This paper explores two examples of collective action, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Kurdish movement in Turkey, by focusing on how these movements constructed two particular places, Diyarbakir and Chiapas, after the armed conflict subsided. My first aim is to show how this place-making has affected the discourses and practices of these movements. I argue that place-making is not only about locality or physical setting, but also about constructing a movement and a form of struggle in its own right. My second aim is to discuss the broad outlines of what may be called the “appropriation of space.” This refers not only to the spaces of visibility and solidarity opened up by a movement, but also to its chances of acquiring significance within local, national or global spaces of power. I look at how the Kurdish movement has had an impact on democracy in Turkey and compare it with the Zapatista movements local and transnational effects. I do so by relating physical and metaphorical notions of space to several concepts generated by social movement literature. As such, this study intends to contribute to spatial understandings of collective action. It is also likely to indicate various pitfalls and obstacles for emancipatory social movements in the present neoliberal era.

Europe of the interwar years witnessed the rise of agrarian populism in several countries. In a sense, something in the “spirit of the age” paved the way for the rise of agrarian ideologies throughout the world. The impact of the Great Depression also played a role in the rise of this phenomenon, since urbanization, industrialization, and liberalism increasingly were seen as responsible for this global economic catastrophe. Turkey of the 1930s and afterward witnessed the rise of such a populism, with an emphasis on the cult of the peasant as one of the most important intellectual motifs of cultural and political discourse. As a matter of fact, agrarian populism, or the so-called köycülük (peasantism), as it was referred to in Turkish, was one of the most important constituent elements of Kemalist populism from the early 1930s through the end of World War II. In this period, the state devised cultural and practical projects for an ideological campaign emphasizing the significance of improving the social and economic conditions of the peasantry. For this reason, in the Turkish press, many wrote about köycülük, and official and semiofficial state institutions such as People’s Houses organized peasantist (köycü) activities throughout the country. The impact of such an intellectual campaign could be seen in some of the most important undertakings of the single-party regime, such as the establishment of the Village Institutes and the land-reform attempts.

İstanbul has undergone a neoliberal restructuring over the past two decades. In this paper, we focus on two urban spaces that we argue to have emerged as part of this process—namely Göktürk, a gated town, and Bezirganbahçe, a public housing project. We examine these spaces as showcases of new forms of urban wealth and poverty in İstanbul, demonstrating the workings of the neoliberalization process and the forms of urbanity that emerge within this context. These are the two margins of the city whose relationship with the center is becoming increasingly tenuous in qualitatively different yet parallel forms. In Göktürk's segregated compounds, where urban governance is increasingly privatized, non-relationality with the city, seclusion into the domestic sphere and the family, urban fear and the need for security, and social and spatial isolation become the markers of a new urbanity. In Bezirganbahçe, involuntary isolation and insulation, and non-relationality with the city imposed through the reproduction of poverty create a new form of urban marginality marked by social exclusion and ethnic tensions. The new forms of wealth and poverty displayed in these two urban spaces, accompanied by the social and spatial segregation of these social groups, compel us to think about future forms of urbanity and politics in İstanbul.

This study draws upon fieldwork to examine the role of the small firm in developing countries with special reference to the Turkish case. The fieldwork was conducted at OSTIM during 1992-93. The study will critically examine the theory of ‘flexible specialization’, which claims that certain developments in capitalist economies, such as a rapid change and differentiation in demand and growth of trade unionism in large production plants, increasingly undermine the system of mass production in large scale firms, and thus favor the growth of small firms. More specifically, it will inquire whether the Turkish case confirms the growth of the small firm sector of the economy in relation to the use of new technology, flexible production techniques, flexible work force and design.

The end of the First World War marked the complete disintegration of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. This disintegration was followed by a powerful surge of various nationalistic currents on the one hand, and an international power struggle for the control of the region on the other. The 1918-1923 period, therefore, represents a crucial phase, for not only were the overall forms of the international power relations in the area defined during these years, but the political structures and the orientations of various social and political interests within the states concerned were also similarly determined.

In an article entitled “Non-Market Mechanisms of Market Formation: The Development of the Consumer Durables Industry in Turkey” which appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of this journal, Ayşe Buğra analyzes the nationwide network of sales agents organized by Arçelik, the first and the largest consumer durables producer in Turkey, and its role in the development of the consumer durables industry in the postwar era. She argues that in the absence of a market-forming role of the state and the limited availability of modern channels of publicity, “the increased sales of household durables required special mechanisms -both to create the need for the products and to facilitate payments for them” (Buğra 1998, p. 7). According to Buğra, under these circumstances Arçelik formed a network of sales agents for its products and this contributed, to a large extent, to the formation of a mass consumer market for household durables.

In 1993, a documentary film titled Sarı Zeybek, which narrates the last days of Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, appeared on a private TV channel in Turkey. Having roused considerable interest, the film reappeared on screens a few more times and later was made into a video. Can Dündar, the producer of the film, writes:

O College dear, we praise thee
For pointing to the stars
With faith and hope unswerving
Which no weak vision mars
Thy service unrestricted
By race or class or creed;
Thy love so freely offered,
Its only claim-our need.
-Anthem of the American College for Girls, Istanbul

Halide Edib (1883-1964) was one of modern Turkey's most celebrated women. Author, feminist, nationalist, modernist, educator, and member of the National Assembly, she identified her person and career with the transformation of Turkey into a modern secular republic. Educated in the internationalist spirit of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, she was, throughout her life, a cosmopolitan intellectual with an international audience. Edib's personal transition from Ottoman society to the new nationalist elite, and her homeland's transition from empire to republic, posed no insurmountable historical, social, and cultural discontinuities; hers was a nationalism that, although grounded in Western notions of emancipation and self-determination, asserted with confidence its distinct identity and autonomy from the West.

A world renowned author once described “a migrant's vision” in terms of a “triple disruption,” one that occurs when migrants lose their place in the world, enter into a language that is alien to them, and find themselves “surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to,” their own. The author in question—let's call him X—then proceeds to explain how the creative work of a lesser known author—let's call him Y—is informed by such “a migrant's vision.”

One prominent intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, argued that the new Republic should be “a Republic of fine arts.” Indeed, the early Republican project in Turkey perceived culture and art as media through which the Republic could not only represent its achievements but also “create” itself. The present study focuses on the cultural policies and elite perceptions of culture during the single-party regime in Turkey. More specifically, it looks into the developments that took place in the plastic arts and in elite approaches towards aesthetics. This is done in order to shed light on young Turkey's cultural modernization. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and power, this discussion stands at the intersection of political studies and cultural history.

In the discourse of the history textbooks used since 1931, the relationship between identity and otherness often tends towards the necessity of proving both the value and greatness of Turkish history and culture. Consequently, the whole historical narrative, and also the discourse on identity and the nationalist discourse, which very often make use of history in their argumentation, always present the Turks in a favorable light and in an emphasized role. This appears in several forms, particularly during a kind of reconstruction of the past using tenses expressing the unreal condition (“If the Turks had not existed… Islam could not have been saved”, or “… the European Renaissance could not have taken place”, etc.). Another noticeable form is the use of the word hizmet, (“service”, “utility”, helpfulness”, “function”) provided by the Turks. The word itself is helpful to fit the Turks in with “otherness”, in the way of showing them in a good light in history. With regard to this notion, according to the narrative, wide groups of “others” often take advantage of the existence of the Turks: the whole mankind, the “free world”, or the Muslim world, according to the time when the discourse was formulated.