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This article examines possible strategies for preserving the national identity of Ukrainians living outside of Ukraine, specifically in the Republic of Turkey for many years, as well as those who were forced to leave Ukrainian territory due to Russia's open military aggression against Ukraine in 2022. The research material is based on the achievements of the Ukrainian community in the Turkish city of Bursa, which is one of the largest cities in the Republic of Turkey. The close proximity of Bursa to Istanbul, and therefore to Turkey's major transportation hub, led Ukrainians to choose this city for temporary residence outside of Ukraine as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Despite the fact that the Turkish government does not extensively cover the events currently taking place in Ukraine in the majority of media outlets, has not imposed sanctions against Russia and the increasing number of Russians in Turkey, the Ukrainian community is making significant efforts to preserve, promote, and manifest the Ukrainian language, culture, and unity. The study focuses on the means and methods that have contributed to the exploration of these paths. It analyzes the achievements of Ukrainians in the fields of education, politics, religion, and culture. The article also highlights certain volunteer initiatives, including online volunteering, by Ukrainians, particularly those who were forced to leave Ukraine due to the full-scale war, in the city of Bursa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking religious education as an important indicator in evaluating religious freedom in a country, this paper focuses on the religion courses in Turkey in order to evaluate Europeanisation and religious freedom in the country. The EU Commission's recent progress reports indicated that the conduct of religious courses in Turkey is incompatible with EU norms. Although important legal arrangements have been made in accordance with the adoption of minority rights in Turkey, it seems more difficult for change to happen in an ideological issue such as education. As religious freedom is an important value for the European Union, this paper aims to explore the impact of Europeanisation on the state of religious education in Turkey and the extent of Turkey's compliance with the European norms in a highly debated area like religious education. It also aims, in a broader sense, to shed a light on the place of religion in the national identity of Turkey today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the role of print culture and visual communication design in the permeation of Turkish national consciousness into everyday practices. It seeks to understand the phenomenon of "banal nationalism," argued by Michael Billig, in a broader context of cultural production advocated by Tim Edensor. It does this by looking into Turkey's first liberalization period in the 1950s where a boosting print industry, a standard print language, and high literacy contributed to the daily reproduction of a collective historical past through representations. This period is analyzed through publications like Sunday comic strips, advertorial giveaways, and illustrated history journals that emulate popular American formats in the commodification of history. These are treated as material tools to present and disseminate an imaginary reconciliation of secular modernism with imperial history in a new print culture. This analysis reveals how representations in the foreground of everyday cultural artifacts are used to produce and reproduce difference that designates a distinct national consciousness detached from the realm of state. It also sheds light on the prevalence of identity negotiation and the commoditization of culture in the professionalization of visual communication disciplines in non-Western design paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains how the Turkish nation's composition has changed under Justice and Development Party rule. Turkish nationalism and Turkish national identity have dramatically changed since 2010, when the Kurdish Opening process was started by former prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Syrian refugee crisis and the influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey created another change in Turkish national identity. Increasing religiosity in Turkey and the use of Islam by the Justice and Development Party created a flexible nation, where all Sunni Muslims can be considered members even though they are not ethnically Turkish. The author uses primary sources, such as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's speeches since 2010, to show how his discourse became more embracing of non-Turkish Muslim groups and created a dynastic understanding of nationalism based on religion rather than the idea of an ethnically homogenous, secular Turkish nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on a theoretical frame developed in reference to an interdisciplinary research field, this article provides a critical analysis of Turkey's citizenship education (CE) curriculum with a view to revealing discourses that inhibit the promotion of cosmopolitan values of human rights, democratic citizenship and diversity. The analysis demonstrates that a complementary set of ethno-religious, statist and neoliberal discourses undermines the cosmopolitan values. The inharmonious patchwork of these two sets of conflicting discourses raises the question of whether CE in Turkey really empowers students to support democracy. This question reveals the significance of developing a CE curriculum underpinned by a consistent set of socio-political values in Turkey