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

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

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, this paper examines the shifts in the positioning of ethnoreligious differences vis-à-vis Turkish nationalism over the past decade. Hatay was annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, 16 years after the foundation of the Turkish nation-state, and did not experience the national homogenization that characterized the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the post-WWI era. Its ensuing ethnoreligious diversity with a population composed of bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish, Christian, Alawi, and Sunni communities characterized the region’s peripheral border status until the new millennium. In this paper, I focus on two major shifts in Turkish politics which reoriented the ethnoreligious identities of these communities. First, I interrogate the short-lived turn to pluralism in mid-2000s to late-2000s when Hatay’s religious diversity gained prominence as an exemplar of Turkish Muslim tolerance. Built on the nostalgia for Ottoman cosmopolitanism against Turkey’s Republican model of nationalism, this regime celebrated the ethnoreligious difference of Hatay’s residents as long as they were identified as representable elements of the nation. I then turn my attention to the emergent ruptures in this discourse of multireligious nationalism with the outbreak of the Syrian War, Turkey’s foreign policy, and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hatay. In showing how both polities operated within and through rather than replaced the formerly hegemonic understandings of national unity, this paper reveals the constant reworking of national and ethnoreligious identities at the Middle Eastern borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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