Unexpected Persistence Amidst Enlargement Stasis: Usages of Europe in Turkey’s Nuclear Energy Debate

Recent studies on European Union (EU) Enlargement have emphasised the importance of usages of ‘Europe’ by domestic actors as a necessary condition for the EU to have an impact on domestic politics. We study the usages of Europe in the critical case of Turkey’s nuclear energy policy. We analyse the narratives and actions of domestic actors in Turkey to identify if they use ‘Europe’ (the EU and the idea of Europe). We reach the counter-intuitive finding of usages by both state and non-state actors, which illustrates that usages of Europe can persist despite enlargement stasis in candidate states.     

Building capacities,exerting power: The European Union police mission in the Palestinian Authority

This article offers a Foucauldian approach to examine the European Union Police Mission in the Palestinian Authority. Using Foucault’s ideas on ‘policing’, ‘discipline’ and ‘normalization’ and applying an interpretive approach, the article argues that the EU police mission rests on ideas, visions and techniques that problematize local capacities and skills in the policing of the population. It highlights the epistemic context of knowledge creation within which the local becomes an object of intervention through two techniques: benchmarking and capacity-building. The article also discusses what is left invisible and unaddressed in EUPOL COPPS activities.     

‘Legislative frame representation’: towards an empirical account of the deliberative systems approach

The systemic approach to deliberative democracy is an empirically underexplored topic. Since ‘classic’ micro indicators for deliberation are at loggerheads with the idea of distributed deliberation, appropriate assessment techniques for large-scale public deliberation are few and far between. This paper aims at exploring a novel pathway into the empirical translations of the deliberative systems approach, using discourse content and the representation of policy frames in the legislature. I argue that legislative frame representation (LFR) is a crucial indicator for the level of sub-systemic deliberative uptake and policy responsiveness. Next to the necessary theoretical and methodological work, the results of an explorative case study for the immigration discourse in the US and Canada are presented. The results indicate that there are considerable differences in the systems’ capacities to take up discourses from civil society and that LFR can be an important tool to explore deliberative systems empirically.     

Fraud, banking crisis, and regulatory enforcement: Evidence from micro-level transactions data

Can widespread fraud cause large scale banking crises? We address this issue in the context of the recent Turkish banking crisis of 2000, which was followed by a severe recession and currency crisis. Using detailed micro-level transactions data, we show that related lending and back-to-back loans across banks were used to circumvent regulation and transfer deposits to private holding companies that were ruined. Our evidence suggests that systemic fraud coupled with weak enforcement of conventional regulatory principles can be a source of banking crisis.     

Determination of Changes in Crystal Violet and Phenoxyethanol (Dating Ink)

Ink dating is a significant problem in terms of forensic science. Ballpoint pens are generally used as writing tools on the documents. Aging is determination of the changes in dyes and solvents in the composition of ink over time by analytical methods. The evaporation of the solvents from the paper surface is faster than the decomposition process of the dyes. In this study, in 2017, we were asked by the court to determine whether the texts on the suspicious pages of an agenda dated 1996 were written within 2 years or earlier. Phenoxyethanol and dyes were examined in the composition of all suspected ink samples. The results show the determination of both the decomposition process of the dyes and the evaporation process of phenoxyethanol in the aging of the document entries written by ballpoint pen.     

Rendering Space and People Economic: Naguib Sawiris’ Refugee ‘Country’

This contribution explores the intersection of humanitarianism and neoliberalism as ‘recipes’ to address the ‘migration’ or ‘refugees crisis’ in the Mediterranean. It takes the recent proposal of Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris to buy a ‘refugee island’ as a starting point for a discussion of the increasing propensity to view refugee communities through their economic potential in a neoliberal marketplace. Such an understanding in turn feeds into the continued construction of the Mediterranean as a particular neoliberal market space.