Struggling for the Kurdish vote: religion,ethnicity and victimhood in AKP and BDP/HDP rally speeches

This study explores the competition for Turkey's Kurdish vote through the instrumentalization of religion, ethnicity and victimhood in political competition. This becomes possible through the study of rally speeches of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – AKP), the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Bar?? ve Demokrasi Partisi – BDP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halklar?n Demokratik Partisi – HDP), in Turkey's June 2011 and June 2015 general elections. The AKP campaigns framed the resolution of the Kurdish issue along with an updated version of the ‘Turkish Islamic Synthesis’. The issue of ethnicity was toned down in contrast to the idea of common victimhood of pious Turkish and Kurdish Muslims in republican Turkey. On the other hand, the BDP/HDP moved from a more ethnic-oriented and exclusive identity approach in 2011 to a more inclusive, liberal and extrovert agenda based on a civic definition of Turkish national identity in 2015. Religion and victimhood appear as the two most enduring symbolic resources for political party mobilization.     

The aesthetics of minor intimacy: precarious attachments and queer feelings in the autobiographical fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This essay offers a new perspective on the queerness of the encounters between self and other in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction. It attends to the dynamics of openness and reservation, immediacy and mediation, desire and longing played out between Anya and Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and John and his female cousin, who is represented by the characters Agnes in Boyhood: A Memoir (1997), Ilse in Youth (2002), and Margot in Summertime (2009). Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of minor intimacy—which asks us to pay attention to encounters without a canon and to desires too elusive for heterosexual conventions— it offers a framework for uncovering modes of attachment in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction that do not obey the strictures of the couple form. I draw on queer studies on intimacy and phenomenological studies on emotions and embodiment to explore the modes of attachment between self and other.     

Fezzes in the river: identity politics and European diplomacy in the Middle East on the eve of World War II

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv's memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv's Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.     

E-government gateway project and authentication： The case of Turkey

Parallel to the advancements in information and communication technologies, certain risks and security problems also arise, one of which is the authentication problem. In order to control who can have access to information sources, it is of utmost importance to develop an advanced authentication mechanism. It is through this mechanism that one can protect personal information, and prevent unauthorized access to the information or services provided. Likewise, this mechanism can block unauthorized persons to change or release information that is not public. All the work being undertaken in this field can be named as access control. The concept of authentication is among those concepts that have been studied for a long time in Turkey in the context of rapidly growing e-transformation efforts. In the process of e-transformation, the transformation circle is completed by first defining the concept of modeling business processes, followed by the formation of automation process, and lastly, providing services in electronic medium.     

Civil and civic death in the new authoritarianisms: punishment of dissidents through juridical destruction,ethical ruin,and necropolitics in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Since the Turkish government’s recent turn to authoritarianism, tens of thousands of public dissidents and government critics have been subjected to dismissals and revocation of civic rights via emergency decrees. The victims call this process ‘civil death’. We aim to understand the logic behind this form of punishment in Turkey by examining the differential genealogy of civil death in the work of Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Ogilvie, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe. We demonstrate that a later form of civil death was used by totalitarian regimes in a process leading to the reduction of targeted individuals as ‘superfluous’ and as ‘living corpses’ in concentration camps. In these contexts, death became an instrument of biopolitical and necropolitical powers. We propose that although contemporary punishment of public dissidents in Turkey shares some similarities with these forms of civil death, it may more fittingly be identified as civic death. We argue that while civil death is based on the classical political right of the sovereign to ‘make die’ after first reducing targeted individuals to little more than living corpses, civic death is linked to the power of the sovereign to ‘let die’ through the exclusion of public dissidents from economic, social, and political life.     

