Turkeys New State in the Making

Turkeys New State in the Making
Author: Pınar Bedirhanolu
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-08-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786998726

Since the Gezi uprisings in June 2013 and AKP’s temporary loss of parliamentary supremacy after the June 2015 general elections, sharp political clashes, ascending police operations, extra-judicial executions, suppression of the media and political opposition, systematic violation of the constitution and fundamental human rights, and the one-man-rule of President Erdoğan have become the identifying characteristics of Turkish politics. The failed coup attempt on 15th July 2016 further impaired the situation as the government declared emergency rule at the end of which a political regime defined as the “Presidential Government System” was established in July 2018. Turkey’s New State in the Making examines the historical specificities of the ongoing AKP-led radical state transformation in Turkey within a global, legal, financial, ideological, and coercive neoliberal context. Arguing that rather than being an exception, the new Turkish state has the potential to be a model for political transformations elsewhere, problematizing how specific policies the AKP adapted to refract social dispositions have been radically redefining the republican, democratic and secular features of the modern Turkish state.

The Making of Modern Turkey

The Making of Modern Turkey
Author: Ugur Ümit Üngör
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 019164076X

The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur Ümit Üngör demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.

Abdullah Gül and the Making of the New Turkey

Abdullah Gül and the Making of the New Turkey
Author: Gerald MacLean
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178074563X

Drawing on original research, including personal interviews with President Abdullah Gül as well as his wife and close circle of colleagues and friends, this fascinating account offers readers a portrait of a man who has been at the heart of the political, economic and cultural developments that have brought Turkey to international prominence in recent years. In 2002 Abdullah Gül’s democratically-elected party gained power and challenged Turkey’s republican and secular legacy, and shortly after Gül led Turkey’s attempts to receive an accession date for the European Union. In 2007 he became the first president of Turkey with a background in Islamic politics – causing political commentators to hail his victory as a “new era in Turkish politics” – and he has, ever since, been a major figure in Turkey’s diplomatic relationships in the Middle East and international political arena. Gerald MacLean’s absorbing biography of this significant politician throws light on important episodes of Turkey’s recent history.

The Making of Modern Turkey

The Making of Modern Turkey
Author: Ahmad Feroz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2002-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134898916

Textbook providing a thorough assessment of the political, social and economic processes which led to the formation of a new Turkey; socio-economic change is emphasised throughout.

Personal States

Personal States
Author: Catherine Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780199251797

The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the material organization of state factory compounds, state personnel encountered in the course of everyday life, and images of the family structure. By also exploring notions of state and personhood within the highest echelons of the administration itself, Alexander shows how ideas of 'the state' recede once one is actually 'within'. For officials the state becomes other institutions and Ministries with which they have little contact.

Building Modern Turkey

Building Modern Turkey
Author: Zeynep Kezer
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2015-12-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 082298119X

Building Modern Turkey offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey's transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Zeynep Kezer argues that the deliberate dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and the spatial practices that ensued were as integral to conjuring up a sense of national unity and facilitating the operations of a modern nation-state as were the creation of a new capital, Ankara, and other sites and services that embodied a new modern way of life. The book breaks new ground by examining both the creative and destructive forces at play in the making of modern Turkey and by addressing the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences. By considering spatial transformations at different scales—from the experience of the individual self in space to that of international geopolitical disputes—Kezer also illuminates the concrete and performative dimensions of fortifying a political ideology, one that instills in the population a sense of membership in and allegiance to the nation above all competing loyalties and ensures its longevity.

Collective and State Violence in Turkey

Collective and State Violence in Turkey
Author: Stephan Astourian
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2020-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789204518

Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.

Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey

Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey
Author: Sibel Bozdogan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295800186

In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.

Faces of the State

Faces of the State
Author: Yael Navaro-Yashin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 069121428X

Faces of the State is a penetrating study of the production of a state-revering political culture in the public life of 1990s Turkey. In this new contribution to the anthropology of the state, Yael Navaro-Yashin brings recent poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on the study of the political. Delving deeper than studies of nationalist discourse that would focus on consciously articulated narratives of political identity, the author explores sites of "fantasy" in the public-political domain of Istanbul. The book focuses on the conflict over secularism in the aftermath of an Islamist victory in the city's municipalities. In contrast with studies that would problematize and objectify religious movements, the author examines the agency of secularists under a state widely known for its "secularist" policies. The complexity and dynamism of the context studied moves well beyond scholarly distinctions between "secularity" and "religion," as well as "state" and "society." Here, secularism and Islamism emerge as different guises for a culture of statism where people from "society" compete to claim "Turkish culture" for themselves and their life practices. With this work that stretches the boundaries of regionalism, the author situates her anthropological study of Turkey not only in scholarship on the Middle East, but also in the broader problem of thinking "Europe" anew.