Although Turkey's authoritarian turn is often interpreted as a reaction to the Gezi resistance of 2013, this article argues that its foundations were laid much earlier through the gradual accumulation of infrastructure and legal frameworks. Rather than emerging as a sudden response to dissent, Turkey's networked authoritarianism must be understood as the outcome of long-term infrastructural decisions that have extended through successive waves of privatization, legal control, and market consolidation. Drawing on a cartographic ethnographic methodology, this article maps the entanglement of media ownership, regulatory centralization, and expert discourse, as reflected in the Internet Conferences of Turkey (INET-TR) conferences, to show how early quiescence and missed interventions enabled a gradual shift toward centralized control. Unlike fully nationalized Internet models, Turkey's approach is hybrid and strategic: it maintains international connectivity and commercial integration while exercising tight control over domestic information flows through a combination of layered legal and technical instruments. This historical context complicates linear narratives of rupture and resistance, demonstrating that authoritarian consolidation in digital infrastructures is not only about state repression but also about infrastructural and institutional standardization of control.
This study decomposes aggregate labor productivity growth in Turkey from 1999 to 2023 using a chain-linked gross domestic product (GDP) series with an exactly additive decomposition method. Traditionally, this growth has been decomposed into two components: productivity growth within sectors and labor reallocation across sectors. Using the chain-linked GDP series introduces a third component: changes in relative sectoral prices. Although these relative price changes cancel out at the aggregate level, they influence sectoral contributions to overall labor productivity by altering each sector's weight in total output. Incorporating them, therefore, provides a more comprehensive view of sectoral dynamics by capturing their contributions to aggregate productivity growth. On average, the contribution of structural change slightly exceeds that of the within component. However, both the magnitude and composition of contributions vary considerably across sub-periods. During crisis years, structural change contributed positively while the within-sector component was negative. In contrast, during non-crisis periods, aggregate labor productivity growth declined because the structural-change component weakened persistently and nearly vanished after 2018, despite a positive though limited within-sector component. At the sector level, construction, finance and real estate, community, personal, and government services, and transport and communication largely account for the slowdown, while manufacturing's contribution stayed steady; its composition shifted away from within productivity across periods.
This article investigates how feminist praxis in Turkey incorporates refugee women into their advocacy practices, and uncovers the extent to which these interactions expose the boundaries of solidarity. Anchored in Gramscian political theory, it asks whether feminist activism continues to operate as an inclusive counter-hegemonic political sphere, and the degree to which refugee women are incorporated within it. Drawing on interviews with feminist- and migrant-led non-governmental organizations in Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that interactions with refugee women frequently unfold through short-term, humanitarian-oriented, project-funded initiatives rather than collective practices of solidarity. These dynamics highlight tensions between the emancipatory claims of feminist politics and the selective solidarities that take shape under conditions of intersecting inequalities and governance frameworks. Rather than offering a definitive critique of feminist politics, the article treats the question of refugee women as an analytical lens through which the constraints of solidarity within contemporary feminist politics in Turkey become visible.
Drawing on Agamben's notion of "bare life" and Fassin's critique of "humanitarian reason," this article asks when refugees become recognizable as fully human in Turkish news discourse. It analyzes a simple random sample of 2,285 migration-related news items published in eight national newspapers between 2011 and 2020 through qualitative content analysis, and complements this with a close reading of sixty items that cluster around positive/humanitarian storytelling. Overall coverage is largely massifying and predominantly negative in tone; framing is dominated by threat-security-control (40 percent) alongside a substantial humanitarian-moral frame (32 percent). The paper's main contribution is to identify and theorize three recurring "good refugee" figures: (1) the vulnerable woman/child; (2) the heroic young man; and (3) the talented/entrepreneurial refugee whose exceptional skills and achievements are foregrounded. The paper argues that these figures do not merely individualize refugees; they also function as privileged sites where Turkish nationhood is narrated as compassionate, modern, and sovereign - while "ordinary" refugees remain outside the horizon of unconditional humanity and rights. The article argues that humanization strategies may backfire, ultimately eliminating individual subjectivity and agency. The article critiques the news items' compassionate, patronizing, and moralizing tone, highlighting the urgent need to politicize and historicize the issue.
This article offers the first systematic assessment of environmental studies (ES) on Turkey over the past decade (2013-2023), situating its development against the backdrop of intensifying ecological crises and shifting academic paradigms. Drawing on a dataset of 585 journal articles and book chapters indexed in the Web of Science, complemented by manual coding and interviews with scholars across disciplines, we map the thematic, methodological, and institutional trajectories of the field. Our findings reveal a significant growth in ES, with climate change, sustainability, and energy emerging as dominant themes, and gender representation among scholars showing relative balance. Yet this expansion is uneven: research remains clustered in a few universities, more reliant on quantitative approaches, and largely shaped by economics, management, and political sciences. Critical perspectives, particularly those engaging grassroots mobilizations, environmental justice, and post-anthropocentric frameworks exist, but cannot dominate. Interviews further highlight the persistent ambivalence of scholars toward ES as a disciplinary identity, raising questions about whether the field is coalescing or persisting as fragmented conversations. By charting both the advances and enduring oversights of ES on Turkey, this study contributes to global debates on the institutionalization of environmental knowledge and points toward more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and justice-oriented futures.
