The allied occupation of İstanbul and the construction of Turkish national identity in the early twentieth century

This article tells the story of the construction of Turkish national identity in the early republican era by addressing two canonical novels about occupied ?stanbul: Sodom ve Gomore (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmano?lu and Biz ?nsanlar (“We People”) by Peyami Safa. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkish nationalist intellectuals attempted to offer certain formulations and implemented various mechanisms to create a national self. The study aims to focus on the ways in which Karaosmano?lu and Safa create the new Turkish national identity and deals with the questions of how occupied ?stanbul was perceived by these intellectuals and how the memory of the Allied occupation of ?stanbul, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the National Liberation Struggle shaped Turkish elites’ self-identification as well as their formulation of the national identity.     

Militarisation of citizenship education curriculum in Turkey

In response to the United Nation’s (UN) Decade for Human Rights Education initiative, the Turkish Ministry of National Education changed the title of citizenship education courses from ‘Citizenship Studies’ to ‘Citizenship and Human Rights Education’ in 1995. However, this curriculum reform was overshadowed by the rise to power of a political Islamist party. The secularist military toppled the first Islamist party-led government in the name of preserving the principle of laicism. Announced after the 1997 coup, the main textbook for the citizenship and human rights education course showed a profound influence of the militaristic discourses as evidenced by the negative depiction of the Kurdish people and political Islamists and the hagiographic portrayal of Atatürk and the army. By drawing on interviews with key informants, archival/public policy documentation and textbooks, this paper argues that the curriculum reform began with the participation in the UN initiative ended with the military’s instrumentalisation of the subject because it was launched with no recognition of Turkey’s human rights and democracy problems.     

Rebels in Northern Uganda after their return to civilian life: between a strong we-image and experiences of isolation and discrimination

This article is based on biographical interviews and field research carried out in two adjacent regions of northern Uganda on local peace and post-war processes. It focuses on the situation of former rebel fighters following their return to civilian life. In the case of Acholiland, these are primarily former “child soldiers” of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army who were recruited by violent abduction; in West Nile they are primarily men who more or less voluntarily joined local rebel groups as adults. The following questions were investigated: How do rebels who have returned from the “bush” speak about their past and their present? What discourses do they confront within the groupings, or we-groups, to which they are regarded as belonging and whose collective knowledge they refer to? What is the nature of their present situation and how can it be socio- and psychogenetically explained and interpreted?     

From a cosmopolitan to a fascist land: Adriatic irredentism in motion

This article explores Adriatic irredentism, a complex political, cultural, and social movement, by specifically analyzing the unique role it played in the legitimization of Italian territorial claims over “language frontiers” such as Trieste and its hinterland. Through a close reading of first-hand sources, it examines how Italian irredentist intellectuals, public press, and associations purposefully utilized anti-Slav and anti-German arguments to shape public perception of both the Italian nation as well as Trieste’s Italian identity or “Italianità.” Although recent historiographical interpretations have emphasized continuities in local understandings of “Italianità,” this article examines the discontinuities in the debate over its identity. It suggests that although Italian identity was first conceived as an expression of cultural and linguistic autonomy within the broader intellectual framework of Adriatic multi-nationalism, this idea gradually vanished amidst the structural crisis triggered by the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 and then inexorably faded on the eve of the Great War. Thus, notions of Italian national identity took an exclusionary and sometimes xenophobic meaning that was publicly used by a wide set of political actors to justify the territorial reincorporation of the “unredeemed” land within the borders of the new Italian state. The fascist regime, especially, utilized Italianness to further its aggressive and chauvinist agenda toward the Adriatic borderland. Consequently, Italian language and culture became instruments as well as symbols of repression and imperialism that were used to fulfill the regime’s ambitions of “fascistization” of the Slavic population living in the region.     

