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The Declaration of Helsinki (DoH), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines outline the basic principles for ethical conduct and publication of human-subject research, most notably informed consent (IC) and research ethics committee (REC) approval. This retrospective observational study was a first study to investigate the quality of reporting of these protections in a selected sample of medical papers published in Turkey. A total of 573 research articles published in the official journals of six leading Turkish medical schools between January 2018 and December 2020 were searched for information on obtaining (i) REC approval, (ii) written IC from research subjects or their legal guardians/representatives, and (iii) an REC-granted IC waiver when it was found, as stated in the DoH, "impossible or impracticable to obtain consent" from research subjects. Similarly, a total of 166 case reports were searched for a statement about publication-specific IC, as was recommended by COPE. Despite a statistically significant improvement over the years, the overall rates were found to be unsatisfactory. The protections were particularly misused or underused in retrospective research, where the rates of reporting written IC (15.41% vs. 48.61%) and REC approval with date and reference number information (45.38% vs. 61.11%) were significantly lower than in prospective research (p <.05). Both the practices of seeking and granting an IC waiver when no IC was obtained were extremely rare (n = 3). It was also found that the requirement of structured ethical information in research papers was associated with higher levels of ethics compliance, and that medical publishing in Turkey needed specific improvements, including better implementation of the protections already adopted in principle, clearer instructions for authors, more rigorous editorial scrutiny, and greater commitment to rejecting substandard submissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine whether the characteristics of the audit committee impact the timely reporting represented by audit report lag (ARL), firm-based abnormal audit report lag (FAARL), and industry-based audit reports lag (IAARL). The sample of the study includes mostly hand-collected 2,284 firm-year observations obtained from Turkey's listed non-financial companies. Main regression results show that audit committee gender diversity, meeting frequency, and independence are negatively associated with timely reporting. Furthermore, additional analysis indicates the negative association between timely reporting and the audit committee effectiveness indexes created by the coexistence of the audit committee. Also, an interaction effect between audit committee independence and gender diversity concerning the timeliness of financial reporting has been documented. The use of fixed effects estimators and two-step system GMM estimator also supported the main results. This paper aims to provide concrete contribution to the literature by examining timely reporting in an emerging market like Turkey. The results suggest that regulatory bodies and companies should review the audit committee structure to better timely reporting and reduce firm and industry-based abnormal delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the liberal international order has been falling, the heteropolar order coupled with politics of uncertainty has been rising. In this context, illiberal regimes of status-seeking powers have realized the value of public diplomacy to promulgate their versions of the "reality." Those illiberal regimes' adoption of public diplomacy tools (incl. international public news agencies) has generated discussions on theoretical and practical approaches to the field at the intersection of political science/international relations, media, and communication studies. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature on public diplomacy of non-Western illiberal democracies. With the assumption that those regimes' illiberal democratic characteristics will be reflected in their public agencies' coverage styles (e.g., monologic, conflictive, and unbalanced), the article raises the following question: How do illiberal democracies utilize international public agencies as public diplomacy channels? To answer this question, it compares framing strategies (peace/war journalism) of the Russian TASS and the Turkish Anatolian Agency public agencies during the Syrian crisis. The findings reveal that those illiberal regimes' public agencies have reported the crisis as a state-centric monolog in conflict with the West by distrupting the global public good (i.e., peace). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ordinary individuals' understandings of nationhood. In so doing, it focuses on the case of Armenian migrants from Turkey to Canada and their conceptualizations of the host country. The paper captures multiple strands of nationhood and argues that these are pertinent to different boundary-making processes. The outer boundary of nationhood is defined along inclusive and civic lines where difference is recognized and appreciated. Living with difference, on the other hand, brings to the fore the tension between recognizing it on the one hand and accommodating it on the other. The case study further reveals how the exercise of state power and individuals' encounters with the state shape their understandings of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pivetti et al. (2021a; 2021b) examined links between COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and acceptance of vaccinations in Italy and Finland in 2020. They found that moral purity negatively predicted confidence in science, whereas political orientation predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs. Confidence in science, general conspiracy beliefs, and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs were found to negatively predict support for governmental restrictions and attitudes towards vaccines, and positively predict perceptions of informational contamination. Finally, attitudes towards vaccines in general strongly predicted attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine. The current research seeks to replicate these findings conceptually on a predominately Muslim sample (N = 570, M age = 26.69, 69.8% females) in Turkey in 2021, when the COVID vaccines were widely available. Measures of religiosity and left, center, and right political orientations were added to the original instrument. Hypothesized serial mediational models were tested using structural equation modelling. Results revealed that left and center political orientations positively predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs and confidence in science. Religiosity was negatively related to confidence in science. Confidence in science and COVID-related conspiracy beliefs predicted general attitudes toward vaccines. Conspiracy beliefs predicted COVID-related conspiracy beliefs, which in turn negatively predicted support for government restrictions and positively predicted distrust in mainstream media. Attitudes towards vaccines were strongly and positively related to attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines. [This paper was added to the Special Issue on "Conspiracy Theories about Infectious Diseases" in a post-hoc manner. Online publishing allows the addition of new papers to a published special issue, thereby permitting a special issue to grow.