and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey's relations with the EU have gradually soured roughly since 2013. Today, Turkey and the EU have an erratic modus vivendi episodically bordering political crises. This study attempts to provide a critical constructivist account of Turkey's foreign policy change towards the EU between 2002 and 2017. This change in state behaviour analysed in relation to the paradigmatic shift in Turkish national identity discourses regarding civilisational self-understanding led by the AKP elites. The article asserts that this transformation in Turkish national self-perception made fluctuations in Turkey's policies towards the EU and gradual deterioration of relations 'thinkable' via the medium of national identity discourses. The impact of Turkey's new hegemonic civilisational self-understanding is pursued within the epistemological framework of conceivability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkish Muslim nationalism, a new national ideology promoted by the AKP, laid the foundations for a new Turkey and new Turks. Yeni Türkiye Yolunda (Towards a new Turkey) is the slogan used by the Erdoğan's party to support a more nationalist Turkey intertwined with its Ottoman and Islamic heritage. In this paper, I put forward the claim that a number of State-sponsored institutions, including new national museums, play a relevant role in shaping this new Turkey. The aim is to investigate how museums operate as instruments of national identity building by exhibiting a fictitious national past. The case study of the Kabatepe Simulation Centre and Museum will serve this purpose. By interviewing politicians, bureaucrats, and historians, I have researched the links between a ruling class that supports Turkish Muslim nationalism, and new public museums, which exhibits it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the Eurovision stage as a cultural space that cultivated an affective-discursive terrain forging Turkish national identity. It draws upon the media texts as a heuristic to examine how an image of 'Turkishness' was created and negotiated. Focusing in particular on four specific cases (Semiha Yankı in 1975, Çetin Alp in 1983, Şebnem Paker in 1997 and Sertab Erener in 2003), this study suggests that the Eurovision stage was a space where 'Turkishness' encountered an imagined 'Europeanness'. In these cases, affective discourses gave meanings of national allegories of 'Turkishness' to performing bodies on the Eurovision stage. The affective registers generated a discursive formation shaping the contours of 'Turkishness' in relation to Europe. Yet these discourses did not generate fixed and stable meanings. In particular, the construction of national success was negotiated and contested in terms of the appropriateness of the national embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish State and society at large have been subject to significant changes. Besides the recent increasing authoritarianism of the government, Islam made its way through politics like never before, and a new national ideology promoted by the AKP, Turkish Muslim Nationalism, laid the cultural foundations for a new Turkey and new Turks. In this paper, I put forward the claim that new national museums play a relevant role in shaping this new Turkey. In particular, they function as performative cabinets exhibiting the national ideology of the ruling party. I have looked into one of these museums, the Istanbul Museum of the Science and Technology in Islam, researching the links between the AKP, which promotes Turkish Muslim nationalism, and new museums, which exhibit it. The outcome of this study suggests that the IMSTI functioned as the resource and the host of national symbols manufactured by and within the ruling class to be supplied to the masses. The political class, represented here by the AKP, commissioned the museum, whereas cultural agents that shared the party's political ideology were appointed to make it. This collaboration benefited both parts, so much so that profit seems to have been a crucial ingredient in the making of this museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Due to the strong position of Islam in Turkish context the issue of secularism is the first and foremost significant principle of modern Turkey that has always remained on the national agenda as the most polarizing political problem. In my opinion Islam in Turkey was never completely abandoned but in fact has been continuously and strategically used in Turkish political life for pragmatic reasons. I think it is deeply related to Islam's symbolic power, its potential to provide a sense of belonging and cohesion as well as present a code of ethics for people that think of themselves as sharing a way of life. So there is no exaggeration to say that the secular Turkey's most successful political ideologies, trends contains noticeably Islamic ideas, elements. In this paper the relationship between Turkish nationalism, identity and Islam is examined in the Turkish nationalist debates of the late Ottoman and early Republican era. I focus only those disputes in which the compatibility between the ideas of Islam, nationalism and modernism is proven. I analyze the two most significant thinkers of the late Ottoman era because they influenced the dominant thinkers of the officially secular Kemalist era which created the ideological basic of the present Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways states manage their national identity through cultural tourism policy. It draws on archival and ethnographic data on the opening of the Armenian Akhtamar Church in Turkey to cultural tourism and religious service for the first time after 95 years. Based on narrative evidence from the disputes