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In Chapter 2, Adalet examines the records of Daniel Lerner, another prominent theorist of modernization who conducted research in Turkey. In the study of Turkish-American relations in the twentieth century, much of the focus is on political narratives, diplomatic exchanges, crises, and regional disputes. Adalet also supplies many anecdotes to show the inner details of the relationship between Hilts and Vecdi Diker, who visited the United States and proposed the foundation of a separate Directorate of Highways ( I Karayollari Genel Müdürlügü i ) in Turkey. [Extracted from the article]

To what extent can hostility toward Greeks in Turkish politics be explained sociologically? This paper provides a fresh perspective by examining the value of group position theory in understanding negative perceptions of Greeks in Turkish politics between 1946 and 1960. It proposes that Turkish politicians' perceived threats to valued resources played a key role in their unfavorable portrayals of Greeks. To test the argument, the study scrutinizes all Turkish parliamentary speeches in this period that contain the word Greek (N = 652). Quantitative analysis demonstrates that speaking about border-related threats is a significant predictor of negative perceptions. Qualitative investigation details how politicians justified their negative comments. The paper concludes that the negative remarks about Greeks are a function of Turkish politicians' perceived threats to valued resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. support for the Syrian-Kurdish forces aligned with the PKK; U.S. declining to extradite Fethullah Gülen; Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system; and Turkey's aggressive interference with natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean are four issues that have roiled U.S.-Turkish relations. This paper examines neorealist and constructivist explanations for these issues and determines that they provide a less than complete understanding of this troubled relationship. The paper then turns to middle level alliance theory and domestic factors favored by neoclassical realism to fill in the explanatory gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish Republic was founded as a new state, a homeland for Turks, and on a Turkish identity that had yet to be created which would serve as the basis of the political community. This paper analyzes the overall regime properties of the Turkish political system in that period, which has been mired in legitimacy and national identity crises. This paper identifies the varying substance and style of successive Turkish political regimes, examine the domestic and international factors influencing their changing characteristics. The frequent change in the nature of Turkey's political regime have been major sources of its political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the history of Turkey's efforts to establish a national automotive industry, which culminated in a state-driven project to build a Turkish automobile, the Devrim (Revolution), in 1961. The outcome of the project was three prototypes unveiled in Republic Day ceremonies, but quickly left in oblivion afterwards. This paper investigates the possible causes of the termination of the project, arguing that building a Turkish car had great symbolic significance for the identity of a nation in the quest for modernization and Westernization. The project was difficult to sustain considering the vexed political and ideological motivations invested in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the state of Greek-Turkish relations in light of recent developments in the reconfiguration of Turkish foreign policy. Following twenty years of détente and relative calm in bilateral relations, the year 2020 witnessed two escalations in Greek-Turkish relations, one in March involving refugees and immigrants on the Greek-Turkish land border and another in August involving military vessels of the two countries. The refugee crisis and potential military conflict regarding energy exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean have raised tensions at a moment the political and institutional tools for the promotion of conflict resolution between Greece and Turkey linked to Turkey's EU membership perspective appear to be obsolete. This paper seeks an answer to the question of whether structural or ideational factors played the most prominent role in the recent escalation of the Greek-Turkish disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the depiction of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish textbooks and examines correlations between changes in Turkish political dynamics and their impact on these educational resources. It analyzes concepts, methodologies, and linguistic constructs used to describe the '1915 incident,' tracking their evolution from 1980 to the present. The study also considers how events like the 1980 coup d'état, rising nationalism, and the Islamization of politics influenced textbook content, alongside changes during Turkey's bid for European Union membership. Despite a stated aim of historical accuracy in these textbooks, the research hypothesizes that their content is significantly shaped by the prevailing political climate. This work provides insights into the complex relationship between politics and historical representation in educational materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is well-established that exogenous shocks can trigger policy