How are Turkey's insecurities relevant to the analysis of its international relations? While it is interesting to look at how particular security concerns have affected Turkey's foreign policies at various moments in history, this article will take a different route. Following the distinction that David Campbell has drawn between “Foreign Policy” (through which others are rendered “foreign) and “foreign policy” (through which relations with others are managed), the article will explore how Turkey's insecurities have shaped a Foreign Policy that rests on the West/non-West divide. While the literature has analyzed specific acts of foreign policy and how they were crafted in response to specific military insecurities, the role that Turkey's non-military and non-specific insecurities have played in shaping its international relations has remained understudied. Thus, the literature has not been able to fully account for the centrality of Turkey's western orientation to its security. The argument here proceeds in three steps: First, the article draws attention to the necessity of looking at non-material as well as material insecurities in designing research on foreign policy. Second, it illustrates this necessity by focusing on the case of Turkey's foreign policy. Thirdly, in view of this second point the article highlights the centrality of Turkey's western orientation (i.e., its Foreign Policy) to its security, more persuasively than studies that exclusively focus on the material aspects of security.

The Alevist movement developed almost simultaneously in Turkey and among Turkish migrants, but it is structured and acts quite differently in these distinct, albeit related, political spaces. This comparative empirical study tries to explain the differences in the discourses and the success of Alevist movements in Turkey and Germany by relating them to the broader institutional and discursive contexts within which they are embedded. Alevist movements are incorporated differently in state policies directed to claim-makers and consequently possess different discursive and institutional resources. Spatially bounded institutional contexts and political agendas frame the discourse and strategies of Alevist claim-making, and result in divergent developments. It is thus necessary to disentangle the multiple levels of claim-and policy-making involved (local, national and supranational), and to analyze their relationships and possible articulations. ‘Transnational’ mobilization has often been understood as a mere continuation of mobilization at home or, oppositely, as its driving force. This paper questions the continuity between mobilizations at home and abroad, and argues that mobilization in migration entails specific dynamics, which may not be re-imported home.

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

One of the important consequences of the end of the Cold War has been the growing impact that ethnicity has had on the domestic politics of countries as well as international politics. An area that has been deeply affected by ethnopohtics is the Balkans. The collapse of communism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia have led to tremendous instability and ethnic strife in the Balkans. Turkey's domestic politics as well as its foreign policy have been deeply affected by these developments. One reason for this can be attributed to the fact that in Turkey there are large numbers of people of Balkan descent.

As the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans began to contract, large numbers of people who identified themselves with the Empire steadily migrated to Thrace and Anatolia. They were mostly the descendants of Turks who had settled in various parts of the Balkans during the past centuries (Karpat 1985, ch.4). Although there are no exact figures, one source puts the size of this migration between late 1870s and early 1920s at as high as 1,445,000 (Eren 1993, p. 298). In spite of this massive migration many Turkish and Muslim communities were left behind in various parts of the Balkans after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The modern Turkish State has continued to allow members of these communities to migrate and settle in Turkey.

This article examines how the labor market in seasonal migrant work in agriculture in Turkey has changed with the influx of refugees from Syria. Based on both qualitative and quantitative fieldwork in ten provinces of Turkey, the article discusses precarity in seasonal migrant work in agriculture and the impact of the entry of refugees on this labor market. The analysis of precariousness of both Turkish-citizen migrant workers and refugees suggests that precarity is a relational phenomenon. The multifaceted vulnerabilities of groups in the lower echelons of the labor market resonate with one another and the adverse incorporation of vulnerable groups into the labor market pushes the market in a more insecure and informal direction.

In the last three decades, the Turkish economy has become much more open and market-oriented. This paper provides an account of the changes in the underlying economic institutions that have accompanied this transformation. In particular, it assesses whether or not new economic institutions have emerged that constrain the discretionary powers of the executive in the area of economic policy and whether institutional change has resulted in a more rule-based and transparent policy framework. The story that broadly emerges is that the first two decades of the neoliberal era were predominantly a period of increased discretion at the expense of rules. By contrast, after the crisis of 2000-2001 one witnesses a substantial delegation of decision-making power to relatively independent agencies, and the establishment of rules that constrain the discretion of the executive. But this transformation is not uniform across sectors, and there are divergences between the de jure rules and their de facto implementation. Moreover, there are also examples that do not fit the general trend, especially in the case of the construction industry. Finally, recent signs suggest that the government may be having second thoughts about the “excessive” independence of regulatory and policy making bodies.