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the contextual aspects of the digital transformation of the Turkish public administration system during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the accelerating process of the digitalization of public services during the pandemic should be understood in connection with the ongoing, broader transformation of the Turkish state into the neoliberal regulatory state that has been ideologically framed as a facilitator of market-led economic development. This argument is based on the "state transformation approach" developed as an alternative analytical tool to address governance outcomes as a manifestation of neoliberally informed shifts in the location of state power, in the groups of actors that exercise state power, and in the ideas used to rationalize the exercise of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) have been carried out in over 90 countries since 1984, as interviewer administered household surveys conducted initially by paper and pencil interviews (PAPI). Computer assisted personal interviews (CAPI) were introduced in the 2004 Peru DHS, and since then numerous countries have also switched. However, DHS randomized mode comparisons have been limited. The 2018 Sixth Turkey DHS was conducted using CAPI but allocated one household from 21 in each of 754 clusters to PAPI. This analysis examines a wide range of potential differences between modes: interviewer attitudes toward modes; response rates, underreporting and misreporting of persons or events, number of selections to "check all that applies" questions, respondents' attitudes towards modes reflected by responses to sensitive questions, satisficing behavior such as age heaping, straight-line response patterns, and use of don't know options; and some operational aspects of modes such as retrospective monthly contraceptive prevalence rates, presence of others during interview, and interview length. Findings show that, despite strong interviewer CAPI preference, CAPI and PAPI were on average almost identical in terms of responses. CAPI took 11 min less (total duration of 33 min). Analysis of retrospective monthly contraception use indicated potential underreporting by CAPI for past use, an issue highlighted before in DHS literature. Overall, the switch to computer technology in DHS surveys does not appear to change estimates or levels of nonsampling errors, although some differences with respect to PAPI mode may need DHS designer attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civil-military relations literature on Turkey focuses predominantly on the guardianship role of the Turkish military, its interventions, and the role of the National Security Council as the main institutional mechanism of military tutelage. Yet, the existing studies lack a much-needed focus on the law enforcement or policing missions of the Turkish military. To fill this gap, this study discusses the EMASYA Protocol (Emniyet Asayiş Yardımlaşma or Security and Public Order Assistance), a secret protocol signed in 1997. Emerging in the context of political instability and military tutelage of the 1990s, the Protocol enabled the military to conduct internal security operations without permission from the civilian authorities. This paper argues that the EMASYA Protocol provided a sphere of "reformulated new professionalism" for the Turkish military, enabled it to specialize in the war against rising internal threats such as reactionary Islam and Kurdish separatism, and created anomalies in civil-military relations in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses novel deep learning-based language models to extract meaningful information from vast chunks of textual data from Twitter on the competing narratives of the recent Syrian immigration to Turkey. Our analysis identifies five main topics in the framing of Syrian immigration in Turkish Twittersphere. In this paper, we demonstrate correlational links between the timing of landmark events and change in the percent share of trends in those topics across time. We highlight two important observations: (a) Social benefit demands of natives on Twitter rose sharply with the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to ever more widespread sentiments of welfare chauvinism and (b) Patriotic feelings and the implementation of an interventionist foreign policy agenda in the immigrants' country of origin created a relatively tolerant yet patronizing attitude towards migrants. As the COVID-19 pandemic and immigration frequently occupy the center stage in politics of immigrant-hosting societies, our research has international appeal beyond its specific geographical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as one of the largest TV program exporters worldwide. However, Turkish television is still largely national in its production practices and content, and thus, highly vulnerable to the domestic political landscape and media regulations of the government. In the last two decades, rather than endorsing the independent growth of this emerging industry in the international markets, the Turkish government has erected barriers by tightening censorship and passing new regulations to control national television and its content production. The AKP government deployed various state apparatuses, including Turkey's public broadcasting channel (TRT), English language news channel (TRT World), and the regulatory agency Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to foster the type of television content that can ideologically serve the AKP's conservative and neo-Ottomanist agendas. Drawing on the political economy of media and through critical analysis, this paper analyzes how these state mechanisms are used to instrumentalize TV exports and media institutions in service of President Erdoğan's cultural, economic, and foreign policy agendas within the country and abroad. By investigating the tension between the state's ideological project and the regional, transnational, and global mediasphere, our work sheds light on how the implementation of the government's new media and cultural policies, top-down directives and pressures from the state and government on both the TV industry and its audience, and South-to-South cultural flows have shaped the Turkish TV industry and its content in the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares self-reported and spouse-reported frequencies of various types of behaviors couples use in marital conflict using data from Turkish Family Structure Survey (2016), which included 9,636 couples. Existing literature reported low levels of agreement among couples. These studies measured between-reporter agreement levels among couples with linear models which report cumulative scores. However, we hypothesized that low levels of agreement reported in the literature might be due to nonlinear patterns in the self-reported and spouse-reported frequencies. To detect such nonlinear patterns, we compared self-reported and spouse-reported frequencies for each level (frequency) of using the types of conflict behavior styles we investigated. This allowed us to explore the patterns of agreement or disagreement at the low, medium, or high levels of using these conflict style behaviors. Findings of this study confirmed our hypothesizes. There are meaningful nonlinear