Turkey's Hydropolitics: Building Order in the Middle East

Water resources have evolved into a major tool for expanding a country's regional influence. The dynamic interactions of hydraulics strategies have thus been regarded as critical factors in Middle Eastern politics. As Turkey controls upstream water resources in the region, this study attempts to answer this question: What goals does Turkey pursue with its water-control policy? The article demonstrates that Turkey is seeking to become the dominant power in the Middle East by regulating hydropolitics.     

The Ankara Consensus: Islamists,Kemalists, and Why Turkey's Nationalism Remains Overlooked

Over the past decade scholarly consensus has moved away from viewing turmoil in Turkey as a product of religious–cultural incompatibility with modernization. Instead, scholars have shown that the rise of an Islamic elite has expanded democracy in Turkey, while often vexing the secularist elite. This article reviews the most important of the new scholarship, but criticizes it for inheriting the assumption that all events in Turkey somehow hinge upon Islamist–secularist antagonism. Alternatively, insights from sociology are employed to argue that domestic Turkish discord is intimately related to industrialization and democratization, and that excessive attention to supposedly religious conflict blinds much contemporary scholarship to the intolerant Sunni-Turkish nationalism cultivated by the Turkish state.     

Forgotten brigade of the forgotten war: Turkey's participation in the Korean War

This study is an attempt to shed light on the issue of Cretan Muslim emigration from Crete to the Ottoman Empire in order to analyse the multiple connections among the Ottoman state, immigrants and different localities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. Following the Cretan revolts of 1896 and 1897, the establishment of autonomous government on the island of Crete and the withdrawal of Ottoman armies from the island, Cretan Muslims began to emigrate from Crete to various places in the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, this article aims to deal with the migration of Cretan Muslims and to focus mainly on the year 1899, during which large numbers of Muslims were forced to leave their homes. The article suggests that Cretan Muslim emigration provides a good case for understanding the attitudes and policies of the Ottoman state towards migration, and the relationship between the state and immigrants, as well as for analysing the broader connections between Crete and the other localities of the Eastern Mediterranean. The working hypothesis is that in order to understand certain socio-political and demographic changes and transformations experienced within the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, it is important to study the issue of Cretan Muslim immigration to Ottoman Anatolia. This presents an opportunity to investigate certain questions with regard to the dynamics of migration and also to discuss certain facts associated with migration within the late imperial context.     

Pseudo‐democratic politics and populist possibilities: the rise and demise of Turkey's Refah party

Within the span of only a few years, Turkish politics witnessed the dramatic rise and fall of the Refah Party. This transformation from relative obscurity to the head of a ruling coalition and eventual banning was caused by a combination of features inherent in the Turkish political system and the party itself. Turkish democracy features the continued interference of the military in domestic political affairs on the one hand and a preponderance of largely centrist and bland ‘mainstream’ parties on the other. Nevertheless, the existence of ostensibly democratic institutions such as elections or a parliament enable potential political aspirants who are outside the mainstream to make bids for power through officially sanctioned channels. The Refah's rise was a product of the perceived uniqueness of its ideological platform and its unparalleled focus on grass roots voter mobilization. Its fall, however, came when the military considered it to have overstepped the bounds of acceptable political behaviour within the country's narrowly defined democracy.