It was in 1974 when I first took a look at mercantile militarism in Turkey, emergent in the form of OYAK-Ordu Yardımlaşma Kurumu (Armed Forces Mutual Trust and Pension Fund) (Parla 1974). In the first section of this paper, I shall present the case as it then appeared. In the second section, I will update the data on the phenomenon of OYAK as of 1998. In the third, I shall examine aspects of the second, complementary wave of Turkish mercantile militarism that has manifested itself in the form of TSKGV-Türk Silahlı Kuvvetlerini Güçlendirme Vakfı (Foundation for Strengthening the Turkish Armed Forces). The concluding section will suggest a way in which this subject can be put in the larger context of an all-pervasive militarism in Turkey—political, constitutional, cultural—as well as some of the ways in which critical appreciation of this phenomenon seems crucial for understanding Turkish politics and political economy better.

Over the past two years, the televised sermons of Fethullah Hocaefendi have thrust him into the public limelight, lending his name celebrity status as a prominent religious-cum-political figure. His long standing influence as the leader of one of the most powerful Islamic communities in contemporary Turkey, Nur Cemaati, is now common public knowledge. Currently, this group owns one of the largest mass circulating newspapers (Zaman), a TV channel (Samanyolu) and a vast network of hundreds of educational institutions extending all the way from Turkey to Central Asia. The teachings of Fethullah Gülen Hoca are widely disseminated through books as well as cassette recordings of his sermons, readily available for sale on counters of commercial bookstores. For the “secularized” public however, Fethullah Hoca's renown extends beyond his religious-cum-political prominence. He is famous for the fact that he weeps ecstatically during his sermons, contrary to what is expected of a man in Turkey today.

While the increasing interest in contemporary art from Turkey has centered on explicitly political works, discussions on the limitations of the freedom of expression have likewise come under the spotlight, not least with regard to Turkey's EU candidacy. In contrast to the attempts of complete suppression marking the 1980 coup d'état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions (and their circulation) that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state, and to turn their producers into targets. This article investigates selected images produced in the contemporary art world between 2005 and 2008, which were taken to transcend the limits of what constitutes tolerable depictions of Turkey's socio-political realities. It examines current modalities of censorship in the visual arts and the different actors involved in silencing efforts. The cases show that within these fields of delimitation there are considerable contingencies: The domain of the unspeakable remains unclearly mapped. I argue that it is because, not despite, this arbitrariness that delegitimizing interventions are successful, in that they (a) create incentives for self-censorship, and (b) produce defenses of artistic freedom that, by highlighting the autonomy of art, to some extent consolidate a conceptual separation of art from politics.

Since the Customs Union came into effect on 1 January 1996, Turkey has effectively become part of the European Union's single market. This high degree of economic integration has not been matched in the sphere of political and social integration. Turkey was omitted from a list of countries with which accession negotiations began in March 1998, and the Cardiff European Council of May 1998 confirmed Turkey's marginalization from the current process of enlargement.

Recent episodes of financial crises in emerging markets progressively highlighted the importance of a sound and well-functioning banking sector for macroeconomic stability and sustainable economic growth. The Asian crisis of 1997, in particular, drew attention to the fundamental role that a deficient banking system could play in terms of generating major financial crises with devastating repercussions on the real economy and with significant possibilities of contagion in an emerging market context. The recent twin economic crises experienced by Turkey in 2000 and 2001 illustrated in a rather dramatic fashion the strong correspondence between a poorly functioning and under-regulated banking system, on the one hand, and the sudden outbreak of macroeconomic crises on the other. Indeed, the Turkish experience shows that both public and private banks can contribute significantly to the outbreak of economic crises. In retrospect, it may be argued that private commercial banks played an instrumental role in the first of the twin crises experienced in November 2000, whilst, public banks emerged as the central actors in the context of the subsequent crisis of February 2001.

This study aims to contribute to efforts to understand how redress occurs in local contexts impaired by armed conflict. Its particular focus is on events, dynamics and forms of relationality that (re)create public spheres on a local level. It takes the city of Diyarbakır, the largest in Southeastern Turkey, as the vantage point from which to explore the transformation of a site of violent conflict into a space for the expression of differences that were either nonexistent or suppressed. Since the beginning of the armed uprising of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in 1984, the majority of political actors in Diyarbakır have in effect been polarized into two antagonistic camps (the Turkish state vs. the PKK). With the end of armed conflict five years ago, Diyarbakır has been astoundingly transformed into a paradise for civil society activists. The dynamics through which new urban spaces of existence and of expression have been created have not ceased being conflictual. In exploring the formative function of micro and macro struggles on publicness, the theoretical intent of this study is to argue against the Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere.

Nınçir mangig im sirasun, Oror yem asum, Baydzar lusinn e meğm hayum, Ko ororotsum.

By analyzing the transmission of Armenian lullabies within the changing contexts of identity and cultural politics in Turkey, this paper addresses displacement and loss as two interrelated experiences shaping the sense of being an Armenian in Turkey. I criticize the liberal multiculturalist perspective that represents cultures in a way that cuts the link between the past and the present, by dissociating different cultures from the history of their presence in Anatolia and the destruction of that presence. I argue that in such a context where cultures are detached from lived experiences and memory, it becomes impossible to share the stories of violence and pain in the public sphere; hence, the loss itself becomes the experience of being Armenian. Finally, I try to explain how today young generations of Armenians in İstanbul, in their search for an Armenian identity, have developed a certain way of belonging to the space and culture, a way of belonging that is very much shaped by the experience of loss.

The aim of this essay is to read Attilâ İlhan's novel Gâzi Paşa, a historical novel about the Turkish Independence War, with a focus on the distinction between history writing and historical novel. I begin my analysis of this novel from the narratological perspective developed by Dorrit Cohn, who emphasizes two aspects of this distinction: different reference fields of history and fiction, and fiction's distinctive ability in reaching into the minds of characters. These aspects will help me to unravel the production of meaning in Gâzi Paşa through its ambivalent and intentional border crossings between the two fields. Then, I will explain this intentional textual swing through an analysis of its roman à thèse features, which I ground on Susan Rubin Suleiman's description of the genre. Finally, the essay will discuss Gâzi Paşa's authorial intention that aims at instructing an audience through a narrative of charisma, founded on a specific representation of Mustafa Kemal for the purpose of propagating a black-and-white perception of history and politics.