Post‐Secular Turkey

For 500 years the West was on the rise, culminating in Globalizaiton 1.0—the open system of trade, information flows and the spread of technology on the terms and in the image of the West. The benefits of that system over the last 30 years have led to the rise of the emerging economies. As a result we are entering the new era of Globalization 2.0 characterized by new forms of non‐Western modernity and the interdependence of plural identities. The advent of this new era has been hastened by the fiscal and financial crisis in Europe and the United States. Turkey, with its Islamic‐oriented democracy that has become a template for the liberated peoples of the Arab Spring, and China, with its effective neo‐Confucian form of governance, are the most sharply defined new players in this multi‐polar and multi‐dimensional world. In this section, one of Turkey's most insightful sociologists examines the post‐secular transformation of that nation. One of China's more provocative philosophers proposes a hybrid model that combines what has been learned from the experience of Western and Chinese governance in a way that “enhances democracy” in both systems.     

NETWORKS: REIFIED METAPHOR OR GOVERNANCE PANACEA?

This article will discuss the contribution of Rod Rhodes to the research on networks. I will focus on networks as a typology of state/society relations and as a particular form of governance. It is not only here that Rhodes has left his deepest mark; most research on networks still falls in one of the two sub‐fields. The typology of policy networks, which he developed with David Marsh more than 15 years ago, has become a classic and still forms a major reference point for studies on public policy‐making. Rhodes also pioneered the concept of network governance in the study of British politics to capture the profound changes in the Westminister model since the late 1970s. Regarding more recent developments, Rhodes has been among the first to discuss the reflexivity of networks, introducing some postmodernist thinking into public administration research. Finally, Rhodes has helped advance the ‘ethnographic turn’ in network studies.     

Protest,memory, and the production of ‘civilized’ citizens: two cases from Turkey and Lebanon

This article studies the proliferation of discourses of rationality and responsibility among a particular elite social group in Lebanon and Turkey, as they remember student mobilization of their past. I offer these episodes of student mobilization as acts of citizenship that create and make use of rapturous moments in the histories of their countries and institutions. I extend these acts of citizenship to the contemporary context and study the ways in which they become part of discourses of citizenship in unexpected ways. I propose that these narratives draw upon a set of local practices that reflect meanings of citizenship, originating from Western discourses of liberalism, albeit following a different route. In the narratives, violence and irrationality become the defining features of politicized behavior, whereas being civilized epitomizes good manners and rationality. Such boundary-drawing exercises contribute to making conceivable exclusionary social orders based on the idea of a hierarchical distribution of reason and social utility.     

The ‘responsibility to protect’ in natural disasters: another excuse for interventionism? Nargis Cyclone,Myanmar

The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) places the ‘international community’ under an obligation to take coercive action for the protection of lives in the circumstances of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Following the dismal response to the May 2008 cyclone disaster in Myanmar where many affected people were provided with almost no relief assistance by the country's military regime that also hampered external assistance, the idea of military humanitarian intervention under the rubric of R2P was proposed by Bernard Kouchner. However, considering the urgency of the provision of relief assistance in an emergency, which is often a matter of life or death, this paper questions the effectiveness of invoking R2P as a possible response strategy in the aftermath of natural disasters. Therefore, in relation to state sovereignty the paper focuses on the concept of ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ at macro and micro levels as an alternative strategy and having analysed the issue in the wider framework of humanitarianism, the paper concludes with the importance of exploring the opportunities provided by humanitarian diplomacy before invoking R2P in the context of natural disasters.     

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.     

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF MARGINALIZATION PROCESSES AT THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPE

Under the influence of the enlargement of the European Union, there is now a renewed concern for marginalization processes in rural areas. Especially in countries at the periphery of Europe, these processes often have a large‐scale and multifaceted character. As agriculture and rural areas have become dissociated, the marginalization or success of the one no longer necessarily affects the other, and not necessarily in the same way. Dealing with the phenomenon in policy terms requires tools to explicate it. In this article, we present a simple typology of marginalization processes as a first step to its disentangling. The typology is applied to Finland and Portugal, countries at the periphery of Europe. The results strengthen the idea that different processes with different characteristics are going on at the same time, requiring specific approaches.     

From doves to hawks: A spatial analysis of voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England

This article examines the making of monetary policy in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2008 by analysing voting behaviour in the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). It provides a new set of measures for the monetary policy preferences of individual MPC members by estimating a Bayesian item response model. The article demonstrates the usefulness of these measures by comparing the ideal points of outgoing MPC members with their successors and by looking at changes over time in the median ideal point on the MPC. The analysis indicates that the British Government has been able to move the position of the median voter on the MPC through its appointments to the Committee. This highlights the importance of central bank appointments for monetary policy.