patterns that are not detectable with cumulative comparative scores. There are also differences in these patterns across the types of conflict behaviors we looked at. For example, the nonlinear patterns we observed for aggressive conflict behavior types are different from the patterns for passive conflict behavior types. We also found that these patterns are different for husbands and wives. This paper highlights the limited capacity of linear models for exploring between-reporter agreement levels and it calls for the consideration of using nonlinear methods for these types of systematic investigation. The major limitation is the lack of analysis on the effect of sociodemographic factors on the observed discrepancies other than gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that biopolitical infrastructures have been central features of Turkey's ongoing colonization of Kurdish territories and populations and that the Green Revolution, despite its promise of progress and abundance, needs to be understood as part of this history of racialized state-making. In doing so, it joins recent literature that uncovers the local roots of the Green Revolution in domestic politics and land struggles in the global south, also revealing the entwined histories of accumulation and colonial and racial dispossession with agricultural norms and practices. Drawing on research in the records of the Economic Cooperation Administration, US Agency for International Development, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Turkish parliamentary debates, and contemporaneous journals, I show how the Green Revolution can in fact be retold as an episode in a longer history of struggles over the distribution and use of land, the construction of agricultural infrastructures, and how these questions have been complicated by class, ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions. The paper thus situates Turkey in a transnational history of agrarian development, while also relating the adoption of high yield seeds, pesticides, and grain cultivation to projects of land consolidation, internal colonialism, and racialized methods of state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the Triangular Development Cooperation (TDC) in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is foreseeable or not between the EU and Turkey. In doing so, we first built a new and original framework based upon five independent variables as follows: (1) foreign policy interests and strategic areas in the recipient country; (2) Convergence of development policy modalities and practices; (3) level of interdependence between DAC-donor and southern provider; (4) friendly relations and share of norms and values between the development cooperation providers and (5) African leaders' perception about the added value of the TDC. Second, we tested these five variables in our case studies to determine the TDC's likelihood level between the EU and Turkey in the SSA by using three indicators as follows: positive, negative or partially positive. In this vein, it first profiles Turkey's and the EU's position as development aid providers in the SSA to highlight their specificities. Then, it examines the TDC's main features, strengths and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study examines the spatial abilities of middle school students with visual impairments (i.e., blindness and low vision) in the context of spatial visualization. The study also aims to examine the strategies used by such students in solving questions requiring spatial ability. Methods: Participants comprised eight students with visual impairments attending the 8th grade of a school in Ankara, Turkey, which teaches students with visual impairments. The data collection tool is composed of eight questions under the guidance of the definition for spatial visualization. Question types belonging to the spatial visualization subcomponent were organized in four topics: 2D rotation, 3D rotation, paper folding, and cube folding. Results: It was observed that students with visual impairments used mental rotation and key feature strategies for 2D rotation questions. They used the key feature strategy for 3D rotation questions and the mental manipulation strategy for cube folding and paper folding questions. Discussion: In this study, it was identified that strategies used by students with visual impairments show similarities with spatial strategies defined in the literature as used by students without visual impairments. Of all the other types of questions, the most successful question of students with visual impairments is the paper folding question. Implications for practitioners: The results of this article can help teachers become aware of the kind of difficulties that students with visual impairments encounter when they try to solve questions that require spatial ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are women's murders (femicide) more common in some localities than in others? This paper addresses this question in the context of Turkey, a country with a high and rising number of women's murders. It uses province-level data between 2010-2017 and the Negative-Binomial estimator to explore the importance of several socio-economic, cultural, and political factors. It finds that a province's ethnic composition, divorce rate, gender equality in education, and level of economic development are significant predictors of women's murders. The main result is that whether economic development reduces femicide depends on other factors: in poorer provinces, there is a strong positive correlation between women's murders and equality in education and divorce rates, but in richer provinces, these associations are significantly weaker. These results are consistent with the idea that economic development may not reduce women's murders by itself, but it can mitigate the effects of male backlash against women who challenge the status quo. The main policy implication of this study is that pro-development policies may save more lives if they target those poorer provinces that also carry these additional risk factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper aims to study the social-psychological factors that would play roles in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. Specifically, we examined whether national and global identifications and the leaders whom people think being in charge of managing the COVID-19 pandemic on a national scale could explain people's acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccines developed by different countries. We proposed a model in which people's assessment of the leader in terms of identity-leadership mediates the relationship between different identification types (i.e., global and national) and acceptance of Western, Asian or national vaccines. The model was tested on self-reported data collected in Turkey (N = 694) utilizing Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in R software. The results revealed that national identification positively predicted acceptance of national vaccines and negatively predicted acceptance of Western vaccines; both of the relationships were also mediated by people's assessments of the leader in terms of identity-leadership dimensions. On the other side, global identification positively predicted acceptance of Western vaccines. The implications of the findings were discussed in terms of their practical