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This article examines the victory of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey's 2023 presidential election, the role of fear‐oriented populist nationalism in Turkish politics, and the implications of the results for society. It argues that Turkey faces a deep moral and social crisis rather than a mere political problem. The article explores the sociocultural origins of polarization, as competing communities with few shared values contribute to divisions. It also analyzes the formation and ideologies of the People's Alliance and the Nation Alliance, the two major blocs involved in the 2023 elections, providing insights into their visions for Turkey. Last, the article scrutinizes the cult of the strongman, the widespread use of nationalism and religion, the utilization of state resources by Erdoğan's administration, and the influence of media—largely controlled by Erdoğan—on public opinion. This includes investigating the impact of alternative truths and narratives on the electoral process. The analysis highlights the deep‐rooted moral bankruptcy Turkey faces in the third decade of Erdoğan's rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than addressing the Kurdish conflict in Turkey directly, this study focuses on how the rising nationalist populism bears on Kurdish voters supporting the pro‐Kurdish party HDP. There are very few studies on how Kurds are affected by the nationalist populism often expressed in Turkey by the governing People's Alliance (Cumhur İttifakı) with its slogan "domestic and national," even though the literature offers a broad variety of studies on the Kurdish conflict. To fill this gap, this study is supported by focus group discussions with the Kurds in Turkey who support the HDP, based on a sample of the Kurds living in Istanbul, which is sometimes referred to as the "largest Kurdish city." This study claims that the populist slogan of the "domestic and national" not only marginalises the Kurdish interviewees but also weakens their sense of belonging to Turkey, thus encouraging them to establish their own national identities. An important result of the focus group meetings is that AKP's polarising policy not only causes polarisation among Turks but also among the Kurds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional historiographical paradigm depicts the consolidation of nation‐state and nationalism in Turkey as a top‐down political project characterised by the domination of the 'center' over the 'periphery'. In this narrative, the masses are portrayed as either passive recipients or silenced opponents of the nation‐state project. Based on a historical and contemporary analysis of the state‐sponsored tea production in Rize, this article contends that this perspective neglects the agency of the provincial population in the reproduction of the nation‐state and nationalism in Turkey and in influencing the decisions made by the state elite. The economic interventionist measures of the ruling authority to extend its nationalist hegemony across Anatolia also opened a field of action for rural/provincial populations to negotiate their interests with the state and thereby influence its policies. The main contours of this relationship have remained salient during the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) period, and it needs to be taken into account to explain this party's large ideological appeal in the Black Sea region. This argument builds on a fieldwork conducted in Rize that included in‐depth interviews with local tea workers and farmers as well as extensive archival research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early monumental statues of Atatürk in Turkey have so far been studied from the perspective of the state and its ambition to disseminate a national consciousness. While this state‐centric approach has been helpful to understand the role of symbolism in nation‐building, it ends up reducing people to a passive recipient of symbolic indoctrination. We, in contrast, approach public perception as an active component in the discursive construction of these monuments over time. We first analyse the period until the death of Atatürk in 1938 during which the democratic possibility of conflicting with the official narrative remained quite minimal. We then look at the aftermath of Atatürk's death, which coincides with the introduction of the multiparty democracy in Turkey where there were more critical engagements with these monuments, particularly by the right‐wing constituents and politicians. We conclude that such resistance was still discursively bound by the nationalist context within which it operated. Our analysis of the politics of symbolism in Turkey taps into the theoretical works of Hanna Pitkin and Warren Breckman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the 'nationalist movement' of Ahıska, a forcibly displaced people who have been arriving in Turkey from various parts of the former Soviet Union since the early 1990s. I focus on how members of this community attempt to define the Turkish nation, how they invoke migration to Turkey as a patriotic and nationalist act, how they criticize the state's responses to this migration as insufficiently nationalist, and how they respond to the movement of non‐Turkish others into the territorial and documentary space that they seek to inhabit. This nationalist movement, albeit small in number, demands our attention because it is born of a phenomenon that is intimately familiar to displaced people and not commonly associated with nationalism – the longing for rest. This longing animates Ahıska efforts to organize themselves and engage with the Turkish state. What possibilities and limitations does this genre of nationalist movement hold for displaced people across the world? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlighting the modernity of state institutions, Hobsbawm defines the nation as a modern territorial state (the nation‐state) and argues that nation and nationality cannot be discussed unless they refer to the nation‐state. Hobsbawm's conception of nations and nationality in the context of the nation‐state warrants readdress by comparing Westphalian models of states with subjects that do not attempt a territorial model but arguably still invest in the nation and a sense of nationality. This article compares the discourses of building nations and national identities fostered in the content of school textbooks in the Republic of Turkey—a modern, territorial nation‐state—and the Autonomous Administration of North and East of Syria (hereafter Rojava)—an alternative state system model established in the power vacuum proceeding Bashar al‐Assad regime withdrawal from expansive territory in northern Syria. In doing so, the article revisits the existing literature on the correlation between the content and political associations of school textbooks through a comparative analysis of primary school course materials in Turkey and Rojava, neighbouring and conflicting political entities that occupy contrasting domains of statehood and military capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on the role of evolutionary ideas in the making of Turkish nationalism during the Kemalist era (1923–1938). By so doing, it aims to challenge some of the dominant historiographical viewpoints as to the nature of Turkish nationalism. One is related to the Kemalist elites' predisposition towards the so‐called "scientism" seen as one of the bases