoman period cannot be portrayed as Kurdish nationalists. This theory prevails because of the belief that they not only endorsed and promoted Pan-Islamism and Ottoman nationalism instead of Kurdish ethnic nationalism, but also because they allegedly eschewed political demands and instead concerned themselves with ethno-cultural issues to articulate forms of “Kurdism” rather than “Kurdish nationalism.” Refuting this underlying misconstruction of the nexus between Pan-Islamism, Ottomanism, and Kurdish nationalism, this book argues, based on empirical findings, that the Kurdish periodicals of the late Ottoman period served as a communicative space in which Kurdish intellectuals negotiated and disseminated an unmistakable form of Kurdish nationalism. It claims that hegemonic Ottomanist and Pan-Islamist political thought were used in pragmatic ways in the service of burgeoning Kurdish nationalism, but were rejected altogether when they were no longer useful to fostering Kurdish nationalism.

This book evaluates the Turkish nation-building process from the Ottoman Empire to today, considering the role of Islam in this process. It gives insight into what has changed and not changed in this process. The book explains to readers that the Islamisation of the country is not a coincidence. Rather, Islamism has been grown symbiotically with the secular Republican regime through the organizational power of Islamic sects and with the assistance of the West. How we live as a nation today is not a revolution of Islamists, as some scholars have remarked. Rather, it is a continuation of the Turkish nation-building process with further Islamisation.

This book is a comprehensive analysis of Turkish foreign policy through the concept of “middle power”. The author explores why and how Turkey has constructed middle power identity based on liberal foreign policies, in order to illuminate the change in post-Cold War Turkish state identity in relation to foreign policy behaviors. The author further explores state identity and how changes of circumstances, norms, state self-perception, and the perceptions of others effects that identity. This is done first through a policy analysis of Turgut Özal, Necmettin Erbakan and İsmail Cem and second through an examination of AKP's foreign policy experiences and ideas, especially in relation to Ahmet Davutoğlu.

This edited volume brings together chapters that offer theoretically pertinent comparisons between various dimensions of Israeli and Turkish politics. Each chapter covers a different aspect of state–society interactions in both countries from a comparative perspective, including the public role of religion, political culture, women rights movements, religious education, religious movements, marriage regulation, labor market inclusion, and ethnic minorities. Israel and Turkey share significant similarities, such as state formation under nationalist ideologies, familiarity with democratic governance since the 1940s, strong affiliation with the West, recent resurgence of religious parties, ongoing conflict with ethno-national minority groups that challenge the dominant national project, contemporary popular protests against the incumbent regime, and recent serious erosion of democratic rights. At the same time they differ on major variables, such as size, majority religion, geopolitical location, level of economic development, policy towards ethnic minorities, and institutional arrangements to managing the state–religion relations. The presence of these differences in face of common backgrounds facilitates analytically grounded comparisons in a host of dimensions. Therefore, employing a case-oriented comparative method, this book provides historically interpretative and causally analytic accounts on the politics of both societies. The contributions reveal the dynamic and complex—rather than one-dimensional and linear—nature of political processes in both settings. This empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated volume should contribute to a better understanding of these two important states, and, no less important, stimulate new directions for comparative research, especially on Middle East regimes, social movements, and democratization.

Debating Security in Turkey: Challenges and Changes in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ebru Canan-Sokullu, gives a detailed account of the strategic security agenda facing Turkey in an era of uncertainty and swift transformation in global politics, and regional and local dynamics. The contributors to this volume describe the challenges and changes that Turkey encounters in the international, regional, and national environment at a time of extraordinary flux. This study provides a framework for Turkish security agenda locating it in theoretical discussions, and developing a conceptual framework of security challenges to Turkey, and to a broader region where the country and its interests are located. The book positions Turkey in the new global security order addressing a multidimensional political agenda, and points to the need not only to elaborate on the overall evaluation of Turkey's political affairs—domestic and foreign— but also to trace a critical conjuncture of transatlantic relations, its recent role in the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia, and bid for full membership in the EU within the security context. Finally, the contributors reflect upon where Turkey's security challenges and prospects stand from internal and external perspectives with an interactive foreign policy assessment. Debating Security in Turkey is an essential contribution to the literature of Turkish national security, and the effects of that security in the region.