Refugees of Turkish origin: "coerced immigrants" to Turkey since 1945

"While several studies (in both Turkish and English) have been made on migration to the Ottoman Empire from the Caucasus and the Balkans during the nineteenth century...very little systematic and comprehensive research on migration has been undertaken on the period since the establishment of the Turkish Republic. This article, which aims to partially fill the gap, is divided into three parts: the issue of national refugees (refugees of Turkish origin) in relation to Turkey's overall refugee policy; Turkey's policy towards national refugees; and the volume and causes of refugee migration to Turkey since 1945." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

Signing in the Seraglio: mutes, dwarfs and jestures at the Ottoman Court 1500-1700

Deaf people, known as 'mutes', worked in the Turkish Ottoman court from the fifteenth to the twentieth century in various roles along with dwarfs and other entertainers. Their signing system became popular, was used regularly by hearing people including successive Sultans, and was reportedly capable of expressing ideas of whatever complexity. The Ottoman court mutes' early achievements, at a time when deaf education and employment was barely considered feasible in Western Europe, have been obscured through literary critics' reactions against later travellers' stereotyping of Middle Eastern countries. Detailed, contemporary sixteenth and seventeenth century accounts of the mutes' activities and signing system are collated and appraised by modern linguistic and historiographical criteria.     

Fragments of Modernization: Domestic Spaces Indicating Traditional Dialects in a Modern Speech

This article examines the change in Turkish domestic space through modernization and, in particular, the artifact of lace, as a nonchanging object in Turkish home in its relationship with the “traditional” and the “modern” domestic settings. Thereby it investigates how traditional and modern settings are defined in Turkish society and, this leads to a further analysis of the modernization process in Turkey within the scope of Turkish house and its domestic settings. The aim of the article is to analyze lace as an agent, which is an actant of the change in domestic settings, to read the connection between the daily life of people and social lives of artifacts. Therefore, examining the dialogue of lace with traditional and modern domestic settings provides to deconstruct the network of the artifact, the house and the individual during the modernization process that Turkish society has been through. The theoretical perspective of the article relies on a material‐semiotic approach with an emphasis on Latour's Actor‐Network Theory and, the methodology of the article is based on ethnography: It includes observations and semi‐structured interviews conducted with people from different social environments focusing on the meaning and the use of lace in domestic environment.     

Turkish politics: raison d’État versus republic

Turkey is still far from having reached the level of advanced representative democracies. Turkish social and political life oscillate between the two modes of modern unfreedom: tryranny of majority and soft despotism. The logic of raison d'État is observed as the dominant state of mind in Turkey both in power circles and among the ruled. The article explores the literature of the sociology of Turkish politics paying special attention to the evolution of political vocabulary. After examining the impacts of the latest developments and considering contemporary challenges of authoritarianism, it argues that a Tocquevillian tension of freedom/unfreedom is shaping the framework of Turkish politics.     

Haitian emigration in the early twentieth century

"Standard migration theories see receiving countries as the dynamic agent [pulling] migrants to them. These theories, while useful for explaining many cases, appear inadequate for the case of labor migration from Haiti to Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. This article examines this history and offers an alternative theoretical framework for explaining this migration flow. It is argued that the prime cause of migration from Haiti is factors in the sending country."     

Refugee movements and Turkey

There has been a long tradition in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic of receiving refugees. There were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, Hungarians and Poles fleeing revolts in 1848-9, and those of Turkish descent and usually from the Balkans. Concurrent with this trend is the history of refugees and immigrants leaving Turkey, such as many Armenians, Greeks and Jews leaving at the turn of the century, and after 1923 and the Treaty of Lausanne. Little is currently published on the topic. This article defines a refugee; provides an overview of the refugee problems of the 1980's due to Bulgarian, Kurdish, and Turkish refugees; and the legal and political aspects. As a country of origin, there is discussion of the political and economic aspects of Turkish asylum seekers in Europe. The potential refugee flows to and from Turkey are also examined. I) For this study, refugees are victims of political violence and are persecuted for political or religious beliefs, ethnic or racial background, or war. In Turkey, there are national refugees, international refugees outside the Convention, and UNHCR Convention refugees. During the 1980's all 3 groups were arriving: from eastern Europe, Iranian Kurds, Iraqis, and ethnic Turks from Bulgaria and Afghanistan. The Turkish restricted acceptance of the 1951 Convention on Refugees creates serious humanitarian and security consequences for refugees other than those from eastern Europe and of Turkish ethnicity. Political considerations play an important role in treatment where security threats outweigh humanitarian need. The case is given for Kurdish refugees. II) Asylum seekers from Turkey in Western Europe was determined between 1986-90 to be 185,000 from applications. These figures have risen steadily due to the political instability and military activity of areas bordering Iraq and Syria, the Emergency Region. In addition there are economic and employment problems, and there has been a suspension of human rights. Europe in return has tightened legislation and procedures to differentiate economically motivated refugees from authentic political asylum seekers. Further research is needed to investigate refugee problems. Further refugees may come due to the promotion of a Black Sea Cooperation Region and easier crossings of borders to the former Soviet Republics. Ethnic Turks in Moldavia or Romania or Bulgaria may leave due to unrest. Factors affecting asylum seekers are improvements in Turkey's human rights record, repeal of bans of the Kurdish language, completion of the South Eastern Development Project, and the European government policy on asylum.     