among various actors with conflictual constructions of history, I find that states can use cultural tourism to produce multiple articulations of national identity and govern these articulations in accordance with their interests. The presence of multiple stages of tourism policy and the time and space bounded nature of interaction at each stage allow for the production of multiple images in different interaction situations. At the same time, the discourse of economic development associated with cultural tourism allows state actors to insulate themselves from criticism in disputes over national identity. The article shows how states use cultural tourism to create national identity even in the case of complex histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is Turkish nationality one singular identity that does not permit ethnic modifiers? Or can it be understood as pluralistic, with identities nested – “hyphenated” – with Turkishness? Then, are Turkish and Kurdish identities necessarily mutually exclusive? Such questions over the boundaries of Turkishness have long been framed in the civic versus ethnic dichotomy – an approach that does not ask whether Turkish nationhood is monolithic or pluralistic. In response, this article aims to advance the public and scholarly debates over nationhood in Turkey by turning to the question of ways in which Turkishness can be hyphenated with other identity categories in Turkey, most particularly Kurdishness. First, we reframe the debate over identity by using the combinatorial approach to ethnicity to outline how Turkishness and Kurdishness can be overlapping and nested, or a hyphenated identity. Second, we draw on public opinion data to show that such a hyphenated identity is both theoretically possible and potentially salient in Turkey today. Together, these steps deconstruct the primordialist understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness, on the one hand, and the taken-for-granted civic claims of Turkishness, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper scrutinises citizenship education in Turkey from the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) to the present and explores the extent to which it encourages inclusive or exclusive concepts of national identity and citizenship. In Turkey, where there are citizens belonging to ethnic and religious minorities, civic education plays a prominent role for promoting tolerance among citizens. Using framing questions from phase one of the International Association for the Educational Achievement’s (IEA) research of Civic Education Across Countries, the civic education textbooks of Turkey are examined to determine the extent to which they promote democracy and human rights, make positive references to ethnic and religious minorities, and promote social cohesion. As Turkey was not included in phase one of the IEA study, the paper provides original information for comparative studies, reconsideration of citizenship education in multicultural societies and promoting an active national citizenry in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's commemoration in Turkey often reminds Western observers of a personality cult. Looking at national identity-narratives emerging from the stage-management of his homes and final resting place, this article argues that 'Ataturk' has become shorthand for Turkish national identity and his commemoration represents, as a result, much more than a personality cult. Moreover, I show that although the sites in question provide the state with an excellent tool for national socialisation, they also reflect shared national assumptions and cherished symbols. Commemoration entails a sense of safety and protection, but also a warning against straying from Ataturk's path and legacy that have, after all, stood the test of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Turkish national identity as the critical element in Turkey's exclusion from the European Union (EU). My central contention is that the main obstacle to Turkey's membership in the EU may not be the reason that European officials formally cite, that is to say, problems related to democracy, economics, and human rights, but rather, perceptions of Turkey and Turkish national identity as 'alien' and 'others.' As Europe reinvents itself along ethnic and to a certain extent, racial lines with the emergence of the EU, a powerful regional block pursuing a different kind of superpower whose main domain is the soft power, European perceptions of the Turk constitute serious obstacles to Turkey's integration into Europe. Therefore, Turkey's hopes for full membership in the EU are far from being materialized at this point due to questions regarding Turkey's national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new nation state founded in 1923 on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey faced the need to establish a new national identity and ideology. Recognizing the multiple faces of Turkish nationalism, this article explores how Kemalist conceptions of national identity were not limited to civic nationalist ideologist, but incorporated racist ascriptions of ethnic nationalism as well. Based on the research and publications of scholars associated with the Turkish Review of Anthropology from 1925 to 1929, this article analyzes a form of early Turkish nationalism that was shaped by a racist discourse supported by and purveyed through the disciplinary authority of anthropology. The author's analysis reveals a dominating and exclusionary discourse of Turkish nationalism, in which the 'Turkish race' (posited as the dominant national group) has a sense of proprietary ownership of the nation and national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]