changes, political elites have often been depicted as the initiators of this process. This paper adopts an elite sociology perspective, extending beyond the exclusive focus on political elites, to uncover the pathway through which critical junctures foster policy changes. It employs a case study of the economic crises in Turkey spanning from 1999 to 2001 as an illustrative example. During this period, a significant shift occurred, moving from traditional statist economic policies to widespread neoliberal reforms. Our analysis reveals that this policy shift was not solely influenced by external factors, but facilitated by an intricate process of elite circulation within the economic bureaucracy. This process, which began in the 1980s and gained momentum in the 2000s, coincided with an influx of bureaucratic elites aligned with neoliberal principles and played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the augmented version of the Blanchard-Perotti's SVAR model, this article seeks to estimate the size of fiscal multipliers in Turkey for the period 2002:q3–2016:q2. Unlike many previous papers that use aggregate data in estimating the size of the fiscal multiplier, we use disaggregated data on taxes and government spending for the same purposes. Our empirical findings indicate that the size of the short-run fiscal multipliers for taxes much differs from that of government spending. Depending on the disaggregated tax and government spending instruments, it ranges from −0.83 to −0.27 for taxes, and from 0.02 to 0.98 for government spending, respectively. Overall, these findings corroborate the idea that a shock to taxes produces a non-Keynesian effect on GDP whereas government spending creates a (weak) Keynesian effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main argument of this paper is that Turkey had close relations with Middle Eastern states during the Atatürk period, which is contrary to the literature that claims the opposite because of Turkey's Western-oriented ideology. The article asks why Turkey as a Western-oriented state sought to have close relations with Middle Eastern states. To answer this question, the article uses discourse analysis focusing on Middle Eastern leaders' visits as represented in Turkish public discourse. Accordingly, it proposes two main answers. Firstly, the paper argues that the new state's relations with Middle Eastern countries played an important role in legitimation of its Westernization projects in the eyes of its citizens. Secondly, the Turkish state marginalized rival political discourses, mainly Islamism, by proving that even Muslim majority countries wanted to imitate modern Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the externalization of migration governance and external protection of European borders stimulated the redesign of the Turkish migration regime. This externalization faced its major litmus test with the Syrian refugee crisis. This article proposes that Turkey's accession process to the European Union (EU) and its ongoing collaboration with the EU to control migratory movements altered Turkey's migration regime significantly. Accordingly, the article aims to tackle the following questions: whether the externalization of European migration governance played a significant role in the redesign of Turkish migration governance, and whether this externalization uncovered new collaboration strategies for Turkey and the EU. To do so, this paper analyses Turkish harmonization to the EU rules on migration governance, and the possible role played by the Syrian refugee crisis on facilitating further adaptation. The paper deduces how the Syrian crisis created new challenges for both Turkey and the EU in migration governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent themes in Turkey's political development are modernization and Westernization, notions that carry with them a particular teleology in terms of expected political outcomes. While Turkey has, over several decades, modernized in several respects, Westernization has arguably been much more limited, particularly in terms of embracing political liberalism. This paper scrutinizes its failure to take root in Turkey, noting how a congruence of factors at both the mass and elite levels tends to work against policies that would embrace individual rights and freedoms, pluralism, and a more limited role for the state. It focuses in particular on three periods in Turkish history when liberalism could have potentially been adopted, but ultimately failed to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the substantive representation of women through parliamentary speeches in Turkey with the goal of determining whether legislative behavior differs across gender. By using content analysis of parliamentary speeches given in the Turkish Grand National Assembly between 2002 and 2011, this paper evaluates who speaks more often and on which policy areas they focus. More specifically, it examines the relative participation of women as well as the subjects they choose to address. The analysis of Turkish case is important not only to further our understanding of Turkish politics but also to improve our understanding of women in parliaments with low gender parity. The results reveal that, although there is no significant difference between female and male legislators in terms of the total speeches they delivered, gender differences exist regarding the policy preferences of MPs, even after controlling for partisan, constituency and institutional factors. Female legislators are more likely than