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 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.

This article examines social representations and hierarchies among Iranian migrants in Dubai through an analysis of the diversity of the Iranian diaspora and the ways in which different segments of this diaspora engage with the policies and politics of belonging in the national contexts of both Iran and the United Arab Emirates. I focus on the legacy of stereotypical representations inherited from processes of nation-building, and on how individuals navigate, negotiate, and at times challenge these representations through everyday interactions and relations of alterity. Dubai constitutes a particularly revealing case in this respect, because the Iranian presence there has been shaped simultaneously by regional mobilities rooted in the history of the Persian Gulf and by broader transnational movements, while also reflecting the effects of globalization over recent decades. The analysis further explores how social hierarchies originating in Iranian society are reproduced, reworked, or contested in the migratory context through the study of social interactions between different groups and cultural initiatives undertaken by migrants. The article sheds light on the formation of cosmopolitan subjectivities and practices of cultural distinction within a heterogeneous diasporic space.1

Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.