Torn Turkey: more turbulence ahead

Hailing the victory of his party in recent local elections as a personal triumph, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan now appears set to run for the presidency and to seek to consolidate his rule by concentrating de facto political power in that office. But the depth of popular opposition to Erdogan poses a threat to his ambitions.     

NPT review: failure underlines challenges ahead

The recent deterioration in relations between Russia and the West was among a series of factors that had dampened hopes that the NPT RevCon could deliver meaningful progress on arms control. Nonetheless, nuclear-weapons states may now be convinced of the need to show greater awareness of the widespread impatience fuelling efforts to ban nuclear weapons.     

The challenge ahead: the state agenda for the coming years

The mid-1990s promise to be extremely challenging years as state leaders and institutions struggle to bring accountability and predictability back into their political systems. Faced with continuing budgets troubles, increasing demands for services and a shift of responsibility from the federal to the state level, the American states will be hard pressed to satisfy constituent needs or improve state services. However, the tough times may result in long-term improvement in state government, as administrators streamline agencies, legislators trim inefficient or redundant programs and state leaders generally seek new and cost effective solutions to social and economic problems.     

Pakistan: a more positive trajectory

The past 18 months have been an atypically salutary period for Pakistan. Democracy has deepened, civilian–military relations have been stable, the economy has grown and foreign relations have been conducted with relative maturity and civility. While Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif does face some political turbulence and the country's long-term challenges remain substantial, Pakistan's overall outlook is improving.     

Turkey: the attempted coup and its troubling aftermath

The military coup attempted in Turkey on 15 July 2016 fizzled out quickly. But President Tayyip Erdogan has accused a political rival, exiled Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, and his followers of engineering the coup without substantiation, and is using it as a pretext to purge the government, judiciary and military. This reaction could lead to sustained domestic instability that would strain Turkey's international relations, exacerbate its democratic deficit and damage its social fabric.     

Turkey and the Kurds

Turkey’s military is once again claiming new successes in its 13-year war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The armed forces increasingly recognise the need for social and economic measures to address the plight of the Kurdish population in south-east Turkey. Among Turkey’s political élite there is also some acceptance of the need for a political solution. But if the Army has become less obsessed with a purely military solution, it shows no willingness to make any concessions to the Kurds’ cultural and national aspirations. There thus appears little end in sight to an insurgency which is increasingly damaging Ankara’s relations with the West.     

State Reform in Turkey: Reasons, Needs and Strategies

The state structure in Turkey including all its branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) at both the national and local levels has been shown to be ineffective, even irrelevant, to the ingrained demographic, social, economic and political exigencies of the country. One of the main reasons behind this is the collapse of public finance. Conventional rhetoric limiting solutions to administrative reform fails to provide a sufficiently broad enough context within which public sector reform in Turkey can be discussed. Turkey's determination to become a full member of the EU also necessitates a comprehensive and radical overhaul of the Turkish public sector with respect to efficiency and productivity. Five main strategies are proposed to assist Turkey in overcoming its state governance predicament: initiating and carrying out a state-wide reform by employing modern principles of public management; understanding and solving the problem of internal and external debts; enhancing the conditions of governance; reintroduc-ing and strengthening the principle of meritocracy in public sector and cooperating more with the EU.     

Gezi Park Protests in Turkey: A Party Politics View

One year on from the widespread protests in Turkey, the question of why small environmental protests against the building of a shopping mall on Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul turned into the biggest example of mass civil movement in the republic's history remains unanswered. This article suggests that one can easily detect signs of instability and social unrest in the country long before these mass demonstrations took place. By analysing the evolution of the Turkish party system over the past decade, I argue that the political upheaval in the country is the result of a crisis of representation. This has two aspects: a high degree of polarisation has left certain segments of society unrepresented, while the AKP government has ceased to maintain the balance between responsiveness and responsibility.     

Federal Reserve transparency: The more things change, the more they stay the same?

The calculus of electoral politics and the central bank’s bureaucratic objectives can explain the recent trend toward greater Federal Reserve transparency and can shed light on the likelihood that this trend will continue. If incumbent politicians see no electoral advantage in pressuring the Fed to become still more transparent, and if the Fed sees no benefit to greater transparancy, then further changes in current practice are unlikely. Private sector agents will continue to face a significant degree of uncertainty about the Fed’s policy objectives and about the information that policymakers consider in the monetary policy decision process.     

War without end: the domestic economic fallout of empire

While the effects of the Bush doctrine on our relations in the world and our civil liberties at home have received widespread scrutiny, there has been relatively little attention paid to its effects on our domestic economy. This is surprising in light of Paul Kennedy's thesis that empires tend to overextend themselves militarily, depleting their revenue‐generating and productive capacities at home and making them vulnerable to decline in relation to nations whose economies are rising. This article brings together many threads of a discussion about the economic impacts of war that have been scattered across disciplines, buried in government documents and in the reports of government watchdogs groups, or are just beginning to emerge in the press, and suggests some areas for investigation that are being ignored. Far from “protecting our American way of life,” the garrison state the Bush administration is building may in fact be leading to our political and economic decline.