their male colleagues to prefer speaking about women's equality issues, children and family issues, and education. In contrast to previous findings, female legislators are as likely as male legislators to prioritize speaking on health care issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have identified the rise of the drug trade in the inner-city slums of Ankara's Altındağ district in the wake of post-urban transformation projects (UTPs). However, none of them has thus far discussed the surge of such organized criminal activity in relation to the wider urban policy regime of Turkey. This paper offers the concept of advanced marginality to understand the complex relations between neoliberal urban governmentality and its repercussions in local areas, which results in UTPs, the disintegration of communality, the emergence of slums, and the rise of illicit enterprises. The paper argues that the formation of organized drug trade in Altındağ following the development of UTPs is an outcome of the advanced marginality resulting from the changing urban governmentality and its deliberate neoliberal political preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male circumcision maintains a strong connection with religious responsibilities and masculinity construction in Turkey, but some Muslim men oppose this ritual today. This paper argues that opposing approaches to male circumcision on religious grounds do not necessarily enable a critical view of masculinity in general. Muslim men's opposition against male circumcision shows four interdependent approaches about the juxtaposition of male circumcision, religion, and masculinity: (1) 'Defending anti-circumcision' as an example of practicing religion correctly, (2) 'practicing religion correctly' as a necessity for piety, (3) 'piety' as a requirement for masculinity, and (4) hence defending anti-circumcision as an obligation for 'masculinity.' The fourth point takes us back to the first one, and this creates a cycle which also shows how these men construct their own masculinity. The study shows that being circumcised and uncircumcised can both be positioned as a strategy that supports masculinity and internal hegemony in the same geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The age of sustainable development' has been characterized by an on-going debate over how to define development and which alternative energy resources to rely upon. It is high time to rethink the news media's role in this debate due to transformations in journalism, particularly the role of the media in harnessing the sustainable energy transition. Accordingly, this paper examines the role of the news media in environmental debates over Turkey's nuclear program within the country's polarized media system. Adopting a content analysis method, the paper illuminates how selected media outlets (three mainstream and one online alternative) have framed and disseminated debates over Turkey's nuclear program. The findings reveal that the media system matters in public debates on energy, but also that the alternative media have the potential to contribute to societal debates on issues – even within a polarized media setting – by voicing unspoken ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of ideas and identities in the making of the AKP's foreign policy in Turkey. After briefly examining the institutional and international constraints on Turkish foreign policy before 2002, the discussion turns to the driving factors in three evolutionary stages of AKP's foreign policy. It becomes apparent that a neo-Ottoman worldview and accompanying identity constitute the interpretive framework of the AKP's political elite. The article traces how this worldview became dominant in Turkey's policy making after the government dismantled the country's Kemalist institutions and the AKP consolidated its political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically analyzes the effects of tax shocks on private consumption expenditures in Turkey. For this purpose, private consumption expenditures are firstly decomposed into four major categories and then to which structural VAR (SVAR) model is employed using a data set for the period 2003:Q1-2013:Q3. The empirical findings of the paper show that both in the short and long run, private consumption expenditures are affected by value-added tax (VAT) and personal income tax. However, it is important to highlight that VAT plays a more important role in influencing private consumption expenditures than the other taxes under consideration. Overall, the findings reveal that the effects of tax shocks on private consumption expenditures vary depending on the types of taxes, components of the private expenditures, and length of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the steady growth of authoritarianism, image activism is persistent and vibrant in Turkey. This paper examines how activists/artists used the production and circulation of political images to combat the institutional exclusion of oppositional voices following the Gezi protests (2013) and the attempted coup (2016). Using visual rhetorical analysis of images and in-depth interviews with courtroom painters, the paper focuses on 'political' drawings produced in enclaves of courtrooms and the strategies of image activists in visually narrating the political prisoners and/or detainees for wider networks, forming intersectional communities and creating spatial and digital visibility. In the context of the image activism in the post-Occupy Turkey, the passage from the digital to