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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]

This article studies the violent politics of stigmatisation and erasure of nationalist urban infrastructure. In general, urban infrastructure is a mechanism of state power. But, through the case of the imposing presence of Turkish nationalist infrastructure in the Kurdish city Diyarbakir, it demonstrates that when tied to an antagonistic nationalist political project, this infrastructure is often purposefully built to violently cleanse urban spaces of the national "other". Be it a statue, a mural or a picture of a nationalist leader – this infrastructure is incapable of inflicting physical pain. Nonetheless, its violence is symbolic and meant to have a real effect on Diyarbakir's Kurds' ability and willingness to identify as Kurds. That said, violence does not entirely inform the spatial experience of those targeted by this nationalist infrastructure. The article demonstrates that Kurdish residents also found ways of remaining unaffected, even treating the infrastructure laden with Turkish nationalist iconography as a reminder of their own Kurdish identity. This article thus expands our understanding of what nationalist infrastructure does. It may be designed to be violent. However, it also reveals itself to be a site of contestation – equally inspiring the persistence of the counter-narrative of the national "other". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic Turkification of the dwindling Turkish Jewish community during the period of the Republic extended to its media outlets. The Şalom newspaper, published in Turkey since 1947, changed its language from Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) to Turkish in 1984. This article takes that change as the starting point for an examination of the place of the publication within the political framework of a nationalizing secular state as well as its recent Islamification. The paper's content is reviewed through its archives and interviews with columnists. Thus, the recent history of a Jewish newspaper in a secular Muslim country has been meticulously researched and analyzed so as to unpack the relationship between language and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural imperialism thesis that emerged in late 20th century focused on inequalities in the West driven global flow of culture and communication, and how that adversely affected the cultural conditions of nations in the so called Third World. However, the core–periphery dynamic at the root of cultural imperialism has not merely been confined to the transnational level, from the West to the Rest. It has existed at the national level as well. Conducting a historical examination of state policy vis-à-vis Kurdish culture in Turkey, and drawing on the theories of cultural imperialism, internal colonialism and nationalism, I develop the concept of internal cultural imperialism to capture the state of severe center peripheral cultural imbalance that has been a product of Turkish nationalist ideology and its policies of cultural homogenization. In hegemonic condition, the state's ultimate goal has been to subjugate and/or possibly eradicate the cultures of non-core groups within its territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes social media representations of refugees in Turkey and discusses their role in shaping public opinion. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey has created heated debates about their presence and future in the country. One of these debates was triggered by President Erdoğan's statement that Turkey would issue citizenship rights to Syrians in July 2016. Due to a lack of critical voices about refugee issues in Turkey's mass media sphere, social media has become a key platform for citizens to voice their opinions. Through a discourse analysis of tweets about the issue of refugees' citizenship, I will map different perceptions of refugees in Turkey. I argue that despite contesting discourses about Syrians, the debate on social media reinforces nationalism and an ethnocentric understanding of citizenship in Turkey. As the number of refugees and migrants increases rapidly worldwide, they become the new 'others' of national imagined communities. Social media becomes a key communication space where the nation is discursively constructed in a bottom-up manner through manifestations of 'us' and 'them'. The analysis shows that social media contributes to trivialization and normalization of discrimination and hatred against Syrian refugees through disseminating overt discourses of 'Othering'. Social media also enables more covert forms of discrimination through 'rationalized' arguments that are used to justify discrimination through the basis of false/non-verified information. Thus, Twitter becomes a space for critical, bottom-up, yet nationalistic and discriminatory statements about refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For at least the past 30 years, the Kurdish question has been the most urgent agenda concern for Turkey. Denial of the Kurdish question is a state narrative and an administrative strategy in Turkey that was produced by the founders of the Republic and disseminated by its leadership using the state apparatus. However, we know very little about how denial operates within lay person accounts of the Kurdish question. Learning about the narrative forms that lay people