Much of the discussion today concerning economic development is confined to the polar opposites of the private market and centralized bureaucratic intervention. The dominant paradigm in economics nowadays bluntly claims that state economic interventionism strangles the economy and hinders the development of productive forces. Such a view leads to the neoconservative fallacy in politics that privatizing the public enterprises and rolling back the frontiers of the state will somehow “unstrangle” the economy.

The paper discusses the main characteristics of Turkey's experience of neoliberal industrialization since 1980. We suggest that Turkey has been a “successful follower” in the sense that it has achieved structural transformation in manufacturing output and exports, while its mode of articulation with the global economy has remained intact. To follow our premise, we first provide a comparative overview of the dynamics of growth, productivity, employment and trade in the post-1980 period. We focus on the manufacturing industry because it has evolved as the leading sector in the restructuring of the economy away from domestic demand-oriented import substitution towards export orientation and integration with global production networks. To analyze the direction of structural change in a comparative perspective, we also offer a synopsis of divergent patterns of development in Turkey and Korea. Our brief comparison emphasizes that, while Korea has rapidly changed the structure of its industry and mode of articulation with the world economy with the sense of direction provided by a pro-active state and a far-reaching industrial policy, Turkey has remained a follower ever trying to reach its moving target.

Migration has been among the most decisive influences shaping contemporary German society, deeply influencing not only economics and demography but also societal discourse and political practice. Legal issues concerning foreigners and immigration have been hotly debated in German society and have played a central role in many elections at both federal and provincial levels. Recognition is an issue at the heart of these concerns. How are migrants viewed in Germany, as “immigrants” or as “foreigners”? As individuals who form a legitimate part of German society, or who have overstayed their temporary “invitation”? Who contribute to the economy and to public welfare, and or who live at the expense of German society? Who are essentially alien to German society and can at best achieve a liminal state of betweenness, or who actively and self-consciously assume a diversity of positions at all levels of society?

In this review article I classify the literature on the Turkish political regime during Justice and Development Party rule as two waves of studies, and a potential third wave. The first wave was prevalent at least until the Gezi uprisings in 2013. I argue that, in this wave, the main debate was between two rival and largely culturalist perspectives with conceptual toolkits that tended to interpret regime change through the lens of social transformations. I also maintain that scholarly works written from the hegemonic perspective of this wave, utilizing center–periphery and state–society dichotomies, and a narrow range of concepts from the democratization literature (from defective democracy to democratic consolidation), have misidentified/misinterpreted burgeoning autocratization in Turkey as democratization, albeit with problems. The Gezi uprisings brought to the fore already existing authoritarian features of the Turkish political regime and led to the second wave of studies. In the second wave, the focus was on naming Turkey’s new political regime as a diminished subtype of authoritarianism, and thick descriptions of different facets of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. Finally, I suggest that there is a need for a third wave that builds on recent studies and focuses on explaining Turkey’s autocratization process and democratic breakdown, as well as the impact of autocratization on other aspects of Turkish politics and society.

This paper examines the “social development” practices carried out within the framework of the Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi or GAP) in Turkey in the 1990s. In its initial phase, GAP was a state-run regional development project in southeast Anatolia which consisted of massive infrastructural investments. But beginning in the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, the scope of GAP expanded to include a set of social projects. The emergence and transformation of the notion of social development within GAP constitute the major focus of this study.

Following the victory of the Kurdish party DTP (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, Democratic Society Party) in Turkey's southeastern provinces in the local elections of March 2009, Turkey witnessed the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) government's Kurdish initiative, the closure of the victorious Kurdish party, and waves of arrests of Kurdish activists and politicians. This rush of action constituted a renewed effort to contain and roll back the political and societal influence of the Kurdish movement. But what is it exactly that the government and the state were attempting to contain, and why? This article considers the recent moves of the ruling AKP, the judiciary, and the Turkish Armed Forces in regard to the “Kurdish problem” in Turkey's southeast, interpreting them as different responses to the regional success of the Kurdish movement.

