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.

This article explores how socio-ecological crises reshape the Köyceğiz-Dalyan region, Turkey’s first Special Environmental Protection Area, through a more-than-human approach. Based on multi-stage qualitative research conducted between 2018 and 2023, we argue that the region is experiencing interconnected socio-ecological crises that are transforming a long-standing multispecies web of life unique to the area. Our findings highlight two major shifts: first, deforestation, driven by agricultural land clearance, mining activities, and forest fires, has dismantled collaborative practices such as beekeeping, goat keeping, and small-scale agriculture, all of which sustained multispecies partnerships that maintained both biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. Second, waves of lifestyle migration, from middle-class retirees in the 1980s and 1990s to remote workers during COVID-19, have altered village demographics and transformed landscapes through construction that replaces agricultural lands and forests with residential developments. These interwoven transformations demonstrate how socio-ecological crises simultaneously unravel multispecies relationships, eliminate traditional sustainable livelihoods, and fragment life networks that once sustained both human communities and biodiversity.

This article examines the construction of gendered collective identity among leftist women in Turkey through their post-1980 coup prison memory. By analyzing 124 autobiographical narratives, we uncover a process of identity formation grounded in a continuous negotiation between past struggles and present concerns, constituting a counternarrative that challenges the master narrative of defeat and submission prevalent after the coup. The article’s tripartite framework of distance, substance, and persistence underscores women’s journey from marginalization to collective empowerment, producing shifting subject positions across time. By placing temporality at the center of collective identity formation, this study contributes to feminist memory literature and identity studies while addressing a significant historiographical gap by bringing the neglected struggles of leftist women in Turkey to light.

This article revisits the history of Muslim Turkish society, questioning its essentialist portrayal as a “religious society,” with religiosity narrowly defined through Sunni Islamic doctrines. It examines the content of Sunni folk Islam through the Mevlid, Karbala, and Ebâ Müslim books published by İstanbul Maarif Kitaphanesi until the 1980s, as well as their political appropriation by elite actors during the early Cold War period. I argue that Sunni and Alevi religiosity shared key elements beyond saint veneration, particularly praising the Prophet through Nur Muhammad, love of Ahl Al-Bayt, and mourning for Karbala. Using these books as religious media through a material approach to religion, I maintain that they made Muhammad and Ahl Al-Bayt “accessible,” “tangible,” and “sense-able” in the world in oral, pictorial, and scriptural forms. Since the publishers, editors, authors, readers, and listeners of these books were descendants of Turkish speakers dating back to the twelfth century, I propose the term “Islam in Turkish” as a conceptual framework to capture these shared elements. I argue that this concept, denoting a vernacular form of religiosity, has the potential to replace the modern category of Turkish folk Islam and contribute to global critical discussions on Islam.

The Great Depression in 1929 had a transformative impact on Turkey. The institutions established to minimize the effects of the crisis propagated a set of statist measures. The National Economy and Savings Association and Public Press Directorate utilized photography and painting in the beginning of the 1930s to propagate those measures. In their efforts, these institutions constructed a new conception of landscape with a moral agenda: citizens and artists should travel in Anatolia to learn about the country, love it, and create art accordingly. Key to this conception was the productivity of the land. The most comprehensive cultural program during World War II, Homeland Tours, mimicked this new conception of a landscape. This article analyzes the conception of productive landscapes up until the end of World War II by drawing attention to the overlooked photography collection in the State Archives, which comprises paintings made during the Homeland Tours. One of the many tools that the statist economic institutions devised was agricultural statistics. The comparison between the paintings and actual land use statistics demonstrates that the artists collectively followed the statist economic agenda.