Remembering and forgetting: the state policy of memorializing Stalin's repression in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

The general perception of Western analysts and observers is that the nation-states created as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union all treat the memory of the dark, repressive aspects of the Stalinist regime in public spaces as a symbolic element in the creation of a new post-Soviet identity [Denison, Michael. 2009. “The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan.” Europe-Asia Studies 61 (7): 1167–1187]. We argue that the government of Kazakhstan employs non-nationalistic discourse in its treatment of Stalinist victims’ commemoration in a variety of forms, through the creation of modern memorial complexes at the sites of horrific Soviet activity (mass burial places, labor camps, and detention centers), purpose-built museum exhibitions, and the commemorative speeches of its president and other officials. Kazakhstan's strategy in commemorating its Soviet past is designed to highlight the inclusiveness of repression on all peoples living in its territory at that time, not just Kazakhs, thereby assisting in bringing together its multinational and multiethnic society. Thus, the official stance treats this discourse as an important symbolic source of shaping the collective memory of the nation, based on “a general civil identity without prioritizing one ethnic group over another – a national unity, founded on the recognition of a common system of values and principles for all citizens” [Shakirova, Svetlana. 2012. “Letters to Nazarbaev: Kazakhstan's Intellectuals Debate National Identity.” February 7. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://postsovietpost.stanford.edu/discussion/letters-nazarbaev-kazakhstans-intellectuals-debate-national-identity].     

The Primordialisation of Ethnic Nationalism in Macedonia

Abstract

After the Greek veto on Macedonia’s NATO accession in 2008, the Macedonian government launched comprehensive policies to reconstruct the Macedonian ethno-national narrative as stretching back to ancient Macedonia. The ‘Skopje 2014’ project, which was a large-scale reconstruction of the capital city in neoclassical and baroque styles, as well as new educational and mass media campaigns claiming the continuous existence of the Macedonian nation since antiquity, were the cornerstones of the Gruevski government’s project. The so-called ‘antiquisation’ programme was both a domestic and international assertion of Macedonia’s name, identity and history amid Greek challenges and attempts to undermine Macedonia’s legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. The Skopje 2014 project increased tensions between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians in Macedonia, and also deepened divisions among Macedonians.     

Do Human Rights Require a Strong State?

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Biopolitics,borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben’s reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state’s borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign’s practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.     

Germans in Wrocław: “Ethnic minority” versus hybrid identity. Historical context and urban milieu

After 1945, German Breslau was transformed into Ur-Polish Wroc?aw at Stalin’s behest. Most of the remaining prewar population was expelled, and a stable population of a few hundred with German ethnic background is estimated to have lived in the city since then. This paper is based on qualitative analysis of 30 oral history interviews from among the self-defined German minority. It pays close attention to historical context, urban milieu, and salient narratives of identity as shaping forces, which include the suppression of German culture under Communism, prevalent intermarriage between Germans and Poles, and the city’s qualified reinvention as “multicultural” after Polish independence in 1989. Together with the group’s relatively small numbers, these narratives play out in their hybrid approach to ethnicity, often invoking blended cultural practices or the ambiguous geographical status of the Silesian region, to avoid choosing between “national” antipodes of “German” and “Polish.” The results follow Rogers Brubaker’s insight into ethnicity as an essentializing category used to construct groups where individual self-perception may differ; and the concept of “national indifference,” previously applied to rural populations. It also suggests we might better approach circumscribed “minority” identities such as these, by seeing them as a form of “sub-culture.”     

Soviet war memorials and the re-construction of national and local identities in post-communist Poland

This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country's past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.     

Art et artisanat en Afrique Noire: Problèmes d'une définition différentielle

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.     

Economic crisis and the crisis of national identity in Slovenia: toward a new notion of social order

This paper addresses the influence of the economic crisis on national identity in Slovenia. It first analyzes the creation of the contemporary national identity following independence in 1991 that was established in relation to a negatively perceived Balkan identity, which represented “the Other,” and in relation to a “superior” European identity that Slovenia aspired to. With the economic crisis, the dark corners of Slovenia’s “successful” post-socialist transition to democracy came to light. Massive layoffs of workers and the bankruptcies of once-solid companies engendered disdain for the political elites and sympathy for marginalized groups. The public blamed the elites for the country’s social and economic backsliding, and massive public protests arose in 2012. The aftermath of the protests was a growing need among the people for a new social paradigm toward solidarity. We show that in Slovenia the times of crisis were not times of growing nationalism and exclusion as social theory presupposes but, quite the contrary, they were times of growing solidarity among citizens and with the “Balkan Other.”     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

China's High Schoolers: Pro‐American Consumers or Nationalists?

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

The Trickle‐Down Olympics

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Rebuild China With an Olympic Amnesty

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

A Civil Society Emerges From the Earthquake Rubble

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Tibetans Are Looking to the Post‐Olympic Era

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

China's Youth: Ravenous for the West,With No Memory of the Past

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.