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The Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) was initiated in the 1970s to produce energy and irrigate arid lands through constructing dams and hydroelectric power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and extensive irrigation networks in southeastern Turkey. Over time, the project was expanded to achieve a wider range of goals in different fields and radically transform Southeastern Anatolia Region. It is also widely claimed that GAP was initiated to address the root causes of the Kurdish question in Turkey and that security considerations and political calculations were actually theraison d’êtreof GAP. However, this supposed link between GAP and the Kurdish question was often established in a simplistic manner and the question how these two have been related – or not – remained largely untangled. This article aims to fill this research gap and examine the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the interrelationship between GAP and the Kurdish question based on diverse primary and secondary data sources. Accordingly, the article identifies and discusses major narratives in which GAP was conceived as a political and strategic ‘anti-Kurdish’ plot; remedy for the conflict; and totally technical non-political project and presents an alternative and more accurate perspective on how to interpret this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the First World War, empires were replaced with nation-states for good and the map of the Middle East was redrawn. Traced back to the final decades of the nineteenth century, Kurdish nationalism did not result in a nation-state in the modern Middle East. Therefore, the Kurds inhabiting the borderlands of the four nation-states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria came to be perceived as ‘trouble’ by these nation-states. Through the use of a wide array of published and unpublished Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and French archival documents, memoirs and oral and written literary pieces, this article unearths the role of a Kurdish tribal chief by the name of Ferzende in Mount Ararat Revolt in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the Turkish and Iranian nation-states. An exceptional contribution of this study is its exploration of the petition submitted to the Iranian Parliament by Ferzende's wife Besra. This study thus is a fresh contribution to the study of social history of the Middle East from the margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will attempt to develop an in-depth examination of the pivotal role of Islam in the articulation of Turkish nationalism and Turkish official identity by examining the sermons authorized and imposed by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA), the state agency regulating religion, and how the their cosmologies of social, moral and political order are entwined. We will further argue that this role involves a twofold process; firstly, the Muslim identity was imagined as a prerequisite for being considered as a Turk and a Turkish citizen and, secondly, the ‘cultural intimacy’ of Turkish nationalism is grounded on the ‘root paradigms’ inherited and attained from the Islamic tradition and theology. These arguments are particularly pertinent at a time when Islamist JDP (Justice and Development Party) consolidated its power and began to instrumentalize PRA for its priorities and visions of Islam. This, however, does not bring a radical reshuffling of PRA. On the contrary, the continuity from the Kemalist-monitored PRA to the JDP-monitored PRA can be attested not only in its organizational features but also in its ideological make up; especially in terms of its perceptions of society, state and social order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study discusses the position of Alevi identity and Alevi community with regard to the Turkish national identity-building project. There was a partial compatibility between the Kemalist objective of laicization and nation building and the Alevi practice and understanding of a ‘local’ version of ‘Turkish Islam’. Besides these compatibilities, Alevis faced the challenges of nation-building and homogenization policies, which involved homogenization in ethnic, religious and sectarian domains. Kurmanji- and Zazaki-speaking ethnically Kurdish/Zaza Alevis of Eastern Anatolia had a different experience during the project of centralization and ethnic homogenization, in comparison to Turkish-speaking Turcoman Alevis. This different experience still is a source of division among Alevi communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aside from a few exceptional works, studies on the subject of the Ottoman Special Organization (SO, Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa) are marred by confusing, vague, and inconsistent sets of arguments and assumptions. This may be attributed to certain methodological and linguistic shortcomings of particular studies and a general laziness in the use of existing primary and secondary sources. It is also an outcome of the degree to which contemporary political and ideological currents and concerns colour the nature of the historical inquiry into the subject. Based on a comprehensive and systematic critical reading of existing literature in the light of certain sets of hitherto unused archival material, the present study aims to re-open to discussion such historiographical problems both by revisiting the most speculative, and well-trodden, research topics in the literature, such as the very nature of the organization as well as its administrative features, and offering insights into the potential(s) of certain little-explored Turkish archives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with press coverage of the 1942 Wealth tax and focuses on the Turkish press's use of a discriminatory discourse against non-Muslim minorities to designate non-Muslims as other than Turkish. More specifically, this article analyses linguistic and discursive strategies adopted by the press in reporting on the Wealth tax. The press attempted to explain the tax on non-Muslims that aimed to liquidate non-Muslims' wealth as a tax that would establish social justice by making war profiteers and black-marketeers pay the government what was due. By adopting various linguistic devices and discursive strategies, the press played a significant role in the construction of meaning through a related set of assumptions about non-Muslims and Turkishness embedded within news reports on the Wealth tax. This critical analysis of power and inequality in language reveals the dominant discriminatory discourse of Turkish nationalism as manifested in the coverage of the Wealth tax and the role of the press in the reproduction of the hegemonic discourse connected to Turkish national identity and the criteria governing exclusion from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the successor to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey inherited many non-Turkish-speaking Muslim communities. This article is concerned with Albanians in Turkey, one of the Muslim communities which migrated in large numbers to Anatolia during and after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to escape conflict and massacre in the Balkans. Based on historical studies and oral history interviews, we account for the Albanian migration to Turkey during the 1912-13 Balkan Wars and demonstrate the formation and transformation of an Albanian community in Samsun Province in the Black Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the involvement of Indian politician Maulana Mohamed Ali Jauhar in the fortunes of the Turks in the early 20th century. Perils that the Ottoman Turks were facing; Efforts to organize and promote the Khilafat Movement; Maintenance of the authority of the Caliph of Islam at Istanbul and Muslim control of the holy places of Islam; Ways in which Mohamed Ali's culture was in juxtaposition with two other cultures.

Discusses the role of Turkey in the Korean War. Turkey's place in international politics and economics after World War II; Policy to avoid involvement in international conflicts; Immediate impact of participation on the country's foreign and domestic policies; Long-term impact on Turkish society; Leaders' belief in developing closer ties with the West.