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Although Ziya Gökalp was one of the most important intellectuals to shape Turkish nationalism, scholarship has not systematically examined the links between his sociological perspective and nationalism. This study shows how Gökalp’s culture‒civilization theory, predominantly adapted from Emile Durkheim’s sociological perspective, provides a basis for his Turkish nationalism. Gökalp developed two central premises in line with Durkheimian sociology: (a) civilization is dependent on cultural unity; and (b) religion is the root of culture. Via the culture‒civilization duality, Gökalp constructed a Turkish nationalism that excluded non-Muslim and non-Sunni minorities. This article not only provides a comprehensive account of the roots of Turkish nationalism but also posits a fresh perspective on Gökalp’s trinity of Turkification, Islamization and modernization. In so doing, it underlines Durkheim’s indirect impact on the foundations of Turkish nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current study, conducted in Turkey, examined feelings toward Muslim refugees among Turkish participants (n = 605) in comparison to feelings toward established non‐Muslim national minority groups. Using the social identity perspective, these feelings were examined in relation to national and religious group identifications, and the endorsement of multicultural beliefs. The feelings toward both refugees and minority communities were similarly negative, yet the processes behind these feelings were somewhat different. While stronger national identification was associated with more negative feelings toward Muslim refugees, stronger religious group identification was associated with more negative feelings toward non‐Muslim minority communities. Further, higher endorsement of multiculturalism was associated with less negative feelings toward both refugees and minority communities, but only for relatively low national identifiers. [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]

Turkish nationalism has long presented a study in contrasts. The nationalist movement that created the Republic of Turkey sought to define the nation in explicitly civic and inclusive terms, promoting a variety of integrationist reforms. Those same nationalist politicians, however, endorsed other policies that were far more exclusionary, expelling many religious and ethnic minorities from the new nation and imposing harsh restrictions on those who remained. The seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies has been mirrored by much of the scholarship on Turkish nationalism, which has often viewed Turkish nationality through the lens of the “civic/ethnic divide,” with various scholars arguing that the Turkish nation is exclusively civic or ethnic. This article seeks to transcend this dichotomous way of looking at Turkish nationalism. I argue that the policies previously seen as being exclusively civic or ethnic are in fact both examples of boundary-making processes, designed to forge a cohesive nationalist community. Seen through a boundary-making perspective, the seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies in its early years is not paradoxical at all, but represents a multidimensional effort to construct a cohesive national community that could replace the defunct Ottoman state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses diplomatic tourism during the Cold War and the gendered performance of Turkish national identity in the U.S. It discusses the important role of the Tarsus ocean cruise, which Turkish filmmaker Sabahat Filmer embarked on, as an example of diplomatic tourism. It also discusses the significant role of the travelers in the public negotiations to determine Turkey's place in the Cold War and its relations with the U.S.

What are the roles of history and memory in geopolitics? How does urban experience influence geopolitical understandings of one's place in the world? This article brings these questions to a study of how Ottoman Turkish citizens of Istanbul came to link ethnicity with nationalism and to view their Greek Orthodox neighbors as national betrayers. I propose an explicitly cultural geopolitics: an affective, embodied critical geopolitics contextually dependent on experience, encounter, and memory in place. My sources are postwar Ottoman humor gazettes published in Istanbul, the waning capital of the Ottoman Empire, while it was occupied by Allied forces immediately after World War I. The future sovereignty of the city was unknown, and there was no coherent state structure. As normative (and also subversive) popular media, humor gazettes illustrate the reverberation of postwar geopolitics with the lived and remembered processes of urban place. Ethno-nationalist Turkish belonging in Istanbul was a form of urbanism, composed of place-based norms for behavior and a commonly understood cultural geography of the city. Satirical depictions of urban Turkish and Greek encounters during the armistice era betray a Turkish anxiety surrounding territorial and historical claims to the city and also a simultaneous questioning and hardening of the imagined geographies that demarcated Turkish and Greek identities as nationally distinct. This research illuminates the topological and relational dimensions of ethno-nationalist identity formation and the role of urban cultural processes in political belonging in the contemporary Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to shed light on the journey of the Hittite sun disk, a cult object from the Early Bronze Age, from the architectural, narrative and discursive boundaries of a public museum to the streets of contemporary Ankara. First, it explores the role that