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The process of Europeanisation initiated in Turkey following the 1999 Helsinki summit witnessed a loosening of state control over the Patriarchate of Constantinople under the government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). In parallel with the AKP's reforms geared towards EU membership, the Patriarchate's activities became more transnational in their character, especially with regards to its organisation and influence over religious affairs within the Christian world. This contribution traces change and continuity in Turkish policy towards the Patriarchate under the AKP government. Key differences between the AKP government's stance on the Patriarchate and those of its predecessors are noted, with specific reference to prospects of EU membership and the strategy that has been devised by the AKP to that end. Specifically, the contribution shows that Turkey's bid to join the EU initially presented important leverage over Turkey, allowing the Patriarchate to reassert its transnational character. However, diminished prospects of EU membership together with a gradual return of nationalist sentiment now present an important challenge for the Patriarchate in its efforts to maintain transnational character and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tells the story of the construction of Turkish national identity in the early republican era by addressing two canonical novels about occupied İstanbul: Sodom ve Gomore (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Biz İnsanlar (“We People”) by Peyami Safa. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkish nationalist intellectuals attempted to offer certain formulations and implemented various mechanisms to create a national self. The study aims to focus on the ways in which Karaosmanoğlu and Safa create the new Turkish national identity and deals with the questions of how occupied İstanbul was perceived by these intellectuals and how the memory of the Allied occupation of İstanbul, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the National Liberation Struggle shaped Turkish elites’ self-identification as well as their formulation of the national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an examination of the ‘Kurdish Students’ Hope Society’ – a youth-led Kurdish organization founded in the Ottoman imperial capital, Istanbul, in 1912. The article contends that the foundation of this organization should not be seen simply as a reaction to the gradual ethnic polarization and ‘Turkification’ of Ottoman politics that occurred in the aftermath of the 1908 ‘Young Turk Revolution’. It also needs to be understood in the context of dynamics emanating from within Kurdish society. Specifically, to the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented Kurdish elite, the Kurdish youth were setting out their own path towards national salvation which was neither conformist nor separatist. In short, they were outlining a ‘third way’ between these two extremes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conceptualising the public sphere as a form of sociability in the Sennettian sense, the paper explores the intimate connections between novel and Western forms of sociability and civility in nineteenth-century Pera - the most cosmopolitan and Westernised district of the Ottoman capital. It shows how through a distinct culture of social interaction transcending ethnic and religious lines, and a code and manner of dealing with strangers Pera stood at the juncture between the East and the West and opened up the prospects for the development of 'cosmopolitan civility' - a form of social relations between strangers, a coexistence and openness to unassimilated others. The paper argues that by attacking cosmopolitanism Turkish nationalism not only brought an end to this form of civility, but also transformed Pera by constructing it as a symbolic space falling outside the ideals and values of the 'imagined community'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of gender have an important place in studies of Turkey because the discourses of Islamism and secularism, and modernity and tradition, make the bodies and practices of Turkish women the site of debate. However, few studies have used a spatial analysis to examine the production of gender in daily life. This article is simultaneously a study of how gender is produced through space and of the creation of various kinds of spaces in an Istanbul mahalle (neighborhood). The mahalle is the space of intimate daily life in the Turkish urban context, and narratives of and ways of life in the mahalle articulate competing notions of what it means to be a woman in Turkey. This study of gender and mahalle space reveals the linkages between space and gender to be multiple and shifting and the boundaries between private and public spaces to be fluid. Furthermore, this reading of gender and urban space, when brought back to the Turkish context, also contributes to research which interrogates the idea of modernity at the core of national identity in Turkey, of which gender is a central and constitutive element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]