contributions along with their theoretical relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited research has been conducted on migrants' decision making factors in transit and this is an important area of investigation that goes beyond the origin-destination country dichotomy most commonly represented in migrant decision making. This paper examines the decision making factors for onwards migration or stay of migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria in Greece and Turkey. This paper is based on a unique dataset of surveys collected with 1056 migrants in Athens and Istanbul from May- July 2015. The decision for onwards migration or stay is examined through a probit regression analysis. Four categories of influencing variables are discussed: the country of origin, current conditions in the transit country, the initial migration destination choice and previous onwards migration attempts. The results demonstrate that first; the majority of respondents in both countries seek to migrate onwards (75% in Greece and 63% in Turkey) and that conditions in the transit country are highly significant in influencing onwards migrate decisions including their current subjective living conditions, employment, experiences of abuse, and speaking the local language. This paper contextualizes the findings and highlight the complexity of factors influencing migrants' decision making in Greece and Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypermasculine hegemonic masculinities have become the norm to dominate the foreign policies all around the world. As the populist foreign-policy visions, the byproducts of androcentric norm-creation, undermine the established rules for peace, diplomacy and co-existence in the international system, other experiences have faded away from the narratives that have defined and contributed to foreign policies. The accelerating urgency of the national security agendas of the hypermasculine states seek to cancel feminist definitions, practices and theories for the sake of physical force and state control. Nevertheless, more than any other period in history, it is these conflicting times that necessitate Cynthia Enloe's 'curious feminist' questions the most. Turkish foreign policy of the last decade has become a quintessential example of hypermasculine hegemonic masculinity, especially within the context of the S-400 crisis with the US, NATO and Russia; its feminist critics are distressingly rare. This paper aims to offer an alternative reading of Turkey's S-400 saga from a feminist perspective to contribute a Turkish case to feminist International Relations. First a definition of feminist International Relations will be provided. Then, the hypermasculine character of the Turkish hegemonic masculinity and its reflection on the current Turkish foreign policy will be analyzed. Lastly, the S-400 crisis of Turkey's decision to buy Russian defense missiles as a NATO member will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing economic and political roles of the so-called emerging powers in sub-Saharan Africa have attracted particular attention following the apparent decline of Western powers in the face of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. The AKP's "proactive" foreign policy has manifested Turkey's burgeoning role in the region. This paper draws upon Marxism to explore the diffusion of Turkish capital and the enhancement of military relations in the region in harmony and in contradistinction with Western and Gulf countries. It discusses the AKP's proactive foreign policy vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africa as a particular sociohistorical form of sub-imperialism that is characterized by and reproduces economic and geopolitical rivalries and alliances among Turkey and Western and Gulf countries. JEL Classification: F5, P1, O1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mausoleum of Halikarnassos (modern Bodrum, Turkey) is one of the wonders of the ancient world, although little remains above ground to give visitors a sense of its original grandeur. While previous scholarship has studied the Mausoleum's place within the canon of classical Greek art, this paper identifies specifically local perceptions of the monument through interviews with residents of Bodrum, exploring how different images, values and futures are projected onto the archaeological site, in conversation with both national and local discourses of the past. The responses of local inhabitants, living in an Aegean town dramatically transformed by mass tourism, urbanisation and migration, encompass being underwhelmed, pragmatically interested in the monument's economic potential, or proud of its status, fuelled by the local discourses of "Blue Anatolianism" and "Karianism". We argue that these influential discourses allow different heritage actors to turn the Mausoleum into a specific kind of locally rooted "heritage capital" and to negotiate a distinctive identity for the monument's otherwise ambiguous position within the landscape of Turkish national heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel integrated multi-criteria decision-making model consists of the CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) technique and the EDAS (The Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution) method to evaluate the selection of the urban rail vehicles operated in the public transport systems. In order to determine the selection criteria in a more realistic perspective, a board of experts consists of seven members, who perform as senior executives in the public transport institutions of the country, was constructed and many round tables meetings were organized with together the members of the board for determining the procedure to follow to reach meaningful and applicable results. At the beginning of the research, approximately fifty selection criteria were determined by the research team and some of them were eliminated during the preparation process of this study. Finally, 22 factors were determined as the selection criteria, which will be used in this research. These factors are the selection criteria directly or indirectly affecting the selection process and results. Also, rail tram types currently operated in the various cities of Turkey were determined as decision alternatives. These options were evaluated by using the proposed integrated MCDM approach. When the obtained results are evaluated, it can be seen that the proposed model has the potential to give very successful results for evaluating the selection process of the urban rail systems. Moreover, it can be implemented as a decision support system by decision-makers, who perform in the public transport authorities. Finally, it can also be applied for decision-making problems faced in the various fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea that young children’s emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali- and Turkish-speaking three- and four-year-olds learning English in their first year of school. Using neo-Vygotskian activity theory as a guide, this paper examines the children’s classroom literacy practices, particularly around writing and the alphabet, in order to understand, first, how literacy functioned as a socially embedded activity for these students (sometimes in ways that contrasted with the official literacy practices of the classroom), and second, how that activity facilitated