Utilizing data on household consumption expenditure patterns and sectorial greenhouse gas emissions, we study the extent of inequality over Turkish households’ differentiated carbon footprint incidences. We harmonize the household budget survey data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) with production-based gas emissions data from EXIOBASE3 and investigate both the direct and indirect emissions across household-level income strata. Our calculations reveal that the households in the highest income decile alone are responsible for 19.4 percent of the overall (direct and indirect) emissions, whereas the bottom 10 percent of households are responsible for 4.3 percent. We also find that for direct emissions, the per-household average of the highest income decile exceeds that of the lowest income decile by a factor of 11.2. Notably, 87 percent of the indirect emissions budget for the poorest decile is linked to food and housing expenses, underscoring their susceptibility to climate policies. We confer that in designing the net-zero emission pathways to combat climate change, it would not suffice to study the technological transition of decarbonization solely and that the successful implementation of an indigenous environmental policy will ultimately depend upon the socio-economic factors of income distribution strata, indicators of consumption demand, and responsiveness of the individual households to react to price signals.

This paper examines trends in wage, income, and consumption inequality in Turkey from 2002 to 2023, a period marked by unorthodox economic policymaking before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using microdata from the Turkish Statistical Institute’s Household Budget Survey and the Survey of Income and Living Conditions, we document several salient distributional patterns. Wage inequality declined steadily over two decades, including during the recent episode of policy experimentation – coinciding with sustained minimum wage hikes and a rising share of university-educated workers. Income inequality also fell, though less markedly, before reversing in recent years due to widening disparities in capital and entrepreneurial income. In addition, consumption inequality rose dramatically during the unorthodox policy period, exceeding income inequality growth and driven primarily by a surge in durable goods consumption among top-decile households. These findings reveal the complex and multi-dimensional distributional consequences of unconventional economic policy in emerging markets and highlight the importance of examining inequality across multiple dimensions when evaluating policy effectiveness.

This article explores how ontological insecurity shaped Cold War collaboration between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Turkey, and how their shared anti-communist anxiety produced lasting far-right consequences. Drawing on newly examined archival documents, it argues that communism was not merely a geopolitical or ideological threat but an existential danger to the state’s self in both countries. In response, the FRG and Turkey built a security partnership that extended into diaspora governance and intelligence coordination, often empowering far-right nationalist networks as bulwarks against leftist mobilization. These covert strategies – particularly the cultivation of far-right Turkish actors within Germany – were rationalized at the time as necessary countermeasures but ultimately contributed to long-term radicalization and blowback. By applying the framework of ontological security, the article reinterprets Cold War alliance dynamics as driven as much by existential anxieties as by strategic calculations. It concludes that contemporary German efforts to confront Turkish far-right extremism – such as the designation of the Grey Wolves as a security threat – risk obscuring this deeper legacy, producing a form of selective amnesia that externalizes a problem the FRG helped create.

This article highlights the state’s labor coercion practices and their perpetual characteristic in defining the history of migration and migrants’ experiences in the city. It underlines the internal relationship between production processes and relations on the one hand and the mobility of workers and their families on the other. For this purpose, it focuses on the migration dynamics of shipbuilding workers in mid-nineteenth-century İstanbul, most of whom worked in the Imperial Arsenal (Tersane-i Amire) and dwelled in the neighborhoods of the surrounding quarter of Kasımpaşa. I will utilize the population records of one of these neighborhoods, the Seyyid Ali Çelebi, where the relationship between the worksite and the residential community was evident, and the wage records of the Imperial Arsenal to understand the relationality of migration and work processes. Based on an analysis of these sources, I will point to the connections between the configuration of migration networks built in or through the Arsenal and the settlement patterns in the neighborhood. I will particularly argue that relations at the workplace and the coercive dynamics that underlined these relations significantly impacted the migration and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century.

This study analyzes Turkey’s political landscape by harnessing computational social science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Politus database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an artificial intelligence-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal component analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left–right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular–religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, cluster analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined; center-right-leaning and religiously inclined; and those with a center-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Turkey.

The rise of anti-immigrant parties has reshaped global politics, forcing mainstream parties to recalibrate their strategies. This study examines how Turkish political parties responded to the emergence of the Victory Party (Zafer Partisi) in 2021, which placed immigration at the center of political debate. Drawing on 1,089 parliamentary group speeches (2011–2023) and elite interviews with key party figures, we identified three key factors shaping party responses: voter overlap with radical-right parties; reputational risks associated with shifting policy positions; and access to political power. Our findings revealed five strategies: issue avoidance; amplification; cooptation; repositioning; and reinforcement. Unlike conventional models that emphasize voter competition, we highlight the role of political power in shaping party strategies, particularly in competitive authoritarian settings. This study advances the understanding of how mainstream parties navigate niche party pressures, offering a broader perspective beyond Eurocentric and electoralist frameworks.

This study explores the experiences of Russian relocants in Turkey, focusing on their migration trajectories through overlapping waves of shock, relocation, and partial mobilization, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Initially, Turkey was an attractive destination due to its visa-free access, air connectivity, affordable cost of living, and established post-Soviet community. However, among the nearly one million people who fled Russia, many relocants – primarily young, educated, and entrepreneurial individuals from the information technology sector and oppositional groups – face various uncertainties in Turkey. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this research first examines the migration journeys of Russian relocants through their self-narratives, tracing the waves of the exodus in 2022. It then critically analyzes the legal, economic, and social uncertainties they encounter in Turkey. Finally, it explores how the physical and virtual “bubbles” formed in İstanbul function as coping mechanisms to navigate these challenges. Blending staying and returning, bubbles function as temporary “in-between” spaces, allowing Russian relocants to encounter Turkey’s novelties, while maintaining a “transnational double presence” through ongoing ties to their homeland, resulting in a form of “functional adaptation.”

Recent changes in the Turkish healthcare system aim to enhance efficiency by implementing various feedback systems, performance-based wages, and new auditing mechanisms to monitor resource and time use and cycle of motions in medical settings. This paper aims to answer the following question: how do nurses respond to changes that place them in a subordinate position, where supervisors and administrators dictate control over time and the nature of labor? In the literature on labor and neoliberalization, resistance by workers to control over work is mostly concluded as part of the reproduction of workers’ subordination. However, this paper challenges such a conclusion by presenting an alternative perspective. In-depth interviews with twenty-one nurses conducted in İstanbul revealed that nurses disrupt control mechanisms by refusing to conform to behaviors dictated by managerial principles, manipulating information about medication and equipment usage, and concealing beds and patients through their authoritative control over them. This study unveils new dimensions of contemporary nursing in Turkey through which covert solidarities between nurses enable efforts to maintain “good care” often shaped by gendered expectations. These efforts mostly resist the “hotelization” of hospitals and aim to remake the moral boundaries of care work.