for nationalism. We intend to turn upside–down the relation between the Kemalists' use of science and Turkish nationalism. Second, we problematize the "culturalist" origins of Turkish nationalism arguing that the seemingly "culturalist" reflections of the time were, indeed, materialist formulations based on the science of the times. We discuss in this respect the Kemalist elites' use of evolutionary ideas. By synthesizing the ways in which these elites employed evolutionary ideas in the fields of history, language, geography, anthropology, biology, eugenics, and pedagogy, we aim to understand the specific nature of Turkish nationalism before 1945. This secular nationalism conceived culture as having materialist bases and differed fundamentally from the culturalist varieties of Turkish nationalism coloured by Islam in the post‐1945 era. Furthermore, the paper empirically enriches the complex and entangled story of evolutionary ideas in the early Turkish Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aimed to analyze the ascension of Justice and Development Party—Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP)—in Turkey and its political measures regarding both Islam and the country's Ottoman past, in order to comprehend the party's role in a potential shift of Turkish national identity and in Turkey's relationship with the Middle East. The article does this through a content analysis of decrees, laws, and other measures taken by the AKP that emphasizes its cultural and religious policies, as well as revisiting literature produced about the subject. Analyzing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government during his time as Prime Minister (2003–2014), two noteworthy features come to light: its Islamic influence and its so‐called neo‐Ottomanist outlook. However, this article argues that besides an identity‐ and ideology‐based motivation, the AKP had pragmatic intentions in adopting such approaches, aiming to gather support both domestically and regionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the nationalist attempt of Turkey to create an ethnically and linguistically homogenous population initiated a long process that has resulted in widespread repression, abuse of power, harassment and discrimination on ethnic grounds. Topics include The Kurd descendant and Durkheim inspired Turkish thinker Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924) regarded as the brains behind the other ideological current.

The current study, conducted in Turkey, examined feelings toward Muslim refugees among Turkish participants (n = 605) in comparison to feelings toward established non‐Muslim national minority groups. Using the social identity perspective, these feelings were examined in relation to national and religious group identifications, and the endorsement of multicultural beliefs. The feelings toward both refugees and minority communities were similarly negative, yet the processes behind these feelings were somewhat different. While stronger national identification was associated with more negative feelings toward Muslim refugees, stronger religious group identification was associated with more negative feelings toward non‐Muslim minority communities. Further, higher endorsement of multiculturalism was associated with less negative feelings toward both refugees and minority communities, but only for relatively low national identifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between Islam and nationalism by considering the role of the ulama in Turkey, housed within the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA). The ulama - religious scholars and experts of Islamic law - in Muslim majority contexts are typically closely linked with the state and play a key role in shaping the boundaries of Islam and of what is Islamically acceptable. However, this is also of consequence for the boundaries of the nation, since in Turkey Islam and nationalism has been intertwined, with Islam playing a central role in nation-building, as a basis of ethnic identity formation and a source of symbols and myths. This articles shows, firstly, that the PRA has acted as a carrier and preserver of Sunni (Hanefi) Muslim identity in continuity with the Ottoman ulama and, secondly, that it has delimited nation-building, by considering its approach to and interventions against Alevi identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan have been persistently challenged, since their founding, by both Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. These challenges claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in each country. I investigate the causes behind the concurrence of Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges to the state in Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. Method This research employs comparative historical analysis, and more specifically, a most different systems design. In addition to small- N cross-national comparison, I also designed an intertemporal comparison, whereby Turkish, Algerian, and Pakistani history is divided into four periods, corresponding to preindependence, mobilization for independence, postindependence secular nation-building, and Islamist and ethnic separatist challenge periods. Results Contrary to the prevailing view in the scholarship, this article formulates an alternative reinterpretation of Turkish, Algerian, and Pakistani nation-state formation. These three states were founded on the basis of an Islamic mobilization against non-Muslim opponents, but having successfully defeated these non-Muslim opponents, their political elites chose a secular and monolingual nation-state model, which they thought would maximize their national security and improve the socioeconomic status of their Muslim constituencies. The choice of a secular and monolingual nation-state model led to recurrent challenges of increasing magnitude to the state in the form of Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. The causal mechanism outlined in this article resembles what has been metaphorically described as a 'meteorite' (Pierson, ), where the cause is short term (secular nationalist turn after independence) but the outcome unfolds over the long term (Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges). Conclusion A distinct and counterintuitive path of nation-state formation has been identified based on the cases of Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. This research demonstrates that a contradiction between the goals of the original mobilization that establishes the state and policies of its postindependence governments can be a major structural source of instability and violence in the long run. These findings suggest that theories of nationalism that were developed based on the European experience of ethnic or linguistic nationalism need to be modified in explaining the religious nationalism that is found in the origins of some of the major nation-states in the Muslim world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the rise of the 'reactionary modernist' project that developed after the devastating defeat of the Balkan Wars and which was promoted by the Young Turks by means of articles published in Turkish Homeland, the intellectual platform of the Young Turks. The article argues that the outlines of this project to a large extent shaped the contours of Turkish nationalism then, and that they have hence been constitutive of Turkish nationalism ever since. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]