Situating the “Cultural Reach” of Cities in a Multiscalar Field

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society - On the basis of empirical material from a city bordering Syria and Turkey, this article aims to situate the city’s emerging landscape...     

Unruly Practices: Gezi Protests and the Politics of Friendship

In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of “political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic popular action.     

Suicide Attempts and Self-Image Among Turkish Adolescents

The objective of this paper is to report on the role of self-image as an internal factor in suicide attempts of adolescents. Three groups of adolescents, suicide attempters (n = 33), nonsuicidal psychiatric outpatients (n = 50), and normal controls (n = 50), were administered Offer Self-Image Questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory, Symptom Check List-90-R, and a socio-demographic questionnaire. The factors discriminating suicidal adolescents from the other 2 groups were increased number of siblings, being the older children, and negativity in the familial aspect of the self-image. The self-image factor was specific for suicidal girls but not for boys. Disturbance in the development of the self-image, especially in its relationship with other family members is an important risk factor in attempted suicides by female adolescents. This brings up the importance of including the family in the treatment of suicidal adolescents. None of the factors evaluated in this study are significant in attempted suicides by males. This point needs further research.     

Migration,memory and mythification: relocation of Suleymani tribes on the northern Ottoman–Iranian frontier

This article indicates that Suleymani tribes, which were relocated from Diyarbekir region en masse to the newly conquered territories of northern Ottoman-Iranian frontiers after the mid-sixteenth-century, created a shift in the administrative and ethnic structure of the region. Although the roles of tribes were mostly seen as subordinate to the power of the Kurdish emirs, this study shows that the chiefs of Suleymani tribes, more specifically Besyan and Heyderan, became the rulers of the newly captured Safavid territories and they did not recognize the authority of their own Suleymani emirs. The writer focuses on this migration and discusses that the relocated Suleymani tribes preserved the collective memory of their migration during the nineteenth-century and their perception shaped the creation of a tribal myth, Mil-and-Zil, after the Ottoman central government disinherited the Kurdish emirs during the mid-nineteenth-century. Suleymani tribes' migration, collective memory and mythification of their own identities show that tribes were not passive subjects but they were in fact at the center of the developments of the Ottoman eastern frontier.     

On the front and at home: women in the modern Ottoman epic

Changes in gender roles are related to larger developments in the spheres of social modernization and discipline. As Ottoman society evolved into a nation through the nineteenth century, women's roles in contemporary epic literature were reassigned to domestic life, showing them protecting the hinterland and nurturing younger generations in order to satisfy the state's growing need for manpower. Gradually, Ottoman women lost whatever autonomy they may have had over their bodies, and their status vis-à-vis the state was redefined. This article examines the female characters in modern Ottoman epic literature so as to explore the reflections in this literature of the social and political transformations that occurred during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It aims to reveal the ways in which heroic female figures created before or at the beginning of the autocratic reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) changed into domestic characters as the social skeleton of the regime became apparent.     

Public confidence in the judiciary: the interaction between political awareness and level of democracy

Apart from the studies that focus on public attitudes toward higher courts in advanced democracies, we know little about the factors that can explain public confidence in the judiciary in a comparative setting. In this regard, the goal of this study is to explain whether, and to what extent, the country's level of democracy moderates the impact of political awareness on public confidence in the judiciary. This study uses hierarchical linear models to analyse the interaction between individual and country level factors by using the World Values Survey (2005–2009) data for 49 countries and various other data sources. Our empirical results show that in advanced democracies political awareness variables like education and political participation have a positive impact on public confidence in the judiciary, whereas in countries with weak levels of democracy higher political awareness leads to increased cynicism about the judiciary. These results suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to explain confidence in the judiciary is not possible when we are dealing with a wide range of societies that vary in terms of many characteristics, both institutional and cultural.     

Reconsidering the Role of the Prefects in Turkey: Public Policies and Metropolization

Prefects are considered important actors in the formation of different public policies in Turkey. While prefects and sub-prefects are empowered by means of new policies, their roles are also altered during the process of strengthening local governments. This alteration process represents the spirit of the state reform in its broadest range, that is, the conflict between the central and the local. Another new public policy for Turkey is metropolization. The administrative structure of Turkey has been dramatically changed by the introduction of the new Metropolitan Municipality Law (Law No. 6360, 2012). Representing a major change, this law added 14 more metropolitan municipalities to the already existing 16, and abolished Special Provincial Administrations within the metropolitan municipalities. This study aims to explain the reforms made on a metropolitan level together with the transformation of the government, the central–local conflict, and the prefects’ role in these reform and transformation processes in Turkey.     

Of Rebels and Disobedients: Reflections on Arendt,Race, Lawbreaking

Hannah Arendt valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new, yet in essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire for law and order. She lamented that criminality had overtaken American life, accused the police of not arresting enough criminals, and charged ‘the Negro community’ with standing behind what she named black violence. At once, she praised ‘the white rebels’ of the student movement in the United States for their courageous acts of disobedience. This essay explores how differential Arendt’s treatment of lawbreaking action was in an effort to understand how ‘certain sections of the population’ in the United States could appear to stand for criminality rather than civil disobedience to her mind. It examines how Arendt’s reflections on the ostensibly non-racial subjects of civil disobedience and lawbreaking were underwritten by racial, when not racist, ways of thinking. The essay also raises a larger question: to the extent that the concept of civil disobedience involves limits, how are those limits drawn to the exclusion of certain kinds of actors and their particular claims in the public realm? Pondering this question through Arendt, it concludes that in her theorization of civil disobedience, Arendt was profoundly limited by the fabulous tale that the United States is an exceptional land of freedom and democracy in the world.