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This article examines the emergence of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar as a scientific persona model. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 2015, Sancar's nationalistic tendencies and close relationship with incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) leaders opened up a wide range of discussions on how a scientist's relationship with politics should be intellectually interpreted. Focusing on the case of Aziz Sancar, this article examines the specific contextual conditions in which a scientist expresses his identity and how it is interpreted by the public. To this end, the aim of this work is to present an in-depth analysis of the discussions that took place in Ekşi Sözlük, a popular social media platform acting as an online forum in Turkey, and news from the national media and to scrutinize how a scientific persona is conceived in Turkey and how Aziz Sancar has been 'de-scienticized' in the heavy polarized Turkish political atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, employing qualitative research methods, I explore how the Ottoman past, selectively rejected by Kemalist historiography, is displayed in an established place of memory – Topkapı Palace Museum (the imperial house) – in a neo-Ottoman Turkey. Since the 2000s, Topkapı Palace Museum has transformed from a regular state museum to a national museum and then to a national palace museum. In this old state museum in transformation, the Ottoman past is revitalized through the pan-Islamic and multicultural imperial legacy and through primordial Turkic roots in Central Asia and the West, the two main tenets of Kemalist historiography. Accordingly, I argue that, in Topkapı Palace Museum, the Ottoman past is selectively re-inserted to the homogenous, empty time the Kemalist elite imagined while constructing Turkishness. This reflects on the ensuing significance of Kemalist historiography in displaying the Ottoman past, as well as the centralization and malleability of neo-Ottomanism in a 'new' Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the foundation of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) after a paradigm shift and its maintenance through retooling, which involves strategic positionings and tactical manoeuvres within its new paradigm. The positionings and manoeuvres that the party took vis-à-vis states of exception have been imperative for its survival in government. The main argument of the article is that the AKP retooled itself in the face of crises rather than going through a paradigmatic change, that is to say, resorting back to the Islamism of the party elite's origins, in Kuhnian terms. Through the fluidity of its discourse and the unrivalled charisma of its leader, the AKP has -multiple times- changed the center of gravity of its discourse and policies without having to disarticulate its founding political imaginary. Neither its recently increased nationalism nor authoritarianism was the result of an ideological orientation, just like the democratic reforms in its initial years. They were mostly by-products of survival efforts at power positioning, through retooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pro-Kurdish nationalist mobilization in Turkey was mostly built on the right to self-determination aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology for the insurgent Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the early 1980s and ethnic minority rights for the secular-leftist pro-Kurdish legal parties in the 1990s. The Turkish state mostly framed the legal and illegal pro-Kurdish mobilization as 'the enemy of the state' and 'the enemy of Islam' in its counter-insurgency efforts. However, in the 2000s, the PKK and the pro-Kurdish legal parties became more tolerant and inclusive toward Islamic Kurdish identity by mobilizing their sympathizers in events such as 'Civic Friday Prayers' and a 'Democratic Islamic Congress'. This move aimed to function as an antidote to the rising popularity of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdish Hizbullah in the early 2000s. In other words, Islam and pious Muslim identity has increasingly become contested among Turkish Islamists, Kurdish Islamists, and the secular Kurdish nationalists. This article seeks to unpack why, how, and under what conditions such competing actors and mechanisms shape the discursive and power relationships in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the global wave of decolonization that began after 1945 reached the island of Cyprus, the Cyprus question turned into an issue of paramount importance for Turkish nationalists and for the Turkish people in general. Long before, Turkish foreign policy architects – who had previously taken the line that ‘Turkey does not have a Cyprus problem’ – came to portray Cyprus as a ‘national cause’. Three different geopolitical discourses were instrumental in legitimizing Turkey’s claims over Cyprus and in leading Turkish society to believe that it had a crucial stake in the fate of the island. Naturalized geopolitics represented Cyprus as a natural extension of the Turkish heartland, while ideological geopolitics put forth that Greek Cypriots were responsible for the spread of communism. Finally, civilizational geopolitics characterized Turkey and Greece’s rivalry in Cyprus as the latest chapter in the centuries-old conflict between Turkishness and Hellenism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the issue of early preferences of national political parties in the EU regarding Turkey's accession. Two main hypotheses are proposed. First, national moderate parties contribute mainly to the de facto transformation of the accession in an 'open' process by developing volatile attitudes. Second, in the case of moderate parties, volatile attitudes and concrete political discourses on Turkey's accession are mainly determined by explanatory factors other than ideology (structural and strategic factors). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey has faced increasing political pressure regarding the 'recognition of the Armenian Genocide', presented as an issue of 'coming to terms with history' and further democratisation. This article attempts to analyze the impact of external pressure for the 'recognition of the Armenian Genocide' in Turkey by examining the views of leading commentators, who represent different political standpoints. Among the commentators, opinions diverge to a great deal with regard to the 'Armenian issue', democratisation and European integration. Indeed, the only point that nearly all these intellectuals agree about is the uselessness of external pressure. Both in terms of the external pressure and internal responses, there is a clear instrumental use of the issue for other purposes. Although space for free discussion of the Armenian issue has expanded in Turkey, external interventions have fed reactionary nationalism, hindered dialogue between Turks and Armenians and limited developments in the democratisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of ethnic minorities in post-1989 Central East and Southeast Europe (CESE) has been characterized by an apparent paradox between, on the one hand, well-integrated minority parties at the national level, on the other hand, strong demands for decentralization and local self-government. This article examines the impact of post-communist reforms, since the late 1990s taking place within the frame of European integration, on ethnic politics and state-minority relations in CESE focusing on the case of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. It argues that liberalization cum European integration in CESE states fundamentally transform inherited national divisions, and integrate minorities in existing political and state institutions. At the same time, such integration is constrained by the legacy of state socialism that consolidated ethnic differences by embedding them in economic-territorial structures. In doing so, it set the frame for the growth of a fundamentally distinct minority politics on a regional basis that diverges as much from the traditional nation-state model as from the liberal approach to post-communist democracy, market reform and European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study on the Focus of Supreme Loyalty (FSL) by examining the relations between nationalism, Islamism and globalization since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Discussion on the processes and concepts involved in FSL; Characteristics of FSL; Groups which benefit from the order of things created by globalization.