the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations played, through the invention of secular symbols, in (re)defining modern Turkish identity. Then it probes into the processes by which the sun disk became an increasingly popular and yet controversial political symbol. In doing so, the article examines how a state-sanctioned memory-making project heralded a 'clash of imaginations': conservative and Islamist versus secular-leftist urban identities, embodying conflicting visions of Ankara's past and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focusses on converts from Islam to the Christian faith in Turkey. Converts are confronted with special challenges. Based on Islamic theology and Turkish nationalism most Turks cannot think of positive reasons to choose Christianity. So verbal assaults with social consequences like ostracism, prejudice, suspicion, and very low esteem are very common. The First Letter of Peter provides advice for strengthening new Christians by defining their identity as chosen und loved people of God. Personal caring for converts from Islam is crucial to provide a new "home" in assuring them of their new identity. They have to learn to evaluate accusations honestly, and from a faith-based position, and to integrate their new faith with their old environment. In the context of modern Turkey a fresh look at history can be meaningful: There were Turkish Christians before Islam, and there are still Christian Turkish people today. More important however is a genuine spiritual approach that understands verbal assaults within the framework of God's history with his people. Converts should find their identity "in Christ". At the same time, being in Christ must become practical in finding a new family in the local church and seeing themselves as part of the worldwide multinational body of Christ. [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]

This article challenges two established views in the literature on Turkish nationalism. First, that Turkish nationhood in the early republican era was civic and ethnic and, second, that, while Turkish nationhood was inclusive and egalitarian in constitutional texts, in the early years of the Turkish Republic and in the case of Turkish citizens of Muslim origin, it became exclusive or discriminatory in citizenship practices once the Republic was consolidated and in the case of non-Muslim Turkish citizens. Contra these two established views, I first argue that Turkish nationhood was not civic and ethnic, but it was actually civic and ancestral and cultural. Secondly, relying on an examination of legal texts produced and citizenship practices pursued in the years between 1918 and 1924, I argue that the Turkish nationhood was exclusive and discriminatory both theoretically and practically, on paper as well as in practice, both at the time of the foundation of the republic and once the regime had become consolidated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the role of competing nationalist visions in shaping the course and content of constitution-making processes. Using Turkey as its case study and focusing on a recent attempt at constitution writing (2011-2013), the examination demonstrates that engagements with and the framing of competing narratives of nationhood during constitutional negotiations go to the heart of societal reconstruction. Hence, such engagements should not be treated as an afterthought to institution building. The Turkish case also demonstrates how in deeply divided societies constitutional debates can acquire an ontological significance for the parties that in turn can work to deepen the existing ideological cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflection on the distinctiveness and scope of the ideas of Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), who played a key role in the formation of the ideology of the Turkish Republic created in 1923. Gökalp is generally cast by interpreters as a ‘Westernist’ or ‘modernist’ nationalist thinker, like many other thinkers in late developing societies, whose chief concern was the establishment of a modern Turkish nation-state and who, therefore, tried to combine Western knowledge with the culture of his own society. Contrary to received wisdom, I argue that Gökalp developed not just a model of modernity befitting Muslim Turks but also a distinctive general theory of social life, according to which the cultures of all societies are hybrid, i.e. blends of other (past and present) cultures. If this is correct, then Gökalp’s social thought is more than a mere specimen of late nationalist ideologies; it is applicable to all forms of social life just as much as the ideas of the European social theorists he cited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘Alevi openings’ launched in 2007 by the Justice and Development Party have been widely lauded as a historic and unprecedented step in the Turkish Republic. In contrast, this article places the ‘openings’ in a wider historical context, analyzing them in relation to processes of nation-building. Firstly, it is argued that the ‘openings’ marked continuity with previous interventions by state actors, including the military, dating back at least to the 1960s. Secondly, it is contended that these interventions should be regarded as a process of re-framing Alevism within a Turkish–Islamic framework, consigning it to ‘invisibility,’ rather than as democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the construction of the gendered and nationalised citizen in education in Turkey and Sweden. We draw on a narrative approach identifying narratives linked to educational discourses. Our empirical data consist of textbooks (in the later years of mandatory schooling), steering documents and interviews. In both our cases, we