There has been growing public interest in traditional cheese production and consumption over the past decade, in contrast to the 1990s and 2000s, when food safety regulations excluded traditional cheesemakers from Turkey’s dairy commodity chains. This article focuses on two cheeses, Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri, designated in 2015 with national Geographical Indication and international Slow Food Presidium labels. Drawing on archival and long-term ethnographic research, we trace the historical trajectory of commercial dairying in Kars and its articulation and disarticulation within national and international commodity chains. Against the backdrop of twentieth-century transformations, we investigate how place-based labels have contested neoliberal agricultural policies that imposed industrialization and standardization on the dairy sector. We argue that the re-articulation of Kars in the 2010s relied on community development and collective action, and practices negotiating between tradition and standardization to establish new conventions of quality. This article conceptualizes re-articulation as a transformative socio-ecological process rather than a simple reversal of disarticulation. It demonstrates how peripheral regions re-enter markets through locally negotiated strategies balancing standardization, authenticity, and solidarity. It also foregrounds material and ecological relations, recognizing the agency of non-human elements – such as pastures and artisanal tools – in shaping value and quality.

This article examines the historical and ongoing role of public agricultural research and extension in shaping avocado production in southern Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I find that the making of Turkey’s avocado production base owes to a century-long state involvement in agricultural research and development. Contrary to the assumption that global markets single-handedly shape contemporary production and export geographies in the global South, in the case of Turkey’s avocado production it is not the market per se, but extensionists on the ground who actively advocate for risk-taking, efficient, export-oriented production methods. Despite the push for export-oriented production, smallholders continue to prioritize the domestic market by choosing to produce locally popular and more cold-hardy cultivars that are less prone to frost damage. Findings suggest that while public agricultural research and development were indispensable in creating the material conditions for this high-value crop boom in southern Turkey, farmers’ agency and local contextual factors ultimately shape the trajectory of this production geography. The analysis also demonstrates a persistent disconnect between the state’s agricultural vision and farmers’ realities, which explains why the avocado boom has remained a primarily domestic, rather than export-oriented, phenomenon.

Production of seafood has received relatively little attention in agri-food debates despite the fact that, since the 1960s, seafood production has been transformed through the industrialization of fisheries and globalization of seafood commodity chains. Intensive aquaculture emerged as a new industry in response to declining fish catches. Global commodity chains of seafood and capital accumulation processes changed tremendously, leading to complex international trade dynamics and rising inequalities. The Turkish aquaculture sector has also been transformed via government subsidies, and a few vertically integrated aquaculture companies started to produce farmed sea bass and sea bream (SBSB) in Turkish waters, while organizing their operations both upstream (processing of fish feed in Africa) and downstream (sales and distribution in Europe) in the global SBSB value chain. We adopted a single commodity approach to uncover how seafood production has been transformed via expanding commodity frontiers of capital-intensive SBSB production by focusing on the strategies of Turkish aquaculture enterprises, trade dynamics, and socio-ecological implications of SBSB production via in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and a review of legislative documents and trade data. Our analysis offers critical insights into the agrarian-change debate in Turkey by analyzing the global and regional socio-ecological inequalities created by Turkish SBSB production.

This paper scrutinizes an early childhood education institution introduced by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey in the early 2000s. Making Quran kindergartens public, which were previously run only by private enterprises and religious sects, marked a new development for the country. In an effort towards building its cultural hegemony, the AKP established Turkey’s first public Islamic kindergartens as a part of its “raising a new pious generation” policy. This article explores the emergence of these public Islamic kindergartens, referred to as “Quran kindergartens,” and analyzes how these institutions form the concept of the “Muslim child” through their educational practices while also contributing to the transformation of the role of mosques in Turkey. The study was based on qualitative research, comprising interviews with educators and parents.

The Kurdish movement in Turkey illustrates a complex struggle for political recognition and decolonization. The article examines this dual strategic orientation, focusing on the peace process initiated in October 2024 between the Turkish state and Kurdish representatives. Through a detailed and symptomatic reading of the two texts by Abdullah Öcalan, February Call and Perspektif, the article aims to demonstrate that the movement both interacts with the state to secure democratic prerequisites for political participation and continues to promote a radical critique of capitalist modernity and nation-state structures. Drawing upon Axel Honneth’s recognition theory and Étienne Balibar’s concept of “equaliberty,” the struggle for recognition is no longer seen just to result in a depoliticization through governmental control, but is rethought as building the capacity to stage an ongoing, performative process that manages the constitutive tension between equality and autonomy within Kurdish decolonial practice. This approach raises questions about how the movement navigates state structures while promoting alternative social institutions and epistemic spaces, including the problematic site of communes as a form of democratic autonomous experimentation.

