Mincing Words: The Three Layers of the AKP’s Narrative on Kurdish Politics

Abstract

In 2009–2015, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) put forward several initiatives to end insurgency in Kurdish majority areas. However, successive “openings” failed to make progress. The electoral and international goals of the AKP gradually became incongruent with the peace process, and the AKP espoused heavy-handed tactics in July 2015. The ups and downs of the process in 2009–2015 show that it was already fragile. Some causes of this fragility were external to the AKP, such as the opposition parties’ eagerness to use the process to poach nationalist voters and the PKK’s violence. However, I argue that the contradictory nature of the AKP’s narrative was also a crucial factor. The party’s earlier narrative required the strict separation of two layers: security policies to fight terrorists and democratization policies to address the legitimate grievances of citizens. However, the intersubjective strategies that it experimented later required a gray area between these two fields. The AKP, instead of changing strategies, has constructed a three-layered, contradictory narrative.     

Is the EU held accountable for economic performances? Assessing vote and popularity functions before and after membership

The EU has become increasingly responsible for the state of national economies over the last decades. Meanwhile, many observers have claimed that this increased responsibility has not translated into more accountability. In this article, we revisit this literature and analyse vote-popularity functions before and after accession because it provides a situation when the EU is an incumbent and when it is not. Using Eurobarometer surveys from 2001 to 2011, which were carried out in the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, we first show that individuals do not hold the EU accountable for macroeconomic performances before accession, but that they do after accession. Using European Election Studies surveys, we also indicate that the incumbent European Peoples’ Party is held accountable for the state of the economy in countries that are ruled by the EU, but not in countries that have just become EU members.     

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.     

Views of Male University Students About Social Gender Roles; An Example From East of Turkey

Social gender roles refer to the roles that are traditionally associated with women and men. Social gender role includes the personal attributes and behaviors which are culturally assigned to women and men. This study was conducted to determine the views of male students at Caucasian University Health School on social gender roles at work, social life, marriage, and family life. The study was conducted on male students studying at Kars Health School, Nursing and Health Officers Department during 2007–2008 academic year. The students were given 24 statements relating to work life, social life, marriage, and family life to determine their views on social gender roles. Results indicated that 30.2% of the male students stated that women could work in a paid job, 56.9% believed in equality of women and men, 44.8% approved honor killing, 40.5% said the girls should receive education as far as they can go, 54.3% said the role of the women was to “provide moral support to their husband and children”, 37.1% stated that husbands could beat their wives under certain circumstances, 52.6% said they witnessed violence in their family at some stage of their lives, 51.7% said the women’s environment should be decided by the spouses together, 25% said the women should engage in sexual intercourse with their spouses even if they did not want to. Men who thought the role of the women was to do housework/giving birth to children/looking after the elderly members of the house, and who approved honor killing and disapproved working of their spouses, and who did not believe in equality of women and men, were found to support violence to women by men. Moreover, the students who witnessed violence at some stage of their lives supported this view as well. It was considered that the students should be educated on the definition of violence and situations involving violence, and directed to consultant services.     

Automated region segmentation on cartridge case base

One of the significant problems encountered in criminology studies is the successful automated matching of fired cartridge cases, on the basis of the characteristic marks left on them by firearms. An intermediate step in the solution of this problem is the segmentation of certain regions that are defined on the cartridge case base. This paper describes a model-based method that performs segmentation of the cartridge case using surface height image of a center fire cartridge case base. The proposed method detects the location of the cartridge case base center and specific circular contours around it iteratively by projecting the problem to a one-dimensional feature space. In addition, the firing pin impression region is determined by utilizing an adaptive threshold that differentiates impression marks form primer region surface. Letters on the cartridge case base are also detected by using surface modeling and adaptive thresholding, in order to render the surface comparison operation robust against irrelevant surface features. Promising experimental results indicate the eligibility of the proposed method to be used for automated cartridge case base region segmentation process.     

Public Reason Between Ethics and Law

Rawls says that public reason is the reason of the citizens of a democratic state and takes the Supreme Court in the USA as the exemplar of public reason. It differs from non public reason, which is used e.g., in universities and academic institutions. Rawls contrasts with Kant, which opposes the public reason of the scholar??or the philosopher??, who speaks before the world, to the private reason of state or church officials. The later, once they accept an authority, cannot think by themselves (selbst denken). A closer examination shows that Rawls is not so far from Kant as it seems, because he takes the constitutional judges not as they are, but as they should be. However Rawls still apparently refuses Kant??s unity of reason. Further investigation of the relations between ethical reason, democratic reason and legal reason is needed. Democratic reason is tantamount both to public reason and to legal reason in a modern constitutional state. It is a requirement of ethics but still not identical with ethical reason, since it is possible to accept democratic reason and to argue against it from an ethical point of view. There is just one good way of reasoning, in spite of the constraints that the sources of law and the rules of procedure impose on legal reasoning, compared with ethics. Such constraints are based on the democratic principle, which is again based on ethical reason, which at last both grounds and limits the constraints that law imposes on reason.     

Childhood Trauma,Type of Marriage and Self-Esteem as Correlates of Domestic Violence in Married Women in Turkey

The aim of this study is to determine childhood trauma, the type of marriage, and level of self-esteem as correlates of domestic violence in married women in Turkey. The study sample consisted of 750 women aged 20 and over, selected through face to face interviews. Results More than half the women were exposed to domestic violence, which increases with factors like lower economic status, teenage and arranged marriages and a large number of children. According to the logistic regression model, arranged marriages, sexual problems and physical abuse during childhood lead to an increase in the occurrence of domestic violence, while this decreases as the partners age. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale scores were significantly lower in women subjected to domestic violence and this decrease became statistically significant as the level of abuse experienced during childhood increased.     

Proliferation of neopatrimonial domination in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Literature on Turkey’s post-2011 authoritarian turn – especially after the eruption of the 2013 nationwide Gezi Protests – adopts modern concepts such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘one-party government’, ‘party-state fusion’, and even ‘fascism’ mainly in order to pin down the nature of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkish acronym) or depict the current character of Turkey’s regime. Through engaging the pre-modern concept of neopatrimonialism, which is derived from Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism, this paper argues that Turkey’s encounter with authoritarianism is deeply associated with the proliferation of neopatrimonial domination, into which the legacy of patronage politics, fracture of security power, and the metastasis of crony capitalism have been conflated. This article argues that neopatrimonial features have always, to a degree, marked state-society relations in Turkey. Furthermore, this article suggests neopatrimonial characteristics started to dominate Turkey’s modern legal structure under the AKP, which led to a state crisis culminating in the 2016 attempted coup. However, despite the fact that neopatrimonialism cannot be argued as a pathological deviation from modern-legal domination, this paper concludes that tension exists between the crony capitalism-based economic model of neopatrimonalism and Turkey’s decades-long market-based capitalism.