The rural roots of the rise of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper puts forward four main arguments regarding the persistence of significant rural support of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey since late 2002. Firstly, since the previous coalition government implemented the harshest neoliberal measures in the agricultural sector, small farmers do not directly associate neoliberal assault with the AKP administration. Secondly, villagers have utilized both the ballot box and direct action in order to bargain with the AKP. Thirdly, although the AKP government did not fundamentally depart from neoliberalism, the return of agricultural subsidies, significant expansion of social assistance, and rapid infrastructure construction have secured a large rural following for the party. Finally, the AKP government has effectively used coercive methods to prevent the emergence of an emancipatory political alternative.     

Men Victims of Stalking in Portugal: Predictors of Help-Seeking Behaviours

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - Stalking is commonly perceived as a gendered crime, predominantly affecting women as victims. However, males can also be victims of this crime....     

Exploring Perceptions of Portuguese Police about Human Trafficking Victims and Perpetrators

Crime, Law and Social Change - The present study uses a qualitative approach to explore how Portuguese police perceive human trafficking and the individuals involved. Three hundred and twenty-five...     

Making Hong Kong Chinese: State Nationalism and its Blowbacks in a Recalcitrant City

Abstract

Drawing from the literatures on strategic identity shift and on signaling, this article examines the strategies used by Beijing to impose its monist brand of state nationalism on Hong Kong. Given the nominally high degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong, Beijing has been unable to impose its nationalism directly from above. Instead, it has made use of cooptation strategies so as to cultivate increasingly vocal and influential loyalist circles among local elites, who have promoted state nationalism from within. This logic, this article argues, has led many among Hong Kong’s political elite to compete in expressing an increasingly overt Chinese nationalistic posture as a way to signal loyalty to Beijing. These strategies have however backfired, raising doubts as to the actual extent of Hong Kong’s autonomy and triggering an existential crisis that led to the emergence of a reactive form of popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism. In this context, state and popular sub-state nationalisms have fed on each other and grown increasingly irreconcilable, echoing the intensifying radicalization and polarization between the authoritarian establishment and the democratic opposition.     

Egalitarianism and the democratic deconsolidation: Is democracy compatible with socialism?

Public Choice - The unprecedented reduction in popular support for democracy represents a risk of democratic deconsolidation. The new situation echoes old debates on the compatibility of democracy...     

Performing through Friday khutbas: re-instrumentalization of religion in the new Turkey

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between religion and politics in current Turkish society, particularly since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) consolidated its power over state institutions and replaced the Kemalist establishment in the early 2010s. It argues that the AKP has re-instrumentalized the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and used its mosques to enact a performance of nationalism, deviating from a Kemalist, laicist-national identity towards a more encompassing, Ottomanist, religious one. After discussing the unique understanding of laicism in Turkey and the transformation of Diyanet as a state apparatus, content and discourse analyses are used to examine the texts of 1,200 Friday khutbas, weekly prayers that are ordinarily prepared and distributed nationwide by Diyanet. These indicate how citizens perform their nation simply by participating in gatherings, composing the congregation, listening to imams, and being exposed to the reminders of their (re-)identified nationality. The content analysis of Friday khutbas over three distinct periods—1927, 1997–2010, and 2011–2018—illustrates that, as political power shifts over time, the repetition of certain banal reminders used in the khutbas has resulted in different performances of the nation and that, under the rule of the AKP, a new performance has already begun.     

The color of confinement: examining youth exoneration decisions and the critical race theory

Abstract

The critical race theory has been predictive of how minority youth are treated in the juvenile and criminal justice systems in the United States. However, the theory has not been applied in explaining the existence of wrongful convictions among juveniles. Using secondary data derived from the National Exoneration Registry, the purpose of this study is to identify specific factors (e.g., DNA evidence, etc.) related to the wrongful convictions of Black youth who have been exonerated. Compared to other racial categories, the results reveal that Black youth are more likely to experience wrongful convictions as a result of false confessions, faulty eyewitness identification, perjury, and official misconduct. Limitations, policy implications, and areas of further investigation are offered.     

Deterritorialised territories,borderless borders: the new geography of international medical assistance

This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisation means that certain transnational actors now have the ability to intervene below, across and beyond state boundaries. In the case of MSF, going beyond state boundaries is creative of new territorial structures. One such structure is what may be called the ‘space of victimhood’. Under the guise of reaching ‘victims’ the world over, MSF constructs new spaces—humanitarian zones—inside which individuals in distress are identified as ‘victims’, are sorted out, and become recognisable as generalised examples of human drama. This construction of a space of victimhood opens up the possibility for re-appropriations and manipulations by other non-humanitarian actors. Among such actors, one finds global media networks which avidly search for images of victims. By pointing out the potentially non-humanitarian effects of the new spatial arrangements deployed by transnational medical organisations (a phenomenon referred to as ‘transversality’), this article urges international scholars and practitioners to keep a close eye on questions of space and, specifically, on the sociopolitical processes of inclusion and exclusion that such territorial delineations often produce.     

Who Suffers the Penalty?: A Panel Data Analysis of Earnings Gaps in Vietnam

In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about the informal sector earnings structure compared to that of the formal sector. Taking advantage of the rich VHLSS dataset in Vietnam, in particular its three wave panel data (2002, 2004, 2006), we assess the magnitude of various formal–informal earnings gaps while addressing heterogeneity at three different levels: the worker, the job (wage employment vs. self-employment) and the earnings distribution. We estimate fixed effects and quantile regressions to control for unobserved individual characteristics. Our results suggest that the informal sector earnings gap highly depends on the workers’ job status and on their relative position in the earnings distribution. Penalties may in some cases turn into premiums. By comparing our results with studies in other developing countries, we draw conclusions highlighting Vietnam’s labour market specificity.