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Turkey has growingly increased its activism in the Mediterranean. Engaged on several fronts—from the gas dispute to migration issues, the ongoing conflicts in Libya and Syria and the longstanding dispute over Cyprus—Turkey is a key player in the eastern region of the Basin. Yet, the Mediterranean has been a very important area for the Turkish Republic ever since the first years of its foundation, but its foreign policy started to look at the region as a whole only since the Nineties. Most recent events show that Turkey’s policies and interventions in the Basin appear to be linked to a broader and more complex framework in which various international political trajectories and domestic issues merge. This article contains an outline of Turkish foreign policy’s historical framework, attempting to emphasize when and in what manner various interests resulted in the Mediterranean being considered a geostrategic area; how interest in the Mediterranean was accompanied by Turkey’s rise as a regional power and then an analysis of the most recent challenges faced.

Over the past few years, a series of ‘urban transformation proj¬ects' has been radically changing the face of the city of Istan¬bul. In line with the political project begun in the early 1980s, aimed at reintroducing the old capital of the Ottoman Empire onto the international scene and transforming it into a global city, the hub of a network of financial services and international tourism, today radical interventions have been made in the old neighbourhoods of Gecekondu and peripheral enclaves in the city centre, provoking the removal and further marginalization of large parts of the population. The reaction of the individual inhabitants has joined with the activism of neighbourhood as¬sociations and the interests of professional groups, and become translated into many forms of opposition to the projects and the politicisation, though controversial, of these urban protests.

Gender and migration: the recruitment of Turkish women in West Germany explores Turkish female worker migration to Western Germany in the years of the Turkish- German agreement for manpower recruitment (1961-1973). Analysing archival and oral sources it investigates the procedures of selection and employment that reveal how the demand for female labour in German factories encouraged the participation of Turkish women in the German labour market. It argues that the study of individual and collective historical configurations show autonomous female migratory experiences that contrast with the representation of Turkish women as isolated and dependent, migrating to Germany solely in terms of family reunification.