encounter continuities in these narratives; the citizen is defined with ethno-cultural references along with civic ones, and differentiated according to gender. In the Turkish case, a meta-narrative is constructed around the narratives of enemy and defence related to masculinity, and the feminine as the object of protection. The gender regime is an important part of the processes of normalisation of nationalism. In Sweden, nationalism is formulated around the ‘Swedish miracle’, a social-welfare state, among the best democracies, and with a story of ‘gender success’. In both cases, we also found new narratives in line with Europeanisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The transition from Ottoman Empire to the nation-state of the New Turkey brought along with it political, economic, geographic and social transformations. The spatial-societal change and transformation came foremost among the policies of the new nation-state. The reconstruction of space, the modernization politics of social strata, became state policy beginning in the initial years of the Republic. In this process, education was a significant tool for the formation of national identity, as in all other nationstates. In order to be able to instill a patriotic awareness in the different societal segments of redefined borders, the concept of the homeland had to be defined, constructed and taught. Geography textbooks of the new nation also had an important role in the process by the way of redefinition of all spaces belonging to the nation-state representations with its radical chances on maps and illustrations in previous books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history and contemporary revival of male belly dancers -- zenne or köçk -- in Turkey and in cities with large Turkish populations, such as Berlin. What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender and narratives of modernity as they have taken shape in Turkey? The zenne dancer embodies the contradictions of contemporary Turkish culture, which includes a variety of same-sex practices, along with sexual taxonomies that have developed in collusion with discourses of modernity. The revival of zenne dancing can be seen as part of a series of global transformations in the visibility of gay, lesbian, and trans people in popular culture and public discourse. However, it is also an unpredicted consequence of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) purposeful revival and romanticization of Turkey's Ottoman past, which has been ahistorically remembered as more pious than the present. Re-emerging in the twenty-first century as an embodiment of competing definitions of sexuality and modernity in contemporary Turkey, precisely at a moment when Turkish national identity is a hotly contested issue, the zenne dancer is queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being exempt from compulsory military service, women have been indispensable in their roles as mothers of conscripted soldiers in the conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Based on in-depth interviews conducted with twenty women in Istanbul whose sons were deployed to the conflict zone and returned home without any injuries, this article examines how the conflict has impacted the mothers' perception of national service, of the Kurdish conflict, and of the "East." I argue that the women start to partly question the obligation to serve once their children are asked to become the potential victims, and perpetrators, of the conflict. But this questioning does not develop into a full-fledged critique of the service and ends up reinforcing the tropes associated with Kurds and the "East" as backward, unruly, and resistant to change. Thus they mostly justify the modernizing mission of the military. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between Islam and nationalism by considering the role of the ulama in Turkey, housed within the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA). The ulama - religious scholars and experts of Islamic law - in Muslim majority contexts are typically closely linked with the state and play a key role in shaping the boundaries of Islam and of what is Islamically acceptable. However, this is also of consequence for the boundaries of the nation, since in Turkey Islam and nationalism has been intertwined, with Islam playing a central role in nation-building, as a basis of ethnic identity formation and a source of symbols and myths. This articles shows, firstly, that the PRA has acted as a carrier and preserver of Sunni (Hanefi) Muslim identity in continuity with the Ottoman ulama and, secondly, that it has delimited nation-building, by considering its approach to and interventions against Alevi identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Turkey being a culturally heterogeneous country, the primordial narrative of current Turkish nationalism -- regardless whether arguing from secular or from Islamist angles -- does not allow for cultural diversity and plurality. This article challenges the holistic and exclusionary notion of culture that underlies present Turkish nationalism by shedding light on how the appropriation of multiple identities by second and third generation Germany-born women in Turkey is eluding ascriptions of identity divided among we/them lines. Against the backdrop of frameworks that describe identity as fluid, relational, multiple and imagined, the article will analyze the findings of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul in 2013. Rather than a holistic "either/or" dualism of belonging where social practices only take place in the container space, "as well as" transnational social practices in both countries are analyzed, among others, with respect to biographic memories