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This article develops the concept of fraternal natalism to examine the long-standing alliances between different state actors in Turkey –governments, physicians, religious authorities, and the military– to build, restore, and consolidate reproductive righteousness. It argues that fraternal natalism relies on a narrative of a national crisis to put forward and justify controversial policies in line with the Turkish state's reproductive imaginaries. This natalism provokes demographic anxieties about religious and ethnoracialized "others," casting them as inherently dangerous for the nation's continuity and security. Looking at these strategies through the lens of fraternal natalism exposes the continuities and disjunctures in reproductive righteousness rather than exceptionalizing particular actors and historical periods. It also reveals how religious rhetoric and constructions of race/ethnicity are mutually foundational in the formation of reproductive politics. Although the article develops the concept through a historical and discursive analysis of reproductive politics in Turkey, it can be applied to other contexts to chart the complex configurations of state actors involved in molding reproductive behaviors and population practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nixon's self-declared war on drugs has been underway for over five decades. Not all aspects are well known, and many voices of those touched by the campaign were and remain unheard. In the early 1970s, the Turkish republic faced a political crisis. The military installed a post-coup leadership that acquiesced to longstanding American demands to halt all cultivation of the opium poppy. This was the first sustained battle in Nixon's war, and it had socio-economically devastating consequences for Anatolian peasants who had for generations farmed the crop for licit and illicit markets. To many Turkish citizens, the ban was the result of a new stage in Western imperialism and a direct consequence of their own leaders' failure to protect the country's rural poor majority, on the one hand, and their surrender of national sovereignty, on the other hand. Farmers' voices were rarely heard on this issue, apart from brief quotes in newspapers and in domestic and foreign governmental studies, but their plight attracted sustained popular attention due in part to the proxy geopolitics articulated on their behalf. Before the recently disenfranchised parliament that did not permit sustained discussion or debate of the poppy question, MPs nonetheless rendered impromptu testimonies protesting the ban, its impacts on farmers, the suppression of democracy, and nation's loss of sovereignty. Through an analysis of Turkey's parliamentary record and other contemporary sources, I approach this crucial episode in the histories of intoxicants and the war on drugs. In so doing, I demonstrate the potential and seeming success of proxy geopolitics echoed on behalf of a marginalized people and why engagement with such sources is essential in the wider practice of critical geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Pilgrimage is a journey to a non-substitutable site embodying the highly valued, the deeply meaningful, or a source of core identity for the traveller. Secular pilgrimage is an important yet under-researched sector of the tourism industry. Where the motives for religious pilgrimage are well documented, little is known of the motives for secular pilgrimages. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of one case of secular pilgrimage, the journey of Australians and New Zealanders to the Gallipoli battlefields in Turkey. Five distinct motives for visits to the pilgrimage site are identified – spiritual, nationalistic, family pilgrimage, friendship and travel motives – and differences in their importance noted across seven visitor groups. These motives share some commonality with the motives for religious pilgrimage, and conversely, with the motives for leisure tourism; yet, other motives are unique to the secular pilgrimage. Suggestions for future research on secular pilgrimage are provided. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Nationalism, as a political discourse requiring a fundamental connection to a particular territory has constantly referred to maps as evidence of the eternal existence of the respective nation. In the case of modern Turkey, the national map has been a symptomatic signifier of a constant anxiety of territorial loss. Built around such anxiety, Turkish nationalism has been sensitive towards the borders defining national territory. This article analyzes the use of national maps as instruments for the cultural production of nationalism in Turkey throughout the last three decades. In the process, it is intended to differentiate between official maps produced under state authority and popular maps circulated in mass media. Throughout the 1980s, national maps included in school textbooks presented a country surrounded by hostile neighbors on all sides, in tune with the political climate of the Cold War. A crucial aspect of these official maps was the cartographic awareness they generated which, in the following decade, would become operational in the widespread use of the map as a nationalist sign. With the emergence of the Kurdish question in the 1990s, the national map became a key instrument in promoting nationalist sentiments with the invention of the flag-map logo as a favorite symbol. After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish issue was projected on to Northern Iraq, and a new mode of cartographic representation was invented. “Appropriated maps” produced through the digital retouching of random maps found on the Internet visualized irredentist desires enlarging the country’s territory especially into Northern Iraq and invoking the Ottoman past. These maps, which consciously distorted geographical information, turned to historical references to sustain their cartographic validity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The production of space always has a political dimension, from the design of buildings to the way public places, their ritual use and their users condition the performance of identities within them. This paper is an exploration of urban design, space and political subjectivity in cities in Turkey, using Ankara and Istanbul to illustrate two different but complementary strategies animating cities in Turkey as Kemalist. Although the Ottoman urban heritage of the two cities is very different, their de-Ottomanization by the Turkish Republic has been pursued in a uniform manner. The paper argues that one recent aspect of urban politics, the formation of a Kurdish diaspora in cities in Turkey, is best understood not only in relation to the general nation-building project of the Turkish Republic but more particularly in this case through the built environment that provokes it. Here the built environment encompasses not only the physical design of new spaces, buildings, forms and objects but also the fashioning of space via nationalist practice, performance and symbols. In this way the paper seeks to partially politicize phenomenological approaches to the city by re-connecting inhabitants'' use and experience of space to State power as constituted through its orchestration of space. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]