This article analyzes critical voices raised against the Bologna Process by various stake-holders of higher education in Turkey, such as rectors, professors, international office staff, students, and civil society organizations. The data collected through in-depth interviews were analyzed using the discourse analysis method on the basis of the interlocutors’ reflections on the Bologna Process. It is claimed in the article that most universities in Turkey have attempted a process of internationalization and institutionalization, but that there have been several impediments during the implementation of the Bologna Process. Rising Euroskepticism in Turkey has also changed the process of Europeanization in the universities. It is revealed that the structural changes made in line with the Bologna Process are perceived by several different stake-holders as neo-liberal acts, and are presented as activities of internationalization, but not of Europeanization.

The last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed new methods of domination by the core of the capitalist world economy over its periphery. On matters concerning international organization of capital accumulation the core makes use of international institutions such as the G7, the IMF and the World Bank, and the GATT on a larger scale than ever before. In the present study, we will discuss the history of world agriculture and food production in the twentieth century in an attempt to explain how the current structure of metropolitan domination in these sectors has been shaped in the post-war era. We will, then, investigate the transformations that Turkish agriculture and food production have been undergoing during this period.

In the discourse of the history textbooks used since 1931, the relationship between identity and otherness often tends towards the necessity of proving both the value and greatness of Turkish history and culture. Consequently, the whole historical narrative, and also the discourse on identity and the nationalist discourse, which very often make use of history in their argumentation, always present the Turks in a favorable light and in an emphasized role. This appears in several forms, particularly during a kind of reconstruction of the past using tenses expressing the unreal condition (“If the Turks had not existed… Islam could not have been saved”, or “… the European Renaissance could not have taken place”, etc.). Another noticeable form is the use of the word hizmet, (“service”, “utility”, helpfulness”, “function”) provided by the Turks. The word itself is helpful to fit the Turks in with “otherness”, in the way of showing them in a good light in history. With regard to this notion, according to the narrative, wide groups of “others” often take advantage of the existence of the Turks: the whole mankind, the “free world”, or the Muslim world, according to the time when the discourse was formulated.

It is widely held in the public policy and political economy literatures that the Turkish state is weak and cannot adopt a proactive approach in the financial services industry by steering and coordinating the financial policy network. However, it is puzzling that this seemingly “weak” Turkish state, which is often marked by fragmentation, conflict, and a lack of policy coordination within the state apparatus, acted strongly between 2010 and 2016 by taking pre-emptive measures to contain the macrofinancial risks arising from hot money inflows and bank credit expansion. Examining the organizational policy capacity of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, this article argues that proactive policy design and implementation are more likely to complement state capacity when the principal bureaucratic actors have strong organizational policy capacities.

Based on the analysis of a meeting with nineteen women from civil society with diverse backgrounds, invited to discuss what has gone wrong in Turkey’s Kurdish peace process and what women can do for peace in a highly polarized atmosphere, this article explores women’s dialogue in a conflict situation. With insights from deliberative and agonistic perspectives, the article shows that in a multiple-identity conflict, topical shifts in dialogue are accompanied by shifting alliances. The search for mutual definitions on conflictual issues renders the deliberation of sensitive issues difficult, so women circumvent polarizing discourses through indirect and covert language. However, the discussion of gender-based experiences with direct, contestational language helps women underline shared issues and address resentments. Dialogue’s transformative potential also depends on the existence of trust and an intersectionality perspective for which further dialogic initiatives should develop strategies.

This study concerns how olive oil producers and local bureaucrats in western Turkey use geographical indications (GIs) as a localist strategy to strengthen their position in global markets by challenging conventional agricultural practices. The study employs the disarticulation approach of global commodity chain analysis in order to understand which factors delink people and places from conventional commodity chains/industrial chains and link them instead to GI chains. The results of the study indicate that regional disadvantages—e.g., high production costs due to land characteristics—are the main factor delinking local actors from the conventional olive oil commodity chain. Furthermore, certain dynamic rent opportunities that are related to characteristics of territorial quality and to local cultural characteristics also contribute to the linking of the region and producers to GI chains.