and imaginations, communication and movements across borders and participation in the Gezi protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nationalist movement appeared in Ottoman Empire's Selanik/Thessaloniki by late 1910 and known as New Life (or New Language) group, represents a special phase in the history of Turkish nationalism. The New Life circle flourishing from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the explosion in the press it brought with, had played an important role in making and administering the ideology and cultural policy of the İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress). Among New Life's collaborative and planned activities were publishing brochures, school books and periodicals. These publications are essential in analyzing the movement. These journals are Genç Kalemler (Young Pens) and Yeni Felsefe Mecmuası (New Philosophy Journal). Genç Kalemler is the successor of Hüsün ve Şiir (Beauty and Poetry) journal. Although the contents, policies and ideologies of these journals are examined in a number of studies, very little is known about their technical and managerial side, printing and distribution conditions, and their target and reader profiles. This study tries to elaborate on such issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic civil wars tend to spread to adjacent countries, yet the processes whereby diffusion takes place remain obscure. Quantitative studies point to a wide range of factors and dynamics that drive ethnosectarian conflicts across international borders with no consensus regarding the causal potency of these variables or the ways in which they interact with one another. Surveying the most influential theories that have been advanced so far clarifies the logic of disparate arguments and offers hypotheses that can be tested against particular cases. The civil war in Syria represents one notable instance in which fighting along ethnosectarian lines provoked a revival of political violence in a neighboring state, the Turkish Republic. Applying existing theories to this empirical case clarifies promising directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a comprehensive reading of the 1912–1914 issues of the journalTurkish Homeland, the highbrow intellectualist periodical of the Turkist intellectuals and the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, this article argues that sublime Turkishness envisaged by the Young Turks can be construed as a character build-up. The article also examines how history was utilized as an arsenal from where the sublime ‘Turkish character’ was extracted in a decade in which interest towards Turkic history burgeoned, arguing that valiant Turkic heroes from the glorious Turkic past were discovered or rediscovered to stand out as exemplary men and epitomes of incorruptibleness inspiring the new youth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I attempt to examine the discourses on women's rights and feminist interventions that appear amongst various ethno-religious groups in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and later Turkey from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period. These discourses and initiatives are approached as effects of communication between ethnoreligiously disparate people across the entire Balkans. This interaction created a common canvas of challenges and imperatives with significant differentiations. The latter are linked to the different political agendas prevailing in each community. Such an approach enables us to revisit such dominant historiographical concepts as nationality or the millet and their role in people's everyday lives during this period. This article also attempts to correlate feminism to nationalism, namely to the stance vis-à-vis the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the comparison between Turkish Islamic and secular thinking toward ethnic and religious minorities in Turkey. The authors made the comparison based on a comprehensive content analysis of secular press and Islamic along with other evidence such as opinion polls and political party reports. It also explores the contents of newspaper articles from 1996-2004, and from 2007-2010 with respects to several subjects such as conflict resolution and nationalism.

The surge of environmental protest in Turkey has been interpreted as ‘above politics’ activism that strengthens civil society, fosters alternative expressions of identity, and creates new forms of agency outside the state. This article contends that any analysis of the way environmentalism unfolds in Turkey must take into account identity dynamics and the power the state has over these dynamics. Environmental activism seldom remains purely ‘issue-based’, despite the claims and desires of many activists themselves that their protests be ‘above politics’ as a ‘people’s movement’. Drawing on ethnographic and other methods in the study of environmental protest against a gas power plant on the Black Sea coast, this article shows how activists are caught in a dilemma which forces them to tread very carefully if they are to avoid accusations of being separatists or betrayers of the fatherland. Thus, environmental conflicts in Turkey can only be understood within the context of national identity- and party-politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cemevis emerged as the spaces of the Alevi identity in contemporary cities of Turkey. On the basis of in-depth interviews conducted in İzmir with the heads of cemevi associations, this study claims that, while cemevis were enforced by the process of urbanization, they have been transforming the Alevi practices and collective organizations and eventually constructing a new type of Alevism as to religious practices, community institutions and collective imagination. Though no legal–political recognition has yet been granted to cemevis as the places of worship, they have established themselves as central institutions of urban Alevis with their extensive use beyond the limited oppositional categorization of culture–religion. This denial of legal status which has been seen as the violation of basic human rights is one of the main constitutive dynamics in the ongoing debates on Turkey's Alevi question. It is to such an extent that the denial of legal status to cemevis has today come to be identified by Alevi groupings with the denial of Alevi collective identity itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