Distributive justice preferences are important because they can influence the policy orientations of political actors and can help create conditions conducive to policy change. Yet, these preferences have received relatively little scholarly attention in countries that are not included in major cross-country surveys such as Turkey. This article examines Turkish distributive justice preferences across four key social policy sectors: education; healthcare; old-age pensions; and unemployment insurance. The analysis draws on 2019 data from an original nationwide survey (n = 2,272), designed by a research team including the authors and implemented by a professional survey firm using multistage stratified random sampling. Our findings confirm that, as in mature welfare states, distributive justice preferences vary across social policy sectors in the Turkish case. However, the equality principle is strongly favored in three of the four areas, while equity is preferred only in old-age pensions, possibly reflecting policy feedback effects. In the context of high inequality and low social and institutional trust, we introduce distrustful egalitarianism as a concept to capture egalitarian preferences driven more by distrust of official allocation mechanisms than by purely ideological commitments to equality. These findings highlight the need for further research in middle-income countries with less mature welfare systems.
This article examines Turkey's position as an aid recipient during the Cold War, benefiting from assistance provided by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Adopting a comparative approach, this study investigates the impact of these investments on the development of two major iron and steel plants: the Ere & gbreve;li Iron and Steel Plant (ERDEM & Idot;R), constructed with American financial and industrial support, and the & Idot;skenderun Iron and Steel Plant (& Idot;SDEM & Idot;R), established with Soviet assistance. Both projects sparked political controversy in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s, shaped not only by the ideological rivalries of the Cold War but also by material realities on the ground. In terms of the conditions attached to aid, transfer of technology, and ownership structures, there were significant differences between the support offered by the capitalist and socialist countries. These differences were evident in the cases of ERDEM & Idot;R and & Idot;SDEM & Idot;R, where two distinct models were used for practical testing. This article argues that comparing the construction and operation of these plants provides valuable insights into the nature of Cold War aid and contributes to the broader global literature on the subject.
This article investigates how autocratizing regimes instrumentalize the cultural domain to manufacture consent, assert societal dominance, and socialize oppositional actors into authoritarian logics. In contexts of competitive authoritarianism, memory politics becomes central not only to the incumbent's efforts to legitimize power and construct hegemonic narratives of citizenship, identity, and history, but also to the opposition's attempts to propose alternatives. Drawing on fieldwork, curator interviews, and audience responses, the article analyzes two large-scale centennial exhibitions held in & Idot;stanbul in 2023 and 2024 that offer contrasting portrayals of the Turkish Republic - one Islamist-authoritarian, the other liberal-Kemalist. Despite clear ideological differences, divergent aesthetic approaches, and distinct target audiences, both exhibitions rely on exclusionary, state-centric framings that inhibit critical or pluralist engagements with the past. The article argues that this convergence signals a deeper transformation: the autocratization of the cultural field, wherein even oppositional institutions internalize authoritarian norms and practices. In this context, history is staged as spectacle - either triumphant or nostalgic - narrowing the cultural imagination, consolidating incumbent power, and diminishing spaces for meaningful contestation.
This article is an exploration of leisure practices of military families inside military social institutions such as military summer camps and orduevis (officers' clubs). Introducing generations of military families to aestheticized forms of seaside leisure as well as bodily forms of self-discipline and militarized forms of sociality, summer camps and orduevis have allowed military families to recognize themselves as a distinct social group and develop classed and racialized sensibilities of cultural difference since the 1950s. Building on ethnographic research among military families, this article examines the role of leisure in the cultivation of the tastes, habits, and sensibilities that define white, modern, secular, and middle-class citizenship for military families.
This article analyzes women's experiences of human papillomavirus (HPV) in Turkey under gendered health governance, a lack of public vaccine coverage, and conservative moral norms. Interviews with twenty-three mostly urban, university-educated women show that the diagnosis is experienced as shame, anxiety, and individualized responsibility. The burden is deeply felt despite the high cultural capital of the sample, indicating that stigma and access barriers to vaccination are not mitigated by individual resources alone. After diagnosis, women perform extensive emotional and moral labor, arranging follow-ups, insisting on condom use or choosing abstinence, and calculating disclosure risks to partners and family. Men are largely absent from prevention and care. Clinical routines also produce moral judgment and turn medical risk into a disciplinary test of respectability through marital-status questioning, limited privacy, and admonishing talk. The case in Turkey aligns with global feminization and moralization of HPV yet is distinctive for increasing official familism, rising conservatism on sexuality, and a prolonged lack of HPV vaccine coverage, as well as related civil-society campaigns and pay-it-forward schemes. In such a context, assigning risk management to women creates a double burden of dealing with moral discourses and caring for their and others' health. Even if free HPV vaccination begins, equitable uptake will require non-moralizing clinical communication, confidentiality, and partner-inclusive, de-gendered prevention.
This article aims to demonstrate that the "Alevi Revival," commonly described as the sudden increase in visibility of Alevis in Turkey in the early 1990s, was actually the result of a decade-long transformation experienced by Alevis in Europe since the late 1970s. This historical contextualization is not entirely novel but is typically only framed in reference to certain milestone events. The present article substantiates this approach based on an analysis of nine issues of Yurtseverler Birli & gbreve;i, one of the earliest Alevi political journals, published from 1982 to 1989 in Berlin and not yet studied. The evolving discourse surrounding Alevism in this journal's issues provides the earliest substantial evidence for understanding the emergence and evolution of strategies employed to promote the visibility of Alevism from the 1980s to the 1990s. By the end of this period, the strategy of "making Alevism known" had become dominant in defining Alevism in Europe, in contrast to heterogeneous approaches to framing Alevism in Turkey. In this sense, the "Alevi Manifesto," an open letter published in 1990 in Turkey, and the first Alevi Culture Week, organized a year before in Germany, should be regarded as outcomes of the preexisting context rather than the Revival's initiation.