produce in their accounts on the Kurdish question is necessary to understand the micro-level appearance of the question. Denial appears to be a foundational strategy employed by lay Kurds and Turks in different forms, through numerous arguments, and from different motivations, as evidenced in their personal accounts. This study investigates the arguments, forms, and functions of this denial in the personal accounts of lay Turks and Kurds in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the forced dislocation of immigrant Gyspy townspeople from a Turkish town, Bayramiç, Çanakkale in 1970. It focuses on the workings of social categories of Turkishness and Gypsyness through this exclusionary violent case, how they were re-employed and reproduced exclusively in conjunction with Turkish nationalism. It was the time of socio-economic transformation and rise in populist–nationalist discourses in Turkey. In the town, the reflections of this historical context demonstrated the transformation in power allocation and competing personal interests in highway transportation and forestry. Eventually, the attacks started as “Drivers’ Fight” but turned into “Gypsy hunt” with the effects of socio-economic competition and interests, the employment of historical stigma of Gypsyness and terrorization of the perpetrators in the town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012 Amsterdam Gay Pride Canal Parade hosted a Turkish Boat, organized by Dutch citizens of Turkish decent. The newspaper articles consistently emphasized what an advancement this was for the Turkish migrants, considering their ‘cultural background.’ Simultaneously, public opinion on the former immigrants from Turkey and Morocco as intolerant towards LGBTI people and how they are ‘gay bashing on the streets’ was still present. The scholarship on homonationalism and gay imperialism has been dealing with questions of Orientalism, islamophobia and racism since the 2000s. The question of agency within this scholarship, however, was not dealt with extensively. This paper will engage with this question by mapping out Dutch homonationalism and focusing on how this specific context produces historically contingent subject positions – such as gay, lesbian, Muslim, Turkish or Moroccan-Dutch – that are hierarchized within the Dutch public sphere. None of them is innocent of power or neutral, the power configurations among these subject positions lay the ground of agency upon which the subject can act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the intersections of queer sexualities and the nation online. In particular, I employ Billig’s concept of banal nationalism to investigate when and how the nation is flagged on the most popular LGBTQ websites in Poland and Turkey. The analysis focuses on both the mediation of nationhood through (re)producing the world as a world of nation and the mediation of particular nations through the coupling of queer symbolism with national symbolism. I conclude by proposing the concept of ‘domesticating the nation online’, which is a form of queering the nation via digital technology, though not to challenge hegemonic national discourses in a public debate but to make the nation more homely for queers themselves. Finally, I juxtapose the concept of banal nationalism with the US neo-imperial cultural logic to argue that domesticating the nation online plays an especially important role for queers beyond the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a peculiar case of commodification of culture under the shadow of a law serving a repressive agenda of modernist, secularist cultural politics. Fortune-telling, criminalized in the name of nationalist modernization in the early 20th century, has become popularized and commercialized in millennial Turkey in emergent businesses called fortune-telling cafés, where complimentary cup readings are provided with a cup of Turkish coffee to avoid persecution. Informed by fieldwork in fortune-telling cafés, I explicate this commodification in terms of the recent recalibration of Turkey’s national identity and culture, specifically in relation to Europe. The article analyzes the relationship between commodification of culture and cultural politics in the particular context of post-colonial nationalisms that host a strong tension between popular and national cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that in the interwar period, the Turkish government subjected Ottoman cities to various forms of spatial planning aimed at modernizing but also ethnically homogenizing them. It draws on untapped sources to portray how the regime saw this “modernization” as a panacea that would bring the country up to par with European “civilization.” In the ideological universe of the regime, a perfect society could be forged by design and coercion. As a result, the multiethnic cities of Turkey became the object of high-modernist utopias of spatial planning and urban redesign. These policies were also aimed at erasing Ottoman cities’ multiethnic pasts and crafting a “healthy” Turkish population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to explore young people’s constructions of national identity in Cyprus. The article is based on focus group discussions with 20 Greek-speaking and 20 Turkish-speaking young people between 13 and 15 years of age, drawn from two schools in the divided capital city of Nicosia. The article explores both the ways in which Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot young people understand their own identity and the degrees of their allegiance to an overarching identity as ‘Cypriot’, rather than Turkish/Greek Cypriot. The article reflects on the contradictions young people face in divided societies where there are competing discourses around national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article sets off from a discussion of some methodological and theoretical issues pertinent to the study of ideological and institutional transfer between "centre" and "periphery" in nineteenth-century Europe. While taking into account the asymmetry in radiation and reception, it probes into the (Balkan) periphery's political and cultural agency in reformulating and re-institutionalizing the "western model." Rather than simply tracing movements, flows and circulation - the conventional concern of the transnational approach - the focus is on studying the transformations which occur in the process. This makes it possible to highlight the dynamics and versatility of ideational and institutional selection, interpretation, adaptation and transformation (or subversion) - in brief, the process of re-signification of ideas and institutions. The article then proceeds by exemplifying this approach in two directions. First, it examines several main channels and agents of transfer to and within the Balkan periphery illuminative of the ways ideas, practices and institutions traveled and mutated in the course of their journey; second, it surveys several characteristic instances of transfer of liberal ideas and institutions in the Balkans focusing on their legitimization and "domestication" which underscore the semantic and functional reinterpretations of modernity and tradition in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byron has been seen as central to a Romantic vision of the Levant, the struggle for Greek independence and an idealization of Greek male love. Yet not much sustained attention has been given to Byron’s same-sex experience with Muslims or to the Ottoman culture of his beloved Greek boys. Byron grasped opportunities for same-sex erotic experience that the Ottoman Empire offered; yet by helping to establish a homogeneous Greek Christian state, he helped magnify the power of the Orthodox clergy that still acts in Greece as a brake on homoeroticism. In helping to Europeanize the Greeks, he helped destroy aspects of the Islamic world that deeply appealed to him. Byron’s Orientalism made him a bridge-builder between East and West; today we should recognize both the patriarchal despotism and the sexual and cultural wealth of the Levant he celebrated and helped destroy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediated content is indicative of greater impact of religion in the public and state sphere and of a process of de-secularization. It argues that expressions of Hinduism and Islam have become inseparable from secularist histories in the respective countries. The analysis emphasizes a necessary distinction between piety, public popular culture and political activism in the name of a national religious majority, and shows that in its appropriation and redefinition of secularism and employment of religious symbolism, Hindu nationalist mobilization and governance in India are related more closely to sacralization of secularism in historical Turkish nationalism than to the Islamic movement. In both countries, we can observe a retreat rather than a greater media presence of the pious and sacred in the face of neonationalism and commercialization, which in each case produces a democratically precarious public popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to question, on the basis of the findings of a public opinion survey conducted by the authors in February 2006, the commonsense belief in the recent rise of nationalism in Turkey. Building on a conceptual and theoretical framework that rejects the view of nationalism as a conjunctural force that waxes and wanes in particular historical moments, the article will explore how nationalism is understood by the ‘people on the street’ in order to make sense of what we would describe as the ‘continual’ appeal of nationalism in Turkey. In this context, we will argue that the ‘tidal wave approach’ to nationalism, which treats it as a force hitting on particular occasions, or as a temporary aberration, does scant justice to the pervasiveness of nationalism in contemporary societies, western or non-western, including Turkey. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘family man’, we will explore the role of family in the production and reproduction of nationalism in Turkey with a view to showing the extent to which nationalism is embedded in the fabric of society, delimiting the boundaries of responsibility and providing a template that lays down the standards of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the politics and history of Cyprus, focusing on its division between Turkish Cypriots in the North and Greek Cypriots in the South. It comments on the attempted coup d’état in 1974 that aimed to overthrow the government and annex Cyprus to Greece, and the subsequent invasion by Turkish forces. The author reflects on Cyprus' European Union (EU) membership and Turkey's prospects for EU membership. Other topics include international mediation, the prospect of reunification, and the influence of nationalism.