This paper unpacks the ideas in the poem 'Pull Down My Statues' by Süleyman Apaydın, to examine some common descriptors in use about modern Turkey. Taking his inspiration from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Apaydın ponders the success of Atatürk's vision, based on the idea of a secular/sacred divide. Combining this with the way travel in Turkey is heavily promoted using the same themes, I explore how this divide, with its underlying connotations of West versus East and modernity versus tradition (as found in Turkey's Ottoman past), is applied to Turkish identity. Turks are commonly portrayed as a homogenous people only differentiated by their degree of religiosity, but I argue that this analysis is too simplistic. Turkish identity has never been based on a single clear cut model, and this is becoming obvious as more traditional Islamic ways of life are being reworked by new forms of Islam based on capitalism. Consequently, although it is important to acknowledge Turkey's past, looking to history for a way to steer through the complexities of the present is no longer useful or even relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri's Kurdish-Islamic revivalist project based on a close reading of his Mesnewi. This article primarily focuses on the fusion of the Sheikh's Islamic revivalism with his Kurdish nationalism in his poetic work. A close reading of the Mesnewi leaves no doubt that in the mind of his author both the future of Kurds and that of his revivalist project depended on the creation of an independent state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to challenge simplifications on race and racism in contemporary Turkish society. In doing so, it draws a macro-historical context wherein the racist component of the Turkish national identity had been shaped. The paper traces the emergence of the core racist elements at the beginning of the 20th century within the ideology propagated by the organization of the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları). The Turkish History Thesis with its emphasis on ‘race’ attempted to promote not only an affiliation but also a common ancestry between Turkish and Western civilization. These arguments were backed by commissioning research carried out in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics. The main argument of this paper is that the racist components of the national identity in Turkey have been the product of a Eurocentric understanding of world history by consecutive nationalist leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor talks about the topics discussed in the special issue which includes identity, race and nationalism in Turkey; history and culture of Western World, and citizenship in modern Turkey.

The article presents a report from a February 4-5, 2016 workshop in Munich, Germany on the history of naming held by the Czech and Slovakian history research department at the Collegium Carolinum college and the historiography department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München university. Topics of presentations delivered included 19th-century legislation governing the naming of Jewish descendants, legislation regarding the languages in Bolzano, Italy, and the alleged role of language in Turkish nationalism.

In this article, I investigate the surge of scholarly interest in Ottoman minorities since 1980s - a surge that acts in defense of a national culture. What distinguishes the nationalist-cum-Ottomanist historiography of the Turkish historians under study here is the heavy emphasis on notions of tolerance and multiculturalism with direct reference to the imperial era of 15th and 17th centuries. This emerging discourse has been striving to rebut the Orientalist stigmas attributed to Turkish-Ottoman culture and civilization—such as barbaric, despotic and authoritarian—and construct its own tolerant and multicultural historical imagery. Drawing upon the urgent lessons of postcolonial experience, theory and history, I analyze the pitfalls of uncritically clinging to such an imaginary. The emergence of this new Turkish-Ottoman imaginary and its discourse of a Turkish nativism and Occidentalism that emphasizes minority rights, tolerance and the harmonious coexistence of a plurality remains an under-explored territory for postcolonial criticism. The analysis of nostalgic Ottoman literature can illuminate how the ‘Occident/Western’ and ‘Oriental/Derivative’ (i.e. the Ottoman and Turkish) formations of the national imaginary are constructed, remembered and contested in the contemporary global order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Is Turkish nationality one singular identity that does not permit ethnic modifiers? Or can it be understood as pluralistic, with identities nested – “hyphenated” – with Turkishness? Then, are Turkish and Kurdish identities necessarily mutually exclusive? Such questions over the boundaries of Turkishness have long been framed in the civic versus ethnic dichotomy – an approach that does not ask whether Turkish nationhood is