post-digital is based on, first, the top-down restrictive regulations in public and semi-public spaces and increasing police presence in places where activists previously met, and second, rising surveillance of the digital platforms, including the troll armies of the AKP government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffusion of international human rights norms through the enforcement of international human rights law by courts has been explored by both scholars of international relations and international law. Turkey, which has been a state party to most international human rights treaties despite being a major violator of human rights, is the case in this paper. It examines norm diffusion in the area of women's rights through court action in a patriarchal culture protected and represented by a deeply patriarchal state and judiciary. By looking at the legal processes, domestic and international, through which the issue of the right of Turkish women to keep their maiden names after marriage has gone, this paper argues that norm diffusion through court action can be triggered even in difficult cases such as changing gendered norms and describes the conditions and mechanisms that make these changes more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines party system polarization over 19 general elections in Turkey from1950 to 2018. Using data on party policies from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), we show that, contrary to the common view, party system polarization is not a persistent feature of Turkish politics. We also find that party system polarization on the left-right continuum reflects party differences primarily on social rather than economic or European integration issues. Finally, our results demonstrate that the military interventions in 1960 and 1980 reduced party system polarization in subsequent elections, even when controlling for other determinants of polarization. These findings have important implications for debates on party politics, military rule, and the prospects of democratic governance in developing democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pro-government protests are on the rise in recent years, mostly in populist and/or authoritarian settings, including Turkey. Based on the literatures on populism and social movements, this paper looks at the first mass pro-government mobilization in Turkey, namely the Respect the National Will rallies organized in the summer of 2013. To understand how these rallies contributed to democratic backsliding in the country, the article uses critical discourse analysis. Four discursive mechanisms were identified in play in Turkey during these rallies: nomination, predication, argumentation and intensification. The article argues that the rallies were countermobilizations organized by the ruling party, and this mobilization and the discourse mechanisms used further contributed to democratic backsliding in the country by delegitimizing anti-government protests and protestors, shrinking the democratic space for opposition and opening the path for increased levels of pro-government mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After coming to power in 2002, the Justice and Development Party evoked the 'glory' of the Ottoman past, seeking to expand Turkey's cultural sphere of influence to the former territories of the Ottoman Empire – a phenomenon commonly referred to as neo-Ottomanism. While neo-Ottomanism is generally discussed as a component of foreign policy, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency's (TIKA) intervention in the heritage dynamics of foreign countries was intimately linked with domestic policies. This paper discusses how neo-Ottomanist policies selectively created transnational heritage sites, and how these sites have dialectically become instruments of domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses theories of intersectionality to study Nor Zartonk, an activist group of Istanbulite youths which is mostly comprised of Armenians. Based on ethnographic research, it first explores and analyzes the youths’ subjectivities, ideology, and activism, exposing their intersectional nature. Furthermore, through the study of this particular case the paper identifies some general potentials of intersectional positionality: first, that the politicization of one dimension of individuals’ intersectional subjectivities could pave the way for the politicization of others; second, that intersectional activists could ‘intersectionalize’ the events in which they participate, thus potentially pluralizing the socio-political implications of those; and third, that different dimensions of intersectional activism could support each other in practice and essence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The forthcoming Customs Union (CU) upgrade negotiations have the potential to stabilize and deepen the ties between the European Union (EU) and Turkey and bring them to a stronger form of external differentiated integration. This article examines the viability of an EU–Turkey Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA), similar to that between Ukraine and the EU, as an alternative to the CU. The paper contends that a DCFTA would benefit both the EU and Turkey while it would de facto shift the contractual relations from accession conditionality to market access conditionality with potential political repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most widely used and influential ways of creating foundational myths for authoritarian legitimation