students’ interaction across language backgrounds. Finally, this paper offers a genetic analysis, or an analysis across time, of how students’ interactions with multimodal composing functioned as contexts for emergent bilinguals’ oral language development, and in particular, vocabulary acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent anthropological scholarship on Islam has tended to carve out the 'everyday' as a space of Muslim life that has the potential to escape the normativity of religious discourses. In this paper, I discuss how the special issue edited by Di Puppo and Schmoller critically engages these debates by first moving the lens of attention from the religious to the 'secular' sphere as the source of normative discourse. The essays collected in the special issue focus indeed on the state's and lay officials' discourses in post-Soviet, self-declared secular Russia as the normative framework that defines much of the commitment and self-understanding of Muslims in the region. But the special issue does more. It also shows that far from remaining stalled in their own respective domains, normative discourses and 'daily practices' intertwine profoundly, as Muslims navigate through the normative dichotomies that are imposed on them by national and supranational global discourses. In the process, Muslims in post-Soviet Russia are able to bend these denominations to their needs, as they struggle to see legitimised their status of citizens belonging to a minority religious confession. In this vein, I conclude by suggesting that rather than reproducing static oppositions between the levels of discourse and that of practice, it is to the mutual interactions between the two and to the alternative possibilities that are disclosed by Muslim life within and without overdetermined limits that we have to turn when investigating the multiplicity and diversity of Islam in Post-Soviet Russia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of the 2008 employment package on the gender employment gap in Turkey. The package introduced subsidies for the employment of women in all 81 provinces. However, positive discrimination was only effective in the provinces that did not benefit from social security contribution cuts under a previous subsidy scheme. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, I find that those provinces saw a 5.1 percent higher increase in the female share of employment in comparison with provinces where positive discrimination was not in force. Moreover, the effectiveness of the package is not lower in more conservative provinces, where conservatism is measured by the percentage of early marriages, gender inequality, and gender empowerment indices. The study concludes that the 2008 employment package was successful in closing the gender gap, even in more conservative provinces. By showing that a demand-side intervention can overcome the cultural constraints, it offers valuable insights to policy-makers interested in pursuing policies related to disadvantaged groups, particularly women. JEL Classification: C31, J08, J21, Z10 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the factory regime in the 'Sun'1 food processing factory in Turkey, drawing on participant observation in the factory, informal interviews with women workers and in-depth interviews with the managers of the factory's 'gherkin department' in which I worked. This paper argues that the 'Sun' bottling and canning factory is best understood through my concept of the 'familial factory regime'. By 'familial factory regime' I mean a factory regime in which the features of the extended patriarchal family are used to manage the labour force by obtaining women workers' consent. Indeed, the paper suggests that there is a tendency for patriarchy to be reconstituted in the workplace through the presence of a familial factory regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper narrates the story of large-scale, nation-wide intervention for participatory constitution making in Turkey. The process of democratic involvement in the making of Turkey’s new Constitution has been an action research engagement since 2007 for the authors of this paper. In due process, a deliberative democracy-inspired large-scale conferencing, i.e., the Polling Conference [Tarama Konferansı], was designed. Ordinary, unaffiliated citizens and local nongovernmental organization (NGO) members participated in the constitution-making process via attending these conferences across the nation. Reflecting upon Turkey’s first participatory constitution-making initiative and our intervention, we came to develop certain emergent themes, decisions and actions necessary for the successful realization of large-scale action research in polarized political contexts. These themes range from the establishment of a convening body and legitimate links to decision making and society, to the industrious preparation of a social-ecology on local and national levels. Our intervention is thoroughly embedded in the Turkish context; nevertheless, we came to develop a thematic approach that could set an example to nation-wide participatory initiatives in similar democratic trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece-Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories--ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling territory and imposing practices of death towards governmental powers managing population mainly through pastoral, productive, and deterritorialized techniques, the case of the Greece-Turkey borderzones demonstrates that biopolitics operates through sovereign territorial controls and surveillance, practices of death and exclusion, and suspension of rights. This study also highlights the fact that, despite the biopolitical realities, migrants continue to cross the borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hımışstructures have hardly ever found as extensive a role as other traditional timber housing, such as those originating from Japan or Central Europe, within the wide discourse on the seismic performance of timber-frame architecture that has gained significant momentum in the last few decades owing to advancing testing technologies. While thehımışconstruction technique was perhaps not born as a result of a conscious search for a seismically resistant building form, it was soon widely appreciated for its structural features advantageous under seismic loading - especially from the sixteenth century when it has become a well-established construction technique in part of the Balkans and in today’s Turkey. Despite widely available anecdotal information based on post-disaster studies regarding its performance under earthquakes, robust quantitative data on the seismic behaviour of these structures were practically non-existent until quite recently, and are still somewhat limited. However, we are now able to confirm thathımışconstructions do have intrinsic qualities that are very beneficial under seismic action. This paper aims to make a brief review of the current state of our knowledge on structural performance ofhımışbuildings under earthquake loading, with specific emphasis on infill/cladding techniques, connection details and energy dissipation characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper compares the prevalence and development of consanguineous marriages between Turkish migrants in Western Europe and stayers from the same regions of