This article assesses the recent performance of the Turkish economy, questioning whether the currently observed unusual boom conditions will lead to a process of sustainable growth. The latest phase of Turkish neo-liberal transformation in the post-2001 era is placed in a broader historical and global context; at the same time, the performance of the economy in recent years is compared with that of other key emerging markets, based on selected macroeconomic indicators. Utilizing the East Asian experience as the principal benchmark for comparison, this paper examines whether Turkey is on its way to accomplishing tiger-like development performance. Given the current challenges to sustainable growth, we conclude that it is premature to suggest that the impressive performance of the recent years will lead to durable success and tiger-like performance. While the focus is on the Turkish experience, the paper also probes the very nature of tiger-like performance itself, highlighting the fact that in setting standards for exceptional economic performance we need to extend our horizons beyond high rates of economic growth sustained over time, to broader indicators of social, political and human development.

The article deals with the decline in the military's influence on the foreign and security policy making process in Turkey. Turkey's harmonization process with the EU that gained momentum in the early 2000s and the US invasion of Iraq in April of 2003 seem to have played a key role in this transformation. While the EU reforms provided for the gradual elimination of legal prerogatives of the military, the increasing US influence in Iraq limited the military's operational power and led to a situation in which it could not exert influence in Northern Iraq, a key area for Turkeys security.

This article explores how hope and visions of the future have left their mark on media discourse in Turkey. Looking back at some of the events that took place in the 1980s, a decade that was shaped by the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état, and considering them alongside what has happened since the ban of Istanbul’s Pride march in 2015, it examines traces of hope in two periods of recent Turkish history characterized by authoritarianism. Drawing on an array of visual and textual material drawn from the tabloid press, magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, it inquires into how queer hope manages to infiltrate mediated publics even in times of pessimism and hopelessness. Based upon analysis of an archive of discourses on resistance, solidarity, and future, it argues that queer hope not only helps to map out possible future routes for queer lives in (and beyond) Turkey, but also operates as a driving political force that sustains queers’ determination to maintain their presence in the public sphere despite repressive nationalist, militarist, Islamist, and authoritarian regimes.

Studying changes in the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) politics within the general context of the long-lasting history of neoliberalism-neoconservatism in Turkey, this paper aims to provide a new perspective for analyzing the party’s recent drift to authoritarianism from the perspective of its gender politics. For many feminist scholars and activists, the recent changes in the AKP’s gender politics are a matter of an increase in the AKP’s oppression and patriarchal power. These analyses give no explicit account of why there has been an increase or if it is only a matter of an increase in the level of the oppressiveness of patriarchal power. From a perspective that questions this quantitative assumption (i.e. with an argument that the AKP’s politics has been equally oppressive for all women and from the very beginning of its rule), this paper aims to give insights into this complex process which led, first, to the emergence of neoliberal feminism as a new subjective position, and, later, to the modification of this official politics on women’s issue and the emergence of neoconservative feminism along with the AKP’s drift to authoritarianism in response to certain contradictory effects of neoliberalism and its eventual crisis.

On the night of July 15, 2016, the Republic of Turkey experienced yet another military coup attempt. However, this attempt failed, mainly due to civilian protest and casualties. Their sacrifice, according to the Turkish state, led to the creation of a new national celebration in Turkey, the “Democracy and National Unity Day.” Following the growing interest of historians in the field of national celebrations, this paper examines the creation of this holiday. It argues that the AKP government used this new holiday to shape the Turkish collective national memory and to introduce a national celebration that does not revolve around the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who symbolizes the secular camp in Turkey, but rather around the Justice and Development Party government and its more traditional and religious ideology, in the guise of celebrating Turkish democracy.

The role of conflict has been integral to the state and nation formation in Turkey since the inception of the Republic in 1923. Faced with the twin tasks of democratic legitimacy and maintaining control, or security and civil-centered politics, the state has historically opted for authority and control. Ironically enough, while Republican politics has emphasized unity and uniformity to limit diversity and conflict caused by class, ethnicity and Islam, the result has been the opposite. So much so that the present conflict between the state and the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which has cost nearly fourteen thousand lives since 1984, has reached an abysmal point: “in the end Turkey's victory may be a Pyrrhic one. If the conflict continues without exploration of other avenues, it will most likely jeopardize Turkey's relations with Europe and the United States” (Brown 1995, p. 128). Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that Kurdish nationalism is not just a simple expression of discontent and opposition but also a challenge to the very premises on which the Turkish nation-state has been built. In that sense, the resolution of the Kurdish “problem” is of concern not only to the Kurdish population of the Republic, but involves the future shape and substance of the Turkish state and society in their entirety as well.