monolithic or pluralistic. In response, this article aims to advance the public and scholarly debates over nationhood in Turkey by turning to the question of ways in which Turkishness can be hyphenated with other identity categories in Turkey, most particularly Kurdishness. First, we reframe the debate over identity by using the combinatorial approach to ethnicity to outline how Turkishness and Kurdishness can be overlapping and nested, or a hyphenated identity. Second, we draw on public opinion data to show that such a hyphenated identity is both theoretically possible and potentially salient in Turkey today. Together, these steps deconstruct the primordialist understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness, on the one hand, and the taken-for-granted civic claims of Turkishness, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will attempt to develop an in-depth examination of the pivotal role of Islam in the articulation of Turkish nationalism and Turkish official identity by examining the sermons authorized and imposed by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA), the state agency regulating religion, and how the their cosmologies of social, moral and political order are entwined. We will further argue that this role involves a twofold process; firstly, the Muslim identity was imagined as a prerequisite for being considered as a Turk and a Turkish citizen and, secondly, the ‘cultural intimacy’ of Turkish nationalism is grounded on the ‘root paradigms’ inherited and attained from the Islamic tradition and theology. These arguments are particularly pertinent at a time when Islamist JDP (Justice and Development Party) consolidated its power and began to instrumentalize PRA for its priorities and visions of Islam. This, however, does not bring a radical reshuffling of PRA. On the contrary, the continuity from the Kemalist-monitored PRA to the JDP-monitored PRA can be attested not only in its organizational features but also in its ideological make up; especially in terms of its perceptions of society, state and social order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on Selim Sırrı [Tarcan]’s appropriation of some German concepts of physical education to mobilize Ottoman youth during the early twentieth century. He was an instructor of physical education and became famous for his writings and speeches in this field in the late Ottoman State and the early Turkish Republic. After a biographical sketch of Selim Sırrı, we review the origins of gymnastics and youth mobilization efforts in Germany, since these were role models in Selim Sırrı's writings. As in Prussia in 1813, after the Balkan Wars in 1913 secularly educated Muslim members of the Ottoman political elite, including Selim Sırrı, introduced some German concepts to the Ottoman structure in order to promote the proto-nationalist ideology. We investigate Selim Sırrı's role in this appropriation of German ideas and models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on theories of nationalism, two recent books by Dilek Giiven and Ulkii Agir engage with the September Pogrom in Istanbul on the 6th and the 7th of September 1955. To explain the pogrom's emergence from its historical background both studies discuss the role of Young Turkish ideology, ethnic violence in the course of Turkish nation building, and the development of minority politics throughout the Turkish Republic. On the basis of interviews and archival materials, Dilek Giiven meticulously reconstructs the course of events, the actors, their motives and the context. Ulkii Agir analyses the Turkish press discourse in the pogrom's preparatory phase focusing on the Greek Orthodox community. Critically discussing the two studies, this article scrutinises current conceptualisations of collective violence in research devoted to post-Genocidal Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes how the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) understanding of new nationalism, or neo-Ottomanism, incorporates the logic of masculinist protection in its discourse. This necessitates a security-oriented state that firmly connects domestic politics with foreign policy. The concept of the logic of masculinist protection, borrowed from Iris Morrison Young, refers to the reinforcement of a gender hierarchy in politics, and signifies a paternalistic state charged with protecting a society identified with femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the global wave of decolonization that began after 1945 reached the island of Cyprus, the Cyprus question turned into an issue of paramount importance for Turkish nationalists and for the Turkish people in general. Long before, Turkish foreign policy architects – who had previously taken the line that ‘Turkey does not have a Cyprus problem’ – came to portray Cyprus as a ‘national cause’. Three different geopolitical discourses were instrumental in legitimizing Turkey’s claims over Cyprus and in leading Turkish society to believe that it had a crucial stake in the fate of the island. Naturalized geopolitics represented Cyprus as a natural extension of the Turkish heartland, while ideological geopolitics put forth that Greek Cypriots were responsible for the spread of communism. Finally, civilizational geopolitics characterized Turkey and Greece’s rivalry in Cyprus as the latest chapter in the centuries-old conflict between Turkishness and Hellenism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Responding to the identity-based claims of discriminated-against minorities while maintaining a shared national identity in and through education is a continuing challenge for Turkey, as it is in many other national contexts. Through a systematic analysis of 245 Turkish textbooks, this study explores