The crisis of the state in a globalizing world

Abstract

The sovereign territorial state now appears to have been a contingent product of a particular time and space—early modern Europe. In fact, it is a very distorted view of even the Westphalian era not to recognize that it was always at least as much about empires as it was about states. Looking back, the entire Westphalian era is but a small slice of human history that itself has been quite varied and is still in transition—if not transformation—in our present globalizing era. The state is increasingly challenged and enfeebled today, and the world is witnessing a widespread crisis and decentralization of authority. Actors other than states have more and more influence and control over specific issues, but still are a long way from enjoying the legitimacy established states once had.

Remarks for a Plenary Roundtable at the First Global International Studies Conference, Istanbul Bilgi University, 24–27 August 2005, with H. N. Süleyman Demirel, former President of the Republic of Turkey, and chaired by Prof. Dr Ilter Turan, President of the Turkish International Studies Association. These remarks reflect a perspective on global politics developed by Professor Ferguson in collaboration with Prof. Richard W. Mansbach, Iowa State University, USA.     

The Enlightenment, Greek Civilization and the Ottoman Empire: Reflections on Thomas Hope's Anastasius

Abstract This paper addresses the widespread belief in Europe in the late eighteenth century that without a Greek revival in art, architecture, and philosophy, the rejuvenation of European civilization would never be complete. This intellectual tradition, which is commonly referred to as Philhellenism, sought to rescue the Greek civilization from the Turkish rule. However, the Greeks turned out to be too poor, too religious, and too well integrated into the Ottoman society to respond to the call of the European intellectuals. This essay examines the source and implications of this clash between the enlightenment's idealized Greeks and the real Greeks of eastern Mediterranean through a close reading of Anastasius: Memoirs of a Greek that was written by Thomas Hope at the close of the eighteenth century.     

Fingerprinting and Biopolitical Police Surveillance in Turkey

This paper problematises the 2007 amendments to Article 5 of the Police Powers and Duties Law (PPDL) in Turkey that categorises all citizens as ‘potential suspects’ through fingerprinting technology. The amended article requires everyone to submit fingerprint samples when applying for certain official documents such as driver's licences, passports, and ID cards. Consequently, the result has been dramatic: the police have so far proactively recorded more than 60 million people's fingerprints in the process of issuing these documents. Yet, there has been no research into this phenomenon. This paper suggests that this sort of biometric police surveillance is not a recent development, rather part of a long tradition within policing ‘Turkish’ national interests. Following Foucault's genealogical methodology, the paper argues that the governability of a large heterogeneous population across a vast territory has always demanded biometric policing technologies, addressing biopolitical proximity between the capacity building of modern security apparatus and identifying the unknown masses. Studying the historical data comparatively reveals that fingerprinting first started with recording exceptional groups such as criminals and convicts in Europe, while from the late Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, large sections of the population have always persistently been targeted by police regulations.     

More than Subversion: Four Strategies for the Dominated

This article asks what strategies are available to dominated actors in fields of cultural production. Using archival and biographical materials on Ottoman/Turkish women intellectuals, we show that they effectively used, depending on their social and cultural capital and their past practices, at least four strategies. Apart from the well-theorized strategy of subversion, they could also deploy acquiescence, collaboration, and defiance. These four strategies, we argue, constitute a two-dimensional space defined by loyalty vs. resistance on one hand and the overtness vs. covertness of loyalty or resistance on the other. While much of this space is best understood in terms of reciprocal social exchange, the assumptions of exchange break down in the case of overt resistance, showing that strategy goes beyond negotiation and that the understanding of power as always-already implicated with resistance has limits.     