Herkesin bir tarihi var.

Herkesin bir dili.

Ne anlatır size yalnızlık

Bana, beni.

Ne anlatır size ölüm

Bana, kederli annemi.

Dokunsak ışığa…

Silinse yüzlerimiz.

Ah o gözlerimiz.

Gözlerimiz.

-Kemal Kahraman

A small, dark office in the basement floor of an apartment building in Taksim. The sound of traffic filtering in from the busy street outside. Color photographs tacked to a wall next to a secretary's desk: two young girls in red posing in the lush grass, with mountains in the background. These are the two worlds of Gülümser Kalık. One, the workaday world of the center city. The other, a small village in eastern Turkey. Memories and the dream of return.

Turkey entered the 1990s under conditions of a truly “open economy”–a macroeconomic environment where its capital account was completely liberalized and the process of financial de-regulation was completed. In this setting, many of the instruments of macro and fiscal control have changed in nature, as the constraints of macro equilibrium have undergone major structural change.

In the early 1990s, the domestic economy witnessed a massive inflow of (mostly short-term) foreign capital. Furthermore, the so-called foreign exchange gap which had constrained the growth potential of Turkey for more than three decades seemed to have been alleviated. The ready availability of foreign exchange enabled the Turkish Lira to appreciate against the major currencies in real terms and led to a rapid expansion of import demand. Moreover, it made possible the financing of both the rapidly growing fiscal deficit of the public sector and the sudden rise of wage costs in the labor market.

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ottoman Turkism has been well-documented by studies focussing on their pioneering leaders, publications and institutions. Efforts aimed at the making of a Turkish nation, however, coincided with the period following the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. This new phase of Turkish nationalism differed from the preceding nationalist movements of the late Ottoman era, in its concern with the consolidation of a form of its own. It borrowed elements from, but also deviated from, the expansionist, pan-Turkist tendencies of the earlier era.

The main purpose of this paper is to present some basic information about the population of Turkey and its interpretation in a manner which readers of New Perspectives will find interesting for their purposes. One way to do this is to notice how certain population issues are handled in the public and scholarly discourse. Then, as a demographer and social scientist I will comment on some of these issues and hope to clarify them. Second is to present some of the main features of the macro-demography of Turkey. The account is unavoidably quantitative, but I hope digestible even by those who have aversions to numerical analysis. When the truly large changes in the size and age structure of the population are seen, important questions about the effect of these changes on other fields arise, and it is interesting to think about them. Third, the urbanization of Turkey is one of the central and most important changes in the demographic structure of the society during the last 40 years. I mention its characteristics along with a brief look at the effects on the demography of Istanbul.

The Tanzimat reform period, initiated with the Gülhane edict of 1839 and continuing up until the Ottoman-Russian war of 1876, was an important stage in the reorganization of the provincial administration of the Ottoman Empire. In order to increase state control, the modernizing and centralizing Tanzimat reforms addressed several areas of administration including the formation of a central bureaucracy, regulation of tax collection, and the pursuit of social and economic development in the Ottoman provinces.

This paper investigates the impact of developments in Turkish migration management policy and changes in management of the Greek-Turkish border on border deaths prior to the 2015 mass inflow of refugees. As the locus of multiple and sustained Frontex operations, as well as several autonomous major changes in relevant policies and practices over the 2000–2014 period, the Greek-Turkish border can serve as a post hoc laboratory for analyzing the implications of EU-influenced migration and border management for deaths on the border. We conclude that a chaotic mix of national politics, policy development and law enforcement practices, flexible smuggling networks, and Frontex operations contributed to the mass inflows of 2015–2016 and ensured mass casualties.

One prominent intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, argued that the new Republic should be “a Republic of fine arts.” Indeed, the early Republican project in Turkey perceived culture and art as media through which the Republic could not only represent its achievements but also “create” itself. The present study focuses on the cultural policies and elite perceptions of culture during the single-party regime in Turkey. More specifically, it looks into the developments that took place in the plastic arts and in elite approaches towards aesthetics. This is done in order to shed light on young Turkey's cultural modernization. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and power, this discussion stands at the intersection of political studies and cultural history.