the presentation in them of Turkish national identity and those of ethnic, religious and language-based minorities. Textbooks in Turkey take their present shape and content as a result of a comprehensive curriculum reform of 2005 that aimed to make them conform to the norms of the EU. Despite this rewriting, the study shows that textbooks do not include any radical change in terms of the representation of the national self and of ethnic minorities. Indeed, a close analysis of the textbooks demonstrates that they still preserve an ethno-religious national identity. Recent attempts to include ethnic and religious minorities in the textbooks within the frame of a discourse of tolerance, on the other hand, show an inclusion on the basis of unequal social position for minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan have been persistently challenged, since their founding, by both Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. These challenges claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in each country. I investigate the causes behind the concurrence of Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges to the state in Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. Method This research employs comparative historical analysis, and more specifically, a most different systems design. In addition to small- N cross-national comparison, I also designed an intertemporal comparison, whereby Turkish, Algerian, and Pakistani history is divided into four periods, corresponding to preindependence, mobilization for independence, postindependence secular nation-building, and Islamist and ethnic separatist challenge periods. Results Contrary to the prevailing view in the scholarship, this article formulates an alternative reinterpretation of Turkish, Algerian, and Pakistani nation-state formation. These three states were founded on the basis of an Islamic mobilization against non-Muslim opponents, but having successfully defeated these non-Muslim opponents, their political elites chose a secular and monolingual nation-state model, which they thought would maximize their national security and improve the socioeconomic status of their Muslim constituencies. The choice of a secular and monolingual nation-state model led to recurrent challenges of increasing magnitude to the state in the form of Islamist and ethnic separatist movements. The causal mechanism outlined in this article resembles what has been metaphorically described as a 'meteorite' (Pierson, ), where the cause is short term (secular nationalist turn after independence) but the outcome unfolds over the long term (Islamist and ethnic separatist challenges). Conclusion A distinct and counterintuitive path of nation-state formation has been identified based on the cases of Turkey, Algeria, and Pakistan. This research demonstrates that a contradiction between the goals of the original mobilization that establishes the state and policies of its postindependence governments can be a major structural source of instability and violence in the long run. These findings suggest that theories of nationalism that were developed based on the European experience of ethnic or linguistic nationalism need to be modified in explaining the religious nationalism that is found in the origins of some of the major nation-states in the Muslim world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre las razones posibles que incitaron el genocidio armenio de 1915-1923 por el Imperio Otomano. El autor comenta sobre la prevalencia de nacionalismo de los otomanas así como el sentido de xenofobia ante los armenios. También se considera la cuestión del genocidio como un acto de limpieza étnica o un evento premeditado.

Among other Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Turkey stand out as the two neighboring countries with many linguistic and cultural similarities. The question that comes to the fore is: to what extent do these two countries know each other? This article attempts to provide a picture of the state of Iranian Studies in Turkey with specific attention to three monographs originally written as PhD dissertations in various Turkish universities over the last three decades. Produced from within three different social science and humanities divisions, i.e. Political Science, Persian Literature and History, these are three of the very few scholarly monographs produced on Iran in Turkey. Based on a close reading of these studies, it seems possible to observe that they are mostly ill-balanced by methodological, ethnocentric as well as Turkish nationalist biases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The argument of this paper is that the new foreign policy orientation of Turkey under the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government is a constitutive component of a new nationalist project, constructed and carried out by the AKP over the last decade. The article expounds the ways in which the AKP has reformulated the notions of nation, national history, homeland and national interest and demonstrates the role foreign policy has played in this reformulation. Our point of departure will be the patterns we have observed in the statements and political practices of the AKP government and its officials, particularly the incumbent minister of foreign affairs Ahmet Davutoğlu, whose book, Strategic Depth, presents a more systematic explanation of the major principles and assertions of AKP nationalism and foreign policy. We will also argue that after the Gezi protests in June 2013 this new conception of nation and nationalism has faced with a deep crisis, which has also exacerbated the problem of pursuing an ambitious foreign policy strategy in international arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]