Reluctant Militants: Colonialism,Territory, and Sanusi Resistance on the Ottoman-Saharan Frontier

Libya's enigmatic Sanusi brotherhood has been the subject of perennial debate since its emergence in Ottoman Cyrenaica in the mid nineteenth century, becoming a screen upon which apologists and detractors could project their own political anxieties and desires. For European critics, the brotherhood embodied the irrationality and fanaticism of the Islamic East. Its networks in North and Central Africa constituted an obstacle to their expansionist designs, while Sanusi prestige throughout the Muslim world rendered the brotherhood a threat to the entire colonial order of things. Nationalist historiography has generally endorsed this view, albeit with a positive valence, characterizing the Sanusiyya as an anticolonial social movement. Meanwhile, modern critical scholarship has tried to impose order on the chaos of the turn-of-the-century Sahara by assigning to the fraternity the role of a “proto-state.” This article proposes a new framework for understanding the history and sociology of the Sanusi. Drawing on theorists of subaltern resistance such as James Scott and Michael Adas—alongside Ottoman, British, French, and Italian primary sources—I demonstrate that the brotherhood began its life as an inward-looking Islamic social justice movement with little evident interest in state building or the geopolitical controversies of the moment. I coin the term “reluctant militants” to describe its mercurial trajectory from frontier evangelism to armed struggle in response to French and Italian colonial encirclement. This process culminated in the Long War of 1911–1931, during which the Sanusiyya played a critical part in the struggles over post-Ottoman reconstruction, from the Maghreb to Anatolia.     

Framing Sectarianism in the Middle East

This paper argues that a long view perspective of contemporary sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Islam in the Middle East could be read on the background of earlier forms of sectarianism going back to the 19^th and 20^th century history of the region. Such an approach would disentangle sectarianism from primordial narratives as an intrinsic problem of Islam going back to the early schism of the 7^th century and place it in social formations and social practices, and link it to the emergence of sectarianism during the Ottoman age of reforms. It would explicit arguments that link sectarianism with modernism, discussing how the emergence of modern, secular institutions that were based in early-modern millet system led to sects and sectarianism. The outcome of this approach is conceptualization of sect and sectarianism, its categorization, and confronting it with other modern narratives of the history of the Middle East.     

NEGOTIATING STATE PROVISION: State–Citizen Encounters in the Aftermath of the İzmit Earthquake

The İzmit Earthquake (August 17, 1999) was the most destructive disaster in the history of the Turkish Republic and a major trial for the Turkish state. This article draws on the sociological literature on social citizenship and welfare states to examine the state provision process that followed the disaster. On the basis of ethnographic data collected in the aftermath of the earthquake, I describe how state provision was shaped by the everyday encounters between state agents and survivors, and uncover the cultural repertoire employed in these encounters. I argue that state provision in Turkey is governed by the paternalistic state discourse. I then discuss the historical roots and implications of this finding.     

High level manpower movements in Northwest Europe and the role of careers: an explanatory framework

"This article works towards a theoretical explanatory framework for analyzing the geographical patterns of labor flows between the industrial countries of Western Europe. The framework proposed is based on the disaggregated nature of the modern labor market, in which specialist skills and training result in a workforce segmented into self-contained noncompeting groups. It is applied to the migration within Northwest Europe of high level manpower, especially those moving within multinational organizations."     

Turkey's Education Policies towards Syrian Refugees: A Macro‐level Analysis

This study discusses the transformation of Turkey's education policies towards Syrian refugees in three major stages. It argues that education policies in these different stages reflect the general perception of and political vision for Syrian refugees by the Turkish state, and that they are also instruments through which this political vision is materialized and declared. The remarkable evolution of Turkey's education policies towards Syrian refugees, from early policies that aimed at temporary accommodation to later policies that have aimed at full integration, needs to be understood in this framework of a changing vision in addition to the security concerns. Lastly, the article argues that, while the current strategy of complete integration of Syrians into formal education system is certainly positive, it also brings about a number of significant challenges related to the political and legal context in Turkey that will have to be handled in its realization.     

A TALE OF TWO VISIONS: Representing the Orientialized West,Representing the Orient

Starting in the eighteenth century, the West’s interest in the exotic was matched with a rival gaze from the East. The fluid seams where the so-called dualities met have generated powerful spaces of tension: Occident, Orient; master, colonized; and public, private. The elite Muslim Ottoman women’s agency in dress via adoption of corsets, tight-fitting dresses and the adoption of overstuffed seating furniture modeled after the Turkish divan in the West resulted in an unprecedented conflict between furniture, the body and the dress. The inclusion of the body and its dress in the discourse helps to construct an interior design theory that deals with the immediate, experiential role of the body unlike the abstract body in space, which served architectural theory for centuries. Furthermore, the body fosters social manifestation of spaces. This is the fascinating story of a cultural exchange between women: an exchange of divans and corsets.     