is to construct a necropolitical narrative around the significance of dying for the nation, homeland, state and the leader, i.e. martyrdom. Mbembe's concept 'necropolitics' (the right of the sovereign to determine who shall live and who shall die) has been expanded to include the pollical instrumentalization of martyrdom narratives. However, the literature has not analyzed the necropolitical martyr-icons. This paper aims to address this gap by looking at two historical episodes in Turkey, one in the 1930s dominated by secularists and post-2016 dominated by Islamists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political structure of political violence in Turkey in the 1970s, focusing on the internal structures of the Nationalist Movement. The paper argues that the Movement was able to draw on its high degree of coordination and centralisation to organise violent actions. The first section analyses how the Nationalist Movement was structured. The second section analyses a determined effort by the Movement to promote the model of a disciplined militant. The third section analyses how the Movement mobilised these organisational and militant resources in the violence it employed to entrench its position up until the 1980 coup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alevi-Sunni relations in Turkey are the result of a relational process constructed from contributions of each side rather than each groups' perceptions of the other. Boundaries between Alevis and Sunnis in Turkey have been constructed relationally with the contributions of many complicated socio-political factors. This article aims to answer the question of what the symbolic boundaries between the two groups are, seeking to understand how Sunnis perceive Alevis. This aim will cast light on the nature of the two groups' relations, help us recognize forms of Alevism and Sunnism specific to Turkey, and advance existing literature on the issue. This paper's findings are based on ninety semi-structured and two focus group interviews with Sunnis living in Istanbul. Results show that the concept of 'two-dimensional symbolic boundary,' which runs along dimensions of not-knowing and not-accepting, is the answer to the question of how Sunnis perceive Alevis. The main components of these dimensions are perceptions, which seem to relate to the interpretations of group norms and values. This study, as a group-based analysis, reveals that perceived group norms – whether religious, cultural, social, or political – determine the perceptions of Sunnis towards Alevis and create dimensions of the boundary between the two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade after the global financial turmoil, a new wave of crises is haunting the global South. This pattern is different from previous crisis episodes. Powerful shifts in the international order provide new policy space for emerging powers to manage their economic problems in a heterodox fashion. Key Western-led institutions no longer enjoy a monopoly in dictating the terms of financial assistance for countries in economic difficulty, as non-Western powers increasingly challenge the orthodox Washington Consensus paradigm. The present paper attempts to locate Turkey's ongoing economic crisis in a comparative-historical context. Its central argument posits that the current crisis is the reflection of a fragile and unconsolidated presidential system and its associated mode of economic governance with state capitalist features. Turkey's heterodox crisis allows us to draw attention to the complex interplay of global power transitions in a post-liberal international order and domestic political constellations during an era of growing authoritarian populism, generating a new equilibrium with rather unique features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Spring truly caught Turkey by surprise. In interpreting what was happening in the region, Turkey’s foreign policy-makers relied on a particular view, which helped steer Turkey’s foreign policy in the ensuing regional earthquake. This article seeks to dissect that view and deconstructs its main components mainly through the speeches of Ahmet Davutoğlu, who served as Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs during the heyday of the Arab Spring. The paper also illustrates how Davutoğlu’s interpretation heavily borrows from the Islamist interpretive frame of modern Turkish history. That frame, this article claims, originated in the late Ottoman period and has since evolved in contestation with alternative readings, both official and non-official. The article suggests that Davutoğlu’s view of the Arab Spring helps explain why Turkey welcomed the Arab Spring and advised Arab regimes to implement political reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leadership is a major aspect of Turkish politics; leaders in Turkish politics are regarded as either almost sacred figures or the ultimate reason for all political, social and economic problems. Leaders are seen as decision makers who have a significant impact on almost all aspects of life. It can be contended that a historical continuance toward the leader-centered perspective is present in Turkish politics. This paper aims to present a descriptive framework outlining the elements that constitute the leader-centered perspective in Turkish politics. To accomplish this goal, the paper presents two major arguments. It is argued that the constitutive elements of the leader-centered perspective in Turkish politics are a sui generis synthesis of patrimonialism, patriarchy, populism