origin in Turkey. Analyses draw from three-generational family data of the 2000 Families study. Findings suggest a decline of kin marriage over generations and time in both groups, but a higher prevalence of kin marriage among migrants. Parental impact was influential, but effects of transmission were lower among migrants. Kin marriage was strongly linked with cross-border partner choice. The results support previous findings and indicate the specific effect of migration on seemingly traditional patterns of marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of some of the land ownership consolidation programmes that have been attempted in a number of countries, and examines in more detail the present situation in Turkey. Much of the rural land in Turkey is fragmented, and the structural problems created by co-ownership of small properties will probably influence the viability of future farming in the country. This paper identifies the attitudes of co-owner farmers to the disposal of their own share to one of their heirs when that share's value is paid at the current market value of the land. Ninety farmers who owned their landholdings were interviewed. Answers to the survey questions were analysed with a logit model, and the maximum likelihood method was employed to estimate the model. The results indicate that a farmer's level of education and acceptance of the trend towards the disposal of an owned shared parcel to a third person are positively related to the likelihood that the farmer will choose to pass on the shared parcel of land to an heir. This is true provided that the share value the farmer is likely to recover is the current market value of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines shifts in value chain governance and upgrading in the automotive component production node of Bursa in Turkey. Component suppliers in Bursa have gained design and product-development competences, one result of which is that European and global firms have turned to the creation of modular value chains for the sourcing of components from these suppliers. This paper considers the implications of the insertion of Turkish suppliers into modular value chains on suppliers' upgrading, and reveals that, despite the diffusion of design and product-development competences to suppliers in Bursa, cutting-edge innovation activities such as marketing and branding continue to remain the domain of the lead firms. It is argued that although Turkish suppliers seem to be successful in upgrading to take on design and product-development tasks, this has been more due to the willingness of global lead firms to relinquish these functions than to the success of Turkish suppliers in encroaching upon these once core competences of their customers. It is concluded that power asymmetries in global automotive value chains continue to exist, and that lead firms continue to have a major influence on the type of upgrading strategies that are open to their suppliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins as an investigation of the spatiality of the state in Turkey. In everyday life the state is experienced and recognized through a multiplicity of sites, agents, institutions, techniques, and regulatory capacities. Given this fragmentation, I ask how it is that the state is conceptualized as having a reality beyond its incoherence. Through a discursive analysis of focus-group discussions with lower-class and lower-middle-class men and women in Istanbul, I trace the spatial-temporal techniques through which state power is enacted. I argue that this power operates through referral and deferral, circulation and arrest; it is the power both to set in motion and to suspend the circulation of people, documents, money, and influence that marks out the space-time of the state. Further, my reading of focus-group texts suggests that it is through the operation of the space-time of the state that individuals both submit to state power and become subjects of rights—that is, citizens. At once establishing the authority of the state and the self-recognition of the subject, the Althusserian turn towards the law is a gesture of conscience or guilt. However, I argue that not all subjects are equally guilty in their imagined relationship to the state, some are more guilty than others, and, in this inequality, difference enters into the process of subjection. Focus-group participants discuss how acts such as showing identity cards or performing labor function both to assert their innocence and to mark them as guilty. By tracing out how spatial techniques of power and processes of subjection are discussed among particular groups of people in Istanbul, I hope to speak in an alternative voice to the usual top-down narration of the Turkish 'strong state'. Finally, this paper is an attempt to wrap an argument around the secret of the state, around the desire, despair, and guilt that infuse the relational production of citizen and state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival, and subsequent longevity, of the military in politics in much of the Middle East over the last 50 years or so has elicited considerable attention. This is, perhaps, particularly so in Turkey, where, since 1909, there has been only 10 years in which a fully civilian administration has governed. Recently, the collapse of the Kurdish Workers Party and the beginning of a process of constitutional amendment aimed at meeting EU accession criteria has sharpened the controversy over the role of the military in the Turkish polity. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by analysing the methods through which military rule has been perpetuated since the Second World War. Using the work of the sociologists Eric Nordlinger and Michael Mann, I argue that two succinct regime strategies are discernible. The first – semi-authoritarian incorporation– was deployed throughout Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. Following the 1980 coup, however, it existed alongside a second method – autocratic militarism– which emerged in south-east Anatolia. Thus, the primary purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation for the structure of these strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2001 in Turkey has been marked by a destructive economic crisis. This paper argues that the crisis can neither be explained solely by the coincidence of independent events nor by technical problems of economic policies. The increased fragility of the system after the implementation of an IMF-directed “disinflation and stabilization” program paved the way for the collapse of both the program itself and the economy. Insistence on these types of policies will only worsen the conditions, and results of the policies are both economically and socially undesirable. This paper proposes alternative policies and tools, which will provide improvements in growth, employment, and income distribution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A price reform in Turkey increased the residential electricity tariff by more than 50 percent in 2008. The reform, aimed at encouraging energy efficiency and private investment, sparked considerable policy debate about its potential impact on household welfare. This paper estimates a short-run residential electricity demand function to evaluate the distributional impact of the tariff increase. The analysis allows heterogeneity in households' price