Oslo and Its Aftermath: Lessons Learned from Track Two Diplomacy

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the violence that followed, many scholars have reflected upon the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Most of this analysis has focused on official negotiations without considering the substantial role that unofficial peace efforts have played in peacebuilding, both prior to and after Oslo. This article, in contrast, seeks to better understand the application of “track two” diplomacy to the Israeli–Palestinian case. It reports on a self‐reflection effort by numerous Israeli–Palestinian peace practitioners to better understand what has worked, what has not, and how new initiatives could be more effectively organized and carried out in the future. The research presented is based on an inventory of seventy‐nine track two projects that occurred between Israelis and Palestinians between 1992 and 2004, personal interviews with many of those who organized and oversaw these projects, and two focus group meetings that brought together a total of forty practitioners. In this article, we seek to better understand two issues: (1) how track two initiatives have changed in scope, organization, and intent; and (2) how track two practitioners have sought to disseminate their work beyond the participants of those initiatives. Our findings present an overall picture of the Israeli–Palestinian second track practice and identify a number of trends and common types of practice. Among the trends we have identified are the following: during the peace process years, more track two initiatives were undertaken with elite/professional participants than with representatives of the grassroots, but in the subsequent decade‐and‐a‐half, Israeli–Palestinian grassroots, track two initiatives gradually replaced senior‐level track two exchanges; most of the grassroots initiatives we studied were relationship focused, whereas those involving elite participants are outcome focused; the track two community subscribes to a set of theoretical propositions about which conditions and contexts facilitate the transmission of track two insights and ideas to the political process, but these propositions have yet to be validated; and track two specialists do little strategic planning about ways to most effectively transfer track two insights and ideas to the political process. Our research also identified four distinct, but not mutually exclusive, approaches to practice: the psychological, the constructivist, the capacity building, and the realistic interest.     

Alcohol and Drug Use in Young Apprentices: Effect of Social Control in the Family

In this research, social control used by the families of young apprentices related to certain deviant behaviors such as alcohol and drug use was examined. Finally it was found that most of the young people who use drugs and alcohol were battered frequently. The relationship between deviant acts of young people and social control used by their families was analyzed through theories concerning the socioeconomic status of family and the relations between family members.     

Fatal blunt trauma of the larynx in a child

We report an autopsy case of an 11-year-old girl who suffered mechanical asphyxia from falling off the metal bars in the playground. This autopsy case is interesting because of the atypical trauma and lesions. To our knowledge there has been no similiar published case reports in the forensic literature. The young age of the victim, the setting and the pattern of the injuries are rare in a fall at playground by a child.     

Determination of Changes in Crystal Violet and Phenoxyethanol (Dating Ink)

Ink dating is a significant problem in terms of forensic science. Ballpoint pens are generally used as writing tools on the documents. Aging is determination of the changes in dyes and solvents in the composition of ink over time by analytical methods. The evaporation of the solvents from the paper surface is faster than the decomposition process of the dyes. In this study, in 2017, we were asked by the court to determine whether the texts on the suspicious pages of an agenda dated 1996 were written within 2 years or earlier. Phenoxyethanol and dyes were examined in the composition of all suspected ink samples. The results show the determination of both the decomposition process of the dyes and the evaporation process of phenoxyethanol in the aging of the document entries written by ballpoint pen.     

Body height estimation based on dimensions of sacral and coccygeal vertebrae

This study is to evaluate whether it is possible to predict living stature from sacral and coccygeal vertebral dimensions. Individual vertebral body heights, sacral height (SH), and sacrococcygeal height (SCH) were recorded from the magnetic resonance images of 42 adult males. Sum of the heights of five sacral vertebrae (sigmaS), the first four coccygeal vertebrae (sigmaC), and the total height of the sacral and the first four coccygeal vertebrae together (sigmaSC) were also recorded. Linear regression equations for stature estimation were produced using the above mentioned variables. The regression equations were constructed and tested by using jack-knife procedure. Statistical analyses indicated that the combined variables (SH, SCH, sigmaS, sigmaC, sigmaSC) were more accurate predictors of stature than the heights of individual vertebrae. The results of the study pointed out that the equations derived from sacrococcygeal dimensions perform somewhat better than ones based on foot and head variables, but worse than those based on long-bone length. As a conclusion, the dimensions of sacral and coccygeal vertebrae could be used for stature estimation when long bones are not available.