and militarism. Furthermore, this fourfold historical structure strengthens forms of charismatic leadership and can provide insight into the central role of leadership in Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In January 2016, 1128 predominantly Turkish intellectuals signed an Academics for Peace petition to draw attention to the conflict in southeastern Turkey. Their actions were met with outcry from the government, accusing the signatories of disloyalty to the state, even treason. This paper is an analysis of the responses of 60 of these scholars to a questionnaire sent to the entire Academics for Peace email list. Respondents, including 58 signatories, provided various perspectives on academic freedom in Turkey, as well as their own experiences of signing the petition. We contend that the responses faced by these intellectuals illustrate the homogenizing effects of power to silence criticism and ensure loyalty to the government and its ideas of Turkishness. It reflects a continuation of the suppression of academic freedom in Turkey, an issue that sees little sign of abatement or reform in the light of present challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article briefly introduces the rationale and content of a Special Issue of Turkish Studies that reflects on Turkey's past, present, and future in light of the Republic's centenary in 2023. It suggests that while Turkey can celebrate many accomplishments over the last century, the country continues to face a number of pressing political, economic, and social challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has the state-centered recognition of the public sphere prevailed in Turkey over the last decade? A frame analysis of the public sphere discourse for 2002–09 reveals that the contingency of the discourse on the Islamic headscarf issue discouraged an essential understanding of the authentic public sphere. The dominant frame espoused by secularists claimed that the state banned headscarves in the public sphere were to preserve the neutrality of the public sphere. By contrast, pro-Islamists initially adopted an alternative counter-frame based on the Habermasian perspective, portraying the public sphere as tolerant of various ideas. Yet, in the face of stiff opposition from secularists, the pro-Islamists came to use a negative counter-frame with increasing frequency, implying that the state-centered public sphere impinged on the freedom to wear a headscarf. As a result, both the secularists' and pro-Islamists' frames helped entrench the recognition of the state-centered public sphere in Turkish society (Earlier and longer versions of this paper have appeared as IDE Discussion Paper Series No.262 (November 2010) and in Japanese in Ajiakeizai, Vol 52, No. 4 (April 2011)). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research puzzle that our paper focuses on is the struggle of youth organizations to have their voice heard in public policy processes. We examine the implications of occupygezi in establishing, or not, a new relationship with the political domain and policy makers in Turkey. By drawing on a policy analysis framework, this paper looks at whether occupygezi opened up new windows of opportunities for social and political change for youth activists in Turkey. In doing so, we rely upon the results of a number of in-depth interviews conducted in 2015/16 in Turkey with representatives of youth organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining the Turkish response to the crisis of the 1930s, this paper contributes to existing literature at three levels: economic policy conception, comparative case selection, and mode of explanation. First, it takes a holistic approach to economic policy (neomercantilism) by looking at its foreign trade and finance (autarkic), microeconomic (etatist), and macroeconomic (neoclassical orthodox) dimensions. Second, it locates the Turkish response in the Balkan context, where other small states responded to comparable stimuli. Third, while viewing the macroeconomic conservatism of Turkish neomercantilism as a situational necessity, it explains the autarkic dimension by the shared German metropolitan linkages of the Balkans as a region, and the etatist dimension by the Kemalist bureaucracy’s larger room for maneuver in a context of wider gap between political modernization and economic backwardness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Turkey's economic ties with neighboring Arab countries have flourished in the past few years. A recently stated pledge to create a regional trade alliance with Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan is likely to trigger a further expansion of economic integration. This paper starts by reviewing trends in Turkey's bilateral trade relations with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan since 2000. Next, it estimates a formal gravity model aiming to project Turkey's trade potential with its neighbors and compare them with the actual flows in 2000–10. It is demonstrated that while Turkey fully realized its bilateral trade potential vis-à-vis Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, actual bilateral trade of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan with Turkey is significantly below the estimated potential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reviews political parallelism in the Turkish press from a historical and comparative perspective, covering the period from the 1830s to the 2002 elections. Overall, political parallelism in the Turkish press