sensitivity and the model is estimated using a nationally representative sample of 8,572 Turkish households. The results suggest that rich households in Turkey are three times as responsive in adjusting consumption to price changes as poor households are. In addition, the welfare loss of the poorest income quintile--measured by the change in consumer surplus as a percentage of income--is 2.9 times that of the wealthiest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed flre-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in flrefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the divergent fire-suppression strategies in California and Turkey are linked to two different types of rent-seeking behavior. Developers and landed interest seek absolute rent in Turkey and differential rent in California. The decentralized strategy in California allows property prices to be distinguished between areas of low and high protection, and commodifies safety as a form of investment regulating the market prices of land. In Turkey, the tendency toward centralization of firefighting is a part of the composite political strategy to open new land for development by completing the hitherto unfinished cadastral records of the WUIs. Thus, the centralized firefighting strategy leads indirectly to extensive commodification of the WUIs in Turkey and expands the national land market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work will examine the juxtaposition between political and novelistic intentions that distinguish Orhan Pamuk’s treatment of secularism. While Pamuk’s work can be read as a fierce critique of state-imposed secularism in Turkey, he is simultaneously a great champion of a liberal secularist ideology, on which his texts are based even as they claim to be dialogic and polyphonic. This paper will set out the ways in which Pamuk frames the competing political claims of secularism and Islam – key issues on a global scale as well as in Turkish politics – in order to decipher its implications for the contemporary world and the future.Given Pamuk’s status as a global writer, it is essential that his texts are analysed for their ideological underpinnings, so that any conclusions drawn from them are problematized and seen in a broader context. By analysing Snow, along with a selection of Pamuk’s other novels and writings, this article will explore Pamuk’s view of secularism generally, and specifically its function in Turkish society, and in doing so will draw out the tensions in his case for liberal secularism. In order to do this, it will draw upon some recent critical scholarship on secularism including Ziaudddin Sardar, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and T. N. Madan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The determination of technical efficiency for cotton farms can be invaluable in estimating optimum farming practices and in identifying strategic options for the industry. This paper investigates the productive efficiency of a sample of farmers in Turkey's Aegean region by estimating a stochastic frontier production function (SFA), constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS) using output-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA). Data were obtained from 198 cotton farms using structured questionnaire interviews. The estimates of technical efficiency based on these two frontier methods were compared. While efficiency scores for cotton farms differed between the SFA and the DEA models, the mean efficiency scores are quite low for the CRS DEA model compared with the VRS DEA and SFA approaches. The mean efficiency measure (0.91) obtained from the stochastic frontier was higher than that calculated from the VRS DEA (0.77) and CRS DEA (0.25). This study suggests that more efficient political instruments need to be adopted to review current subsidies because of increasing outlays for diesel oil used in cotton farming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its ever-present and at times escalating significance, conspiracy theory is an under-researched topic in the social sciences. This paper analyses the political influence of conspiracy theories by drawing on semi-structured interviews with the representatives of four major political parties from the Turkish parliament about widespread anti- Semitic conspiracy theories regarding Dönmes (converts). The findings indicate that right-wing political parties problematize the secret character of the Dönme community and use the conspiracy theories to express their own ontological insecurities emerging from the Sèvres syndrome. Left-wing and liberal parties conversely dissociate themselves from the conspiratorial rhetoric. The research concludes that the political parties reject or accept the conspiracy theories rationally and in alignment with their own ontological insecurities; by doing so, they pragmatically confirm their individual ideological perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 Eurocorr meeting was held at the Sheraton Maslak hotel in Istanbul from 9-13th September 2012. The focus of the meeting was 'Safer world through better corrosion control'. The meeting attracted over 650 delegates and over 360 papers and 125 posters were presented during the 27 sessions and workshops. Parts 1-5 will review the technical sessions over five issues with the opening and plenary lectures and technical sessions on corrosion and scale inhibition, corrosion by hot gases and combustion products and metallic, inorganic, and organic coatings covered in this report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to provide a critical realist analysis of the concept of ‘strategic debth’ recently being used in analysing Turkish foreign policy. The article provides a criticism of the realist geopolitical thinking on which the concept of strategic debth is based using the insights of the critical realist philosophy of science. It takes the concept of ontological debth from critical realism and extends it to Gramsci’s analysis and develops the concept of hegemonic debth. Underlying the concept of hegemonic debth is the idea that geopolitical relations should be thought of in connection with the social structures that give rise to them. The article is intended as a contribution to a historical materialist analysis of Turkish foreign policy where a state-centric positivism dominates, as well as an attempt to develop a social theory of foreign policy based on critical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although ingestion of methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (MEKP) is rare, it carries a high risk of morbidity and mortality. This paper reports the first such case from Turkey in which a 70-year-old man unintentionally ingested MEKP in his kitchen. The patient was brought into the emergency department (ED) within 1 hour of ingestion, with the symptoms of sore throat, shortness of breath, nausea and vomiting. Visual examination of the oropharynx revealed minor burns and uvular edema. A laryngoscope examination performed in the ED showed superficial mucosal injury with edema of the oropharynx, uvula, posterior pharynx, epiglottis, arytenoids and vocal cords. Lateral cervical radiography revealed a narrowing of airway due to a thickened epiglottis. After the diagnostic evaluation was completed, the patient was admitted to the gastroenterology intensive care unit for monitoring of adverse reactions. During