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 Birliği, 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.

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.

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 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 İstanbul 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.