is at moderate to high levels, placing it together with Mediterranean countries, and there is no single discernible trend from higher to lower parallelism. The modernization explanation positing less parallelism with modernization fails to capture the situation in the Turkish press. There is more parallelism when ideological polarization in the party system is high, when coalition governments rule the country instead of single party governments, and when cleavage voting is strong. Number of parties in the system does not seem to have the hypothesized relationship with parallelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginning of Turkey's accession negotiations with the European Union on October 3, 2005 constituted an important turning point for Turkey's relations with the EU and for Turkish socio-political transformation. This paper poses the following questions: (i) Is there a Europeanization of Turkish foreign policy as a result of Turkey's accession negotiations with the EU? (ii) If so, then what are the main areas and limits in which Europeanization of Turkish foreign policy has occurred? This paper answers these questions by providing a background of Europeanization; first by differentiating between the member states and the candidate countries; second by analyzing the Europeanization of Turkish foreign policy through an investigation of the changes in Turkish foreign policy since 1999 with regards to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), NATO-EU cooperation and Turkey's Middle Eastern neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of ownership structure on corporate governance practices of Turkish companies listed in Borsa Istanbul Corporate Governance Index (XKURY). It proposes a context-specific ownership structure (founding families, state ownership, foreign ownership from both developed and emerging markets, and institutional investors), and publicly available corporate governance scores as indicators for corporate governance practices. The results of fixed effects panel regression analyses show that state ownership has a negative influence on weighted and non-weighted average corporate governance scores, as mainly determined by shareholder protection and board of directors-related practices during 2010–2017. The evidence regarding the other ownership categories is not sufficient over alternative estimations. Overall, the study provides a critical assessment of the role of ownership in shaping the corporate governance practices of XKURY companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to contribute to the growing Foreign Policy Analysis literature by focusing on the role of non-state actors in foreign policy implementation. Special attention is paid to the case of Turkey, which has emerged as a 'humanitarian state' in the last decade. In Turkey, relatively new Islamically oriented humanitarian NGOs (HNGOs) have been providing ever-increasing amounts of humanitarian aid throughout the former Ottoman lands including the Middle East and Africa. Employing a constructivist-realist perspective, this paper asserts that a 'parallelism,' if not a complementarity, exists between Turkey's Islamically oriented HNGO discourse and practice and AKP foreign policy implementation process. Based on primary qualitative data acquired from interviews, this study has identified various degrees of parallelism between the two, calling into question the status of these HNGOs as purportedly non-governmental entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey has historically struggled to attract foreign investors. This paper discusses how the start of the European Union's accession negotiations in 2005 encompassed a wide set of reforms in several chapters of the acquis communautaire that resulted in higher foreign direct investment (FDI) attraction. However, it seems that the global economic slowdown of 2009 coupled with increasing Euro-skepticism have already started to erode this effect. Only large a volume of foreign investment in the energy sector observed in 2009–13, explained by the energy security strategy of the European Union and the internal liberalization agenda, has prevented the collapse of FDI inflows to Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to examine four dimensions of the climate governance issue in Turkey: legislation; institutional capacity; mitigation and adaptation; and the role of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC). After conceptualizing the concept of climate governance and identifying its components, the current situation of each dimension will be analyzed, along with its shortcomings and the uncertainties concerning climate governance. The challenges of the current system will then be discussed on the basis of these dimensions. Finally, based on the findings, a forward-looking perspective will suggest ways to eliminate the existing shortcomings and improve climate governance in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous scales in climate change politics might create problems for activists, as it is not always easy to locate the appropriate level(s) according to which they develop collective action frames. Therefore, activists might address various scales while identifying the problem and building strategies accordingly. The Turkish climate movement has been active through protest cycles largely influenced by global climate negotiations. Following the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (2009) in delivering a binding climate deal, the movement shifted its strategy. Using the protest