follow-up, the patient made an uneventful recovery. Ingestion of MEKP generally results from accidental ingestion from a container. Therefore, these containers should be kept in safe places. In addition, the priority following the ingestion of MEKP should be given to maintain open and adequate airway in the ED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number and importance of women in family businesses have increased in the recent years. This is reflected in the growing academic and practitioner interest in the topic. In this paper, we have explored the role of women in family business in the context of Turkey by examining the key drivers for their active involvement, their contribution and the challenges they face. The conceptual framework of the article presents key drivers and challenges identified in the extant literature and introduces additional angles on the problematisation of the topic, mainly issues of succession, conflict and balance of work-life relationships. Drawing on empirical material collected through semi-structured interviews with participant Turkish women, we have highlighted importance of cultural dynamics in analysing drivers, contributions and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper compares several generational groups of Turkish children in Germany with respect to cognitive skills and German language skills at an early age. Empirically, children of inter-marriages outperform the other groups of Turkish children in both tests while children with a first generation mother and a second generation father score worse than all others. All group differences regarding children's cognitive skills can be explained by the families' socio-economic status and educational resources. In contrast, with respect to children's language skills also parents' endowment with receiving country specific resources ( e.g., parental German language proficiency) needs to be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the distributional consequences of financial crises based on the lessons of the past crises experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and Turkey. It identifies the possible channels through which crises may affect functional and personal distribution of income. It concludes that the crises of the last two decades have both pro-capital and pro-finance distributional outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transition to a first union of descendants of Turkish immigrants in France. We use data from the project The Integration of the European Second Generation, 2007, and apply event-history techniques. We find that descendants of Turkish immigrants who grew up in France enter a first union earlier and more often in a direct marriage than do young adults without an immigrant background. We then describe the type of union in more detail and estimate the likelihood of a transnational partner choice, that is, between a young adult born in France of Turkish immigrant parentage and an immigrant from Turkey. We pay attention to social factors such as education, city of residence, and to cultural factors such as the rules of affinity in Turkey and the attachment to the norm of virginity at marriage as factors that orient partner choice. Finally, we discuss what anthropological methods could contribute to this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of the deconvolved stochastic seismic excitation on the nonlinear response of dam-foundation interaction systems is investigated in this paper using the equivalent linear method. For this purpose, three different earthquake input mechanisms are used: the standard-rigid-base input model, the massless-foundation input model and the deconvolved-base-rock input model. The spatial variability of ground motion including the incoherence and wave-passage effects are taken into account in the analyses. The Izmit earthquake in 1999 is selected as sample ground motion. Two-dimensional interface finite elements are used between the dam-soil deposit and the asphalt face and also between the foundation-soil deposit and the cutoff wall. The mean of the absolute maximum displacement and stress values obtained from the three earthquake input models are compared with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the prospect of Turkey's EU membership as presented in two influential British newspapers and their Sunday editions (The Guardian/Observer and The Times/Sunday Times) during the eventful period of 2002-5, when Turkey's expectations of setting a date for the start of accession talks overlapped with the establishment in Turkey of a single party government with roots in political Islam, the preparatory phase of the EU constitution, and the terrorist attacks on British targets in Istanbul. The particular aim is to find out how the enthusiastic support of the British government for Turkey's EU membership was reflected and evaluated in the press, and what particular arguments (pragmatic, moral and ethical-political) were put forward either for or against. A discourse analysis of the papers' regular columnists and news correspondents suggests that although The Guardian/Observer and The Times/Sunday Times do not hold radically different views on the issue, and are close to the British government's pro-Turkish stance, they differ in their degree of support for Turkey's EU membership and the rationale they deploy to support their respective positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the spatial strategies used to achieve national integration in the formative years (1923 -45) of the Turkish Republic. During this critical period, despite a severe shortage of human and material resources, Turkey's leaders undertook ambitious infrastructural projects, including the construction of roads, railroads, bridges, institutional buildings, and the implementation of uniform urban plans, which were meant to transform the face of the country. These projects generated webs of uniform and centralized services, which enabled the state to assume a more active role in shaping the daily life of its citizens. Crucially, they also forged a standard recognizable material culture throughout Turkey. I argue that this extensive tangible scaffolding of public works, which introduced new types of spaces and practices, reworked the rhythms and routines of daily life, and created new networks of accessibility across the country, was instrumental for cultivating people's ability to relate the local with a larger national geography, thus rendering the nation an imaginable community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss two distinct sets of advantages which have helped Turkey to become the world's second-largest clothing exporter: the competency-related advantages of the last decade; and the trade-and-currency-related advantages of the earlier decades. In the late 1980s and 1990s, some fortunate developments in the international currency markets, together with an unofficial trade with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulted in windfall trade gains for Turkey. During the last decade, a shift in the culture of fashion, from ready-to-wear to fast fashion pushed Turkish suppliers to upgrade into higher value-added activities such as design. While our focus is on the latter advantage, we point out that both sets of advantages have a commonality: namely, a sustainability problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]