How are deep relationships between city and club identification formed, and are they inevitable? The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the rivalry between two football clubs, Vitesse Arnhem and NEC Nijmegen, explicating their various ‘axes of enmity’. Supporters, club officials and observers of these two clubs created and selectively maintained similarities between respective city image and club image. The process of ‘othering’ influenced both city and club images and helped create oppositional identities. Herein, football identification reflects broader societal needs for a place-based identity, and for a coherent image of both self and other.

The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

International courts (ICs) have found themselves dealing with issues that are ‘political’ in nature. This paper discusses the techniques of avoidance ICs have developed to navigate such highly political or sensitive issues. The first part discusses some of the key rationales for avoidance. Drawing on the discussion of the political question doctrine in US constitutional law, it shows how ICs may justify avoidance on both principled and pragmatic grounds. It then discusses the different types of avoidance strategies employed by ICs, based on examples from the Court of Justice of the European Union, the International Court of Justice and the East African Court of Justice. ICs are rarely upfront about avoidance strategies. Rather, ICs tend to avoid cases in a more subtle fashion, relying on procedural rules to exclude a case, or by resolving the dispute in a way that avoids the most politically sensitive questions and controversies.

This contribution reviews different forms of resistance against the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). While backlash is rare, various forms of pushback are more common than accounts of the CJEU's apparent success suggest. It is not uncommon that national policy-makers, administrations and the judiciary fail to comply with individual rulings. Moreover, Member State authorities have developed multiple strategies to limit the practical effect of controversial lines of CJEU case-law. The availability of ‘work-arounds’ that national authorities can live with shields the CJEU against significant backlash. At the same time, the multiple processes of pushback in the Member States lead to an outcome of considerable heterogeneity.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.

Volatility is a central theme of the scholarship on party competition. At the extreme, entire systems collapse. Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela each went through a protracted period of change with the crash of old parties and the rise of new ones, including one representing the “new left.” Average electoral volatility grew by more than 50 percent and remained high for a decade or more. Can this churning surface of party death, birth, and change obscure undercurrents of stabilization in individual voting behavior? This project decomposes electoral volatility into two subtypes: system-level volatility—long-term spatial and temporal trends of change in support (e.g., realignment)—and individual volatility—fluid and cycle-specific fluctuations in support (e. g., electoral swing). It shows that the high volatility through the transformation has been at the system level, not the individual level. The cause is the stronger partisan and ethnic bonds mobilized by the new left.

Attempts at common agreements to phase out fossil fuel subsidies (FFS) have been increasing, as the topic generated momentum through the Rio Dialogues prior to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and following the Paris Agreement in 2016. This study quantifies the magnitude and the relative importance of FFS in the Turkish economy and produces a relevant national FFS synthesis for policy design. FFS form a complex system of a self-contradictory nature that stands in stark contrast with the Turkish government’s statements regarding sustainable development. Based on available data from the 2000s, we find that Turkey provides state support for coal and the exploration of oil and natural gas that represents roughly 0.2 percent of its nominal GDP per year. Continuing to subsidize fossil fuels narrows down the fiscal options that could otherwise be used to support cleaner technologies and mitigation actions. Given the fact that fossil fuels have significantly negative implications for the environment and health, eliminating those subsidies has the potential to help combat environmental pollution, climate change, and related problems.

Islamic fashion and lifestyle magazines enable the global circulation and consumption of newly emerging images of, narratives about, and discourses on Muslim women across the globe. Such magazines also trigger debates by making visible the language of commodification and consumerism that is increasingly shaping Muslim subjectivities. In particular, Âlâ—the pioneering Islamic fashion magazine in Turkey—has been the target of extensive criticism by Islamic intellectuals and columnists. This study contextualizes these criticisms within the broader debate on veiling fashion and Islamic consumerism in the context of 2010s Turkey, a context in which the Islamic bourgeoisie has been strengthened and class cleavages among veiled women have been further sharpened. The study analyzes the opinion columns focusing on Âlâ published in the Islamic, pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak, as well as the responses of Âlâ’s editors and producers to such criticisms. The findings demonstrate that the magazine is criticized for making visible the surge of consumerism among the Islamic bourgeoisie, for blurring the boundaries between Islamic and secular identities, and for fragmenting an idealized imagination of Islamic collectivity by emphasizing class cleavages among veiled women. I argue that these criticisms of Âlâ in Islamic circles reflect a concern with the erosion of the symbolic connotations of veiling in Turkey, particularly in terms of marking the boundaries that define the imagination of an Islamic collectivity.

This article argues that Turkey’s contemporary political regime is competitive authoritarianism. Tracing the evolution of Turkey’s political system from tutelary democracy to its current state, it describes the developments that resulted in the dissolution of the army’s prerogatives in politics and the rise of a new form of authoritarianism in the country. Associating this substantive change with the global emergence of competitive authoritarianism, I argue that the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey has been institutionalized by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and that, since the 2017 referendum, the regime has displayed a tendency toward full authoritarianism that may render elections non-competitive by narrowing the legal channels through which the opposition can contest for political power.

The Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) is arguably the largest regional development project ever witnessed in Turkey. Begun in the 1970s, GAP initially aimed primarily at the construction of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and of extensive irrigation networks to produce hydroelectric energy and water 1.8 million hectares of land in southeastern Turkey. Later, the scope of GAP broadened significantly as it became a more ambitious and comprehensive scheme of modernization and transformation. Following this expansion, the multidimensionality of GAP and its multifaceted implications became clearer at both the national and international level. The project grew more visible and influential not only in political and public discourses, but also in the GAP region itself. Despite these developments, however, the question of how the project’s characteristics, vocabulary, rationales, and mechanisms have changed since its inception remains underdiscussed. This article asks what GAP was in the past and what it has more recently become. It examines the gradual transformation of GAP over forty years by specifically taking into account the continuities and ruptures in development discourse, theory, and practice since the 1950s. In this way, the article aims to provide a new perspective regarding the stages through which the project has passed to reach its current form.