event analysis method and the movement's archives, this paper attempts to shed light on how the Turkish climate movement learned from this global policy failure and why it switched from the global diagnostic and prognostic framing to a national/local one. Following this, the extent the European and transnational actors contribute to this frame shift will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines business masculinities and relationalities of empowerment in the everyday life experiences of male entrepreneurs and wives of entrepreneurs in three urban centers in Turkey: Gaziantep, Konya and İzmir. We take gendered power inequalities as structural and relational, and empowerment as a complex, multifaceted process. Based on a relational understanding of gender roles, we scrutinize men's and women's decision making areas in an attempt to understand normalized and internalized patriarchal values and assumptions, as well as explicit or implicit challenges against such values. We argue that gendered experiences of entrepreneurs and women married to entrepreneurs offer a complementary analysis of nuanced empowerment strategies in the background of seemingly contradictory currents such as economic globalization, transforming masculinities, rising conservatism and reinforced gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkish cinema, the regular narrative of exclusion or othering of minority ethnic, religious, and gender identities harnesses the nation-building process against groups that function as the 'constitutive outsider.' Although recent Turkish cinema has challenged many established cultural patterns, this challenge does not yet extend to stereotyped and heavily gendered constructions of Greek identity. In this paper, I argue that these constructions are persistent, and can be seen in recent films. Specifically, I demonstrate that Greek characters are limited to a few stereotypical names and roles, assigned heavy Turkish accents, and for the most part, confined to female roles depicted primarily as 'indecent' and/or objects of the male gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attack carried out by Daesh against Kobane in 2014 prompted the mobilization of worldwide media attention and of large crowds protesting across Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast and beyond. This paper examines the potentially transformative effects of this event on the popular geopolitical codes of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey. This is done through a qualitative content analysis of 36 op-ed articles published in the newspapers Evrensel and Özgür Gündem. Three core findings stand out: (a) a constant emphasis on Turkey's alleged links with Daesh, even before Kobane; (b) a boundary deactivation with respect to the US and ‘the West’; and (c) a re-articulation of self-representative frames, which initially relied on post-materialistic arguments and later emphasized security and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its waning influence, Kemalism remains a compelling topic within scholarship on Turkey. In recent years, for instance, a growing literature has critically examined the policies, arrangements, and institutions that underpinned the Kemalist single-party rule (1923–46). Although they have expanded our stock of knowledge on this period and pushed scholarly exchanges beyond polemical debates, most of these studies neglect to account systematically for the origins of the regime and assess it in light of other similar cases from the global south. To address such questions, this paper classifies Kemalism within a category of national-developmentalist regimes. The Turkish case differed from these cases, however, with its low level of institutionalization, particularly its ruling party's limited organizational and mobilizational capacity. While scholars tend to focus on the coercive aspects of Kemalist rule, in reality the regime was built upon a weak party apparatus, a factor that precluded the consolidation of the regime. This paper attributes such an outcome to two factors that gave Mustafa Kemal few incentives to build strong state and party institutions at the onset of his rule, namely (1) a low level of intra-elite conflict and (2) limited popular mobilization. Due to their limited base of support, the Kemalist leadership remained vulnerable to the defection of elites, who could mobilize the popular classes against the ruling party. This paper situates Kemalism as part of a broader category of reformist regimes in the developing world. In so doing, the paper carves out an analytical space wherein scholars can analyze Kemalism in comparative light and highlight the ways with which the Turkish experience differed from other similar cases in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Statistics is one of the chapters in Turkey's EU entry negotiations, and the country is transforming what statistics it collects, using what methodologies, at what intervals, how it publishes them, and how it uses them. It is in light of the new statistical knowledge that the country is reforming its institutions and practices. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of description. To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through reform and/or development, they have a performative nature. In this sense, statistics are less a methodology and more a technology—a technology of governance. The paper draws on the fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians, and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]