In the context of the series of civil wars that have struck the Middle East since the 1980s, the politico-economic changes in the post-Soviet geography of Eastern Europe and the Russian states, and the continuous turmoil in those parts of Africa and Asia where access to Turkish soil has been possible, Turkey emerged as a regional hub for receiving continuous flows of forced migration. As suggested by ample evidence in recent work on migration flows into Turkey, many of these “irregular migrants,” “stateless peoples,” or “asylum seekers” eventually become continuously employed under very unstable circumstances, thus fitting into the definition of the “precariat” or precarious proletariat. This paper examines the context within which such pervasive precarity takes root, directly affecting vulnerable groups such as the Syrian forced migrants arriving in Turkey in successive waves. The marked qualities of the Syrian case in terms of social precarity, combined with the degrees of disenfranchisement and economically precarious conditions for survival, indicates an institutionalized paradigm shift in the Turkish state’s management of irregular migration.

The process of contemporary globalization in its most general form involves a tension between universalism and particularism (see Robertson, 1992, pp. 8-61). On the one hand, with Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history thesis” which suggests universalization of liberal democracy, along with the globalization of free market ideology, the dissolution of differences into sameness can be said to mark an emergence of cultural homogenization. On the other hand, it can be suggested that particularistic conflicts have begun to dictate the mode of articulation of political practices and ideological/discursive forms in global relations, which draws our attention to the tendency towards cultural heteroge-nization. Arjun Appadurai asserts in this context that “the central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization”, or, as he puts it:

the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular (Appadurai, 1990, p. 17).

According to the deputy chief of the General Staff and other Turkish officers, it is hoped eventually to make the Tunçeli [Tunceli] region into a “second Switzerland,” as it is extremely beautiful. It appears to me, however, that its inaccessibility and the difficulties which visitors experience while travelling in Turkey will be considerable obstacles to the realisation of this dream.

A. Ross, Military attaché to the British representative in Turkey, 5 September 1938

The Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) is arguably the largest regional development project ever witnessed in Turkey. Begun in the 1970s, GAP initially aimed primarily at the construction of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and of extensive irrigation networks to produce hydroelectric energy and water 1.8 million hectares of land in southeastern Turkey. Later, the scope of GAP broadened significantly as it became a more ambitious and comprehensive scheme of modernization and transformation. Following this expansion, the multidimensionality of GAP and its multifaceted implications became clearer at both the national and international level. The project grew more visible and influential not only in political and public discourses, but also in the GAP region itself. Despite these developments, however, the question of how the project’s characteristics, vocabulary, rationales, and mechanisms have changed since its inception remains underdiscussed. This article asks what GAP was in the past and what it has more recently become. It examines the gradual transformation of GAP over forty years by specifically taking into account the continuities and ruptures in development discourse, theory, and practice since the 1950s. In this way, the article aims to provide a new perspective regarding the stages through which the project has passed to reach its current form.

Turkey's activism in Africa has been extensively noted. It has been argued that non-state actors like business and civil society organizations take part in Turkeys Africa initiative. Nevertheless, state/non-state interaction in Turkey's foreign policy implementation has not been accounted for in theoretical terms in Turkish foreign policy literature. This paper combines post-international theory and foreign policy implementation in looking at Turkey's foreign policy towards sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that adapting to the multi-centric world, the Turkish government has moved beyond conventional state-to-state dealings in implementing its foreign policy and increasingly relies on the cooperation of non-state actors.

This paper focuses on the everyday life experiences of the post-1980 generation in Turkey–a generation stigmatized for being depoliticized and apathetic. Rather than accepting this stigmatizing view, however, this analysis aims to better understand young people's actual lived experiences. To do so, it adopts the concept of “necessary conformism” developed in previous empirical research. This concept offers an alternative analytical framework that transcends the engaged/disengaged or political/ unpolitical dichotomy in young people's social participation. Specifically, the application of this concept reveals that apathetic behavior may actually mask powerful discontent and suffering that can be expressed neither through conventional politics nor open resistance. The necessary conformism of young people, therefore, is not apathetic behavior, but the expression of an underlying discontent and often a hidden agony.

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of post-conflict processes in Turkey by focusing on the discourses and practices following the city of Mardin's bid to become a World Heritage Site. It intends to show how cosmopolitanism becomes a contested and dominant discourse for the locals of the city (Kurds, Arabs, and Syriac Christians) to re-articulate the history of the inter-communal relationships and to create a negotiating ground with the state, in order to recover from the moral and economic injuries of the military conflict during the 1990s. In doing so, the article discusses the effects of the accumulated events of past and present on the production of different forms of power relations between the state and its subject-citizens in the post-conflict context of Mardin, Southeastern Turkey.