Recent studies have shown that the most important factor explaining opinions on European Union issues is attitudes towards immigrants. Two arguments are given to explain this effect. We contend that these arguments are both built on the idea that people with anti-immigrant attitudes frame other Europeans as an out-group. We then test the validity of these arguments by measuring how respondents in a voter survey frame the issue of Turkish membership. We find that framing the issue in terms of out-groups indeed mediates the effect of anti-immigrant attitudes on support for Turkish membership. This finding offers new insights into why levels of public support vary over different EU issues, because opposition is likely to increase when an issue is more easily framed in terms of out-groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growing literature on transnationalism documents the ways in which immigrants and refugees stay connected with their communities and countries of origin, and shows how homeland governments reach out to their former constituents. Social, financial and political ties are extended across borders. We know little, however, about the specific ways in which oppositional transnational political practices are shaped and made effective. What is more, research on transnational political practices has often limited itself to investigations of the connections between nation states. This article illustrates how transnational political practices articulate different levels of policy making (local, national, supranational) in ways that multiply the effectiveness of engagement at any one site. It will be shown that homeland political activists can effectively shape the homeland political agenda through the mobilization of immigrants' and refugees' associations and institutions in multilevel constructions of networks, constituting a space of political engagement that needs to be considered in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the idea that a centralized administrative infrastructure, a common citizenship, and the resulting national belonging run in the same direction in state transformations. Comparing two Ottoman provinces of Edirne and Ankara, the author argues that community networks influence local responses to administrative centralization and national identity formation. In the province of Edirne, dense communal networks that bridged religious and ethnic boundaries maintained local cooperation with state centralization, whereas dense relations within religious and ethnic communities contributed to the failure of the formation of Ottoman national identity. In the province of Ankara, the lack of dense relations connecting different communities prevented reform success in both administrative and ideological dimensions. [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]

This article focuses on the experiences of Konca Kuris, a veiled Turkish activist, in order to explore the meaning of feminism and the construction of the feminist subject in the non-West. I specifically argue that feminist activism gains meaning in and through interactions among different groups of women and within larger historical discourses. Through a focused analysis of 20th-century Turkish political history, I unpack the multilayered formation and reception of Kuris's experiences with respect to the nationalist trajectory of secularization, interactions among local feminist groups, and the patriarchal Islamist elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author examines the constitutional court cases that led to the dissolution of two political parties in Turkey: Halkin Emek Partisi (People's Labor Party) a leftist, pro-Kurdish party and Refah (Well-Being/Welfare Party) a center-right Islamist party. These two decisions set constitutional milestones that not only affected later similar cases, but more generally also shaped the constitutional trajectory of Turkey. The author examines these cases along three main axes: procedural foundations, substantive constructions of 'threats', and the international context. She offers an analytic approach that treats the constitution not merely as text but as a hub of multiple themes, multiple venues for action, deployed by multiple actors for multiple ends. She shows how various venues of action and interpretation respond to a larger framework consisting of an unstable thematic assortment of Kemalist ideology, international treaties and the legacy of the 1980 military intervention. By following the ways in which the court responded to such venues of interpretation, the author establishes the crucial coordinates of the intricate relation between the domains of law and politics as it has been played out on the constitutional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Cypriots before and since independence in 1960 experienced a double patriotism that contributed to the prolongation of the conflict between the two communities in their country. They identified with the island on which they lived as well as with the nation, Greece or Turkey, from which their ancestors had come. These patriotisms changed after the landing of the Turkish troops in 1974 when Cyprus was split into two distinct sections clearly based upon Turkish and Greek ethnicity. An attempt is made here to describe the resulting insecurity that played a significant role in preventing a resolution of the conflict in 1984-1985. For inductive, theoretical reasons a deliberate effort is also made to isolate ensuing "consequences" and hence to salvage old and slightly new generalizations that perhaps transcend this particular conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolution in Turkey began with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's organization of resistance movement in Anatolia after Turkey's surrender to the Allies in 1918. The Turkish revolution comprised the period of national struggle and the ensuing period of reforms which were aimed at a complete transformation of Turkish society. Kemalism represented the ideological basis of the revolution. The successful termination of the Turkish national liberation movement heralded the birth of the Third World. The scope and depth of the institutional, legal and cultural reforms of Ataturk were more conducive to nation building than those in the economic sphere. The unfinished aspects of the Turkish revolution, that is, the modernization of the socioeconomic structure, constitute the highest priority on the agenda of contemporary Turkey. Kemalism is a national ideology of modernization, and as such it continues to be. the most favoured ideology of the Turkish political elite and intelligentsia., . . Journal Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on history and popular memory. Topics discussed include urban migration in Turkey, Kurdish population in the country and Turkish nationalism. Other topics which includes democratic rule in the country, history of Turkey and Ottoman and Islamic empires in the country are also discussed.