During the interwar years, U.S.-Turkish relations had been confined within the boundaries of conventional diplomacy. By the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the military assistance agreement that drew on it marked the beginning of a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that bound the two nations together in the military as well as political, economic, and cultural fields. However, relations between the two states did not always proceed on a smooth path. Hence, the relatively optimistic, formative years of 1947-1960 were followed by the troublesome decades of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, mutual relations settled back on an upward track, reaching a peak during the Gulf War of 1990-91. With the demise of the Soviet system, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, some commentators expected the eventual dismantling of NATO and with it the waning of the American connections with Turkey. Turkey's “strategic value” in the eyes of the Americans, it was being argued, would necessarily diminish as the Soviet threat-the main component of this “value”-was disappearing. Developments throughout the 1990s, however, did not fully justify those pessimistic scenarios. In fact, by the mid-1990s, Turkey and the United States, with the occasional participation of other states such as Israel, began to build a so-called strategic partnership to contain regional and local threats (arising in the areas surrounding Turkey and ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East and the Caucasus) that had been unleashed by the destabilizing forces of the post-Cold War period. It should be noted that, during about the same period, U.S.-Turkish relations gained unprecedented new dimensions, economic and cultural, complementing and sometimes overshadowing the military one.

As new elections approach, Turkish political agenda is once again dominated by discussions of election systems and impending changes in the existing one. These discussions are not without consequence. Since the first competitive and fair elections of 1950, twelve general elections have been held and a total of 37 legislative arrangements concerning elections have been implemented. Three of those were passed by the parliament just before the December 1995 elections (Tuncer, 1997, 5). The new early election, expected to be held in April 1999, seems to be no exception to this general pattern. Besides incessant attention in the media paid to the characteristics of the existing election system in Turkey and their political consequences, a number of publications appeared over the past few years following the 1995 election that reflect an intense debate about how the election system should be changed.

The essays contained in this volume challenge and complement standard treatments of Turkish history during the 1930s. Typically, the 1930s are cast as a decade that opened with the Turkish economy reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. Decisionmakers in the ruling Republican People's Party (RPP) were not without a response, however. They introduced statist economic policies whereby the Turkish state began to play an augmented role in production and capital accumulation. The conventional story thus chronicles the ruling elite's most visible policy reaction to the material hardships of the 1930s.

What is an archive, and how does it relate to our sense of history and, moreover, to our sense of the present? This question stands at the interstices of bureaucracy, historiography, and memory. Needless to say, it is also a highly political question. This article deals with the politics of archives, specifically as it manifests itself in Turkey. My aim in looking at the problem of archives is to further raise questions about the relation of history, memory, and truth. The politics of archives is a significant topic today, not only in Turkey, but also, for example, in many post-communist countries, regarding which past records of the old totalitarian regimes should be made public in the age of so-called democracy. In this respect, archives are not only the concerns of historians who are interested in recovering the past, but also of political rulers who aim to frame the past for present purposes.

Metropolises in Turkey like İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir along with the cities in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia received a significant number of internally displaced Kurds (hereinafter referred to as Kurdish IDPs) in the late 1980s to the 1990s. One of the impacts of this displacement in the urban areas has been the alteration in the ways in which some hometown associations functioned, and the formation of some new Kurdish associations. Changes in the nature of migration from voluntary to forced migration have largely contributed to the way some hometown associations began to restructure their agendas and their depiction of the needs of their members, in addition to the extension of their service areas to reach out to these forced migrants. However, as argued below, the way many hometown associations dealt with the problems of the Kurdish IDPs and their identity issues were limited and non-political as compared to the newly formed Kurdish associations of the 1990s, which extended their service functions to include the expression of the needs and identities specific to the “Kurdish group,” and in the case of Kurdish women's associations to “Kurdish women.”

We thought “isms” were dead after our disillusionment with socialist utopian thinking in practice. But in the last two decades, new “isms,” Islamism, feminism and postmodernism, each very distinct, have changed our lives as much as our conceptions of ourselves and our societies. Feminism redefined woman's identity and, by the same token, changed the relations between man and woman; Islamism brought Muslim actors to modern politics, in which the veiling of women blurs habitual distinctions between public and private, traditional and modern; and post-modernism-by pursuing the critique initiated by new social movements for egalitarian, progressive, emancipatory values of enlightened modernity-challenged the central and hierarchical place occupied by the West as standard-bearer of modernity. Despite their differences, each movement—feminism as a social movement, Islamism as an anti-systemic movement, and postmodernism as a movement of ideas—changed definitions and perceptions of woman, Islam and modernity.

The aim of this article is to analyze the results of a survey conducted in the slum areas of six metropolitan cities in Turkey— Adana, Ankara, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, İstanbul and İzmir—in order to unveil the multifaceted aspects of social exclusion processes as experienced by their inhabitants. The evidence documented in this study suggests that a significant number of people living in these areas are distanced from jobs, income, education, and training opportunities, with little access to power and decision-making bodies; this inevitably pushes them to the edge of society. Individuals with a relatively better socio-economic standing tend to be excluded to a lesser extent, while they themselves have intolerant attitudes towards others.

The characterization of agrarian structures in contemporary underdeveloped countries has been haunting social scientists for a long time. As in Latin America and India, from the late sixties onwards a strong controversy emerged among Marxists in Turkey concerning the question of why capitalism had not transformed rural structures in Turkey (J. Harris, 1982; R. L. Harris, 1978; Aydın 1986). The question of capitalist transformation of the countryside occupied the minds of classical Marxist thinkers like Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

The religious and nationalist nature of the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925 has been debated by the scholars for decades. For the Kurdish nationalists the rebellion symbolized the Kurdish struggle for an independent state. For the Turkish state, it was another deception by Great Britain to stir up the region for its colonialist interests. Newly available sources in the US diplomatic archives raise the question of the Turkish government's fomentation and/or manipulation of the Sheikh Said Rebellion. In addition, some of the Turkish oppositional leaders (such as Kazim Karabekir) of the time suggested that this rebellion was allowed to happen to suppress the political opposition in Turkey. This study examines the validity of these claims and how this rebellion was manipulated to silence political opposition in Turkey. More specifically, this study will seek answers to the following questions: Was the Sheikh Said Rebellion fomented by the Turkish government to eliminate the political opposition? How was this rebellion manipulated to accomplish this aim?