Modernity as Masquerade: Representations of Modernity and Identity in Turkish Humour Magazines

This article aims at an alternative analysis of Turkish “modernity” by analysing the representations in a popular humour magazine. This study departs from the idea that representations in “low” discourses in Turkey can provide us with a text other than those of the official-dominant discourses in order to see how the certainty and positivity attributed to the modern identity in the dominant ideology is elaborated, demystified, and subverted as well as contained. Essentially, in the magazine, one of the main sources of humour derives from the clash of two main identities, between those who are modern, civil, urban, and effeminate and those who are traditional, uncivil, rural, and super-masculine. In the modern urban space, the modern and traditional become a stake in the power struggles between groups. This struggle operates through tastes, styles, and the body, which are at the same time means of identity construction as well as marks of identity. This duality and the concomitant dualities have come to structure all significatory practices to such an extent that everything gets symbolically overloaded by these series of dualities. In this struggle, the essence and appearance duality is the main framework within which Turkey's modernity and identity are represented. “Modernity” is signified as a masquerade, a play of appearances and a stake in the power struggles among groups rather than as a measure of progress. Bodies, sexuality, and masculinity become the nodal points of the expression of identity struggles, not only of social groups but also of the Turkish nation.     

The crisis of westernization in Turkey: Islamism versus nationalism

This article investigates the rise of the Islamist political movement in Turkey which it argues is a product of the frustration of the promises of Westernist modernization and, thus, represents a crisis of the Kemalist ideology and a critique of modernism. The Kemalist revolution transformed the Ottoman empire from an Islamic empire to a national state, and its legimitizing ideology from Islam to nationalism. Soon after the creation of the Republic the Kemalist project came to be identified with nationalist‐statist developmentalism. But when this development model exhausted its initial rapid‐growth capability, a radical restructuring was imposed. With the help of a military regime installed in 1980, the Turkish development trajectory turned from a nationalist‐statist strategy to a transnational and market‐oriented one. The decline of nationalist and statist policy also brought about a crisis in the popular ideology which supported nationalist‐statist developmentalism. The state could no longer claim the loyalty of its people. Secularist legitimation was undermined together with the collapse of the conviction that the state would deliver and that the common national interest of development would be protected. The Islamist movement came as a response to the crisis of dependent modernization in Turkey. In the eighties, a large marginalized and dispossessed segment in the metropolitan centres joined the petite bourgeoisie of provincial towns in support of Islamist politics. In addition to these social classes, there is also a new social segment in the leadership position of the current religious radicalism: university students and upwardly mobile young professionals. In this connection, it has to be emphasized that the Islamist critique coincides with the post‐modernist critique of Western culture, but, unlike the latter, offers a concrete political project.     

Networks,firms and upgrading within the blue‐jeans industry: evidence from Turkey

Abstract Since the late 1980s, industry characteristics, country‐specific contingencies and international conditions have come together and turned Turkey into a major exporter of jeans. It now has a 6.5 per cent share of the world's market. In this article, I explore this transformation and point out that it has created, especially in the 1990s, significant upgrading opportunities for Turkish firms. A large number of Turkish manufacturing firms are now full‐package contractors for a diversified list of brand‐name jeans. Some of these manufacturers are also experimenting with functional upgrading by developing their own brands and selling them abroad. Local firms, despite their subordinate position in the value chain, can go beyond low value‐added manufacturing and encroach on the core competencies of lead firms.     

Mental health social work in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: challenges and opportunities for developing practice

Drawing on their experience of mental health social work in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the authors examine the impact of current legislative and policy change in both jurisdictions. The paper applies Lorenz's theoretical framework to develop a comparative analysis of how global and country specific variables have interacted in shaping mental health social work. The analysis identifies linkages between factors and indicates similarities and differences in mental health social work practice. The paper highlights emerging discourses in this field and explores the impact on practice of developments such as de-institutionalisation, community care, and ‘user rights’ versus ‘public protection’. The article concludes with a review of key challenges facing social workers in both jurisdictions and identifies opportunities for developing mental health social work in ways that can positively respond to change and effectively address the needs of mental health service users and their carers. The analysis provides an opportunity to evaluate Lorenz's theoretical framework and the paper includes a brief critical commentary on its utility as a conceptual tool in comparative social work.