The village institutes experience in Turkey

This paper sheds light on the Village Institutes experience in Turkey from the late 1930s to the mid‐1940s. The Institutes have given rise to many academic and political controversies, and have remained an issue of confusion. This was owing partly to the lack of understanding of the real nature of the growing interest by the Kemalist elite in rural issues in the 1930s, and partly to the way that the power and importance of peasantist ideology had been underestimated, especially as it had gained wide currency amongst the governing elite in the 1930s and 1940s. This article begins by analyzing the historical and intellectual context of the period, and moves on to the development of the concept of the Village Institutes, assessing its most important and controversial characteristics. Finally, a new theoretical interpretation is offered within a critique of existing, widely‐held explanations that have dominated the theoretical literature on the issue for so long.