Building on the premise that etiquette (adab-ı muaşeret) is a crucial component in understanding Turkish cultural modernization, this article examines how the Turkish military incorporated Western manners during the Republican era. While the military’s role in supporting Westernization is well documented, less scholarly attention has been paid to the internalization and practice of Western cultural norms, particularly etiquette, within military circles. Conceptualizing manners as a disciplined and refined mode of conduct, this study investigates how Western etiquette was transmitted to military officers and integrated into their personal and professional lives. The article argues that, although military texts on etiquette presented Western manners as essential to social status and modernization, their implementation was characterized by selective adoption, ambiguity, and even resistance. These texts, often compiled by officers themselves, reflect both a desire to assert cultural authority and the complex, negotiated process of Westernization. Drawing on two primary sources – etiquette manuals and officers’ self-narratives – the study illuminates the contested and dynamic nature of adopting Western norms. This dual approach highlights the formation of a cultural identity among officers marked by eclecticism and ambivalence, revealing broader tensions within the Turkish modernization project.

The rise of neoliberal statism in Turkey, where the state acts as a developer in both urban and rural contexts, illuminates the multi-scalar, negotiated, and power-laden nature of frontier-making in the twenty-first century. The expansion of export-oriented sweet cherry production in western Turkey’s peri-urban landscapes exemplifies the uneven, non-linear, and contested trajectories of contemporary agrarian capitalism. This paper examines how a niche-commodity frontier is produced not only through shifts in political–economic and socio-ecological relations of production, but also through articulations of nationalism and moral authority grounded in religion. Among the various actors involved in this process, smallholders occupy a paradoxical position: structurally subordinated within export value chains yet discursively mobilized as key agents of frontier expansion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that the ideological hegemony underpinning the frontier hinders the formation of smallholder class consciousness. Instead, the articulation of agrarian capitalism with nationalist and developmental imaginaries, expressed through the party politics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), secures widespread allegiance to Turkey’s current iteration of neoliberal development.

Religious poems sung with music, the Alevi deyiş are an integral part of Alevi ritual and social life. Due to the dynamics of oral transmission, the same deyiş can be performed with all kinds of music, the words of the deyiş can change from one performance to the next, and pen names can multiply. The unique experiential function of the deyiş lies precisely in this dynamic and fluid plurality. The deyiş serve as the anchor of communal identity, linking the group to a mythico-historical past that also constitutes the hermeneutical background for making sense of the present and near past. Born from an affect that is at once personal and communal, the oral tradition of deyiş is an experience of collective and personal agency, re-created at each moment in the acts of performance and active listening. Grounded in conceptual frameworks on emotion, embodiment, and orality, the article explores the transmission of deyiş through the cases of early Republican singer–poet Âşık Veysel (d. 1973), poems by Kaygusuz Abdal (flourished late fourteenth–early fifteenth century) and Pir Sultan Abdal (flourished sixteenth century) in the compilation of Ottoman palace musician Ali Ufuki (d. 1675), and modern musical interpretations of Kaygusuz Abdal’s poem.

States of emergency are usually approached separately in social, political, and economic policy spheres while they are generally tied to a concrete time frame: security, disasters, and economic crises are portrayed as discrete emergencies occupying specific periods. This paper shows that seemingly different and sometimes contradictory processes of states of emergency often intertwine with each other despite their variegated domains, scales, reasonings, and political endeavors. Moreover, their legacies and origins are found in the broader history of articulation of new forms of governance and accumulation of wealth. The paper presents two cases in Turkey that differ in terms of the violence they entailed while both exploited the same emergency declaration against disasters and the new Law No. 6306 on land grabbing. The first is a series of spectacular incidents in the southeastern Kurdish city of Diyarbakır and the second is an ethnographic study from Eskişehir, a mundane setting in western Anatolia. The study develops a historical–relational framework to examine how emergency governance operates through dual, interwoven logics of ruling and capital accumulation. This allows us to move beyond ready-made, reductionist understandings of contemporary emergency governance. Discerning institutionalization of states of emergency also shows their fragility and blurs the line between spectacular and non-spectacular.