This article explores Turkey’s exclusion from enlargement scenarios in European political discourse in the new geopolitical era, which imposes important external pressures on European integration. It utilises the concept of “Geopolitical Othering,” which concerns the discursive constructions of the European identity through boundary-drawing practices that portray the Other as a threat to European security and stability. By doing so, the article aims to complement recent studies on Turkey’s growing role as a third country rather than an enlargement candidate, while clarifying another facet of the complexities in EU–Turkey relations, which extend beyond the persistent normative obstacles to Turkish accession. The article illustrates its theoretical arguments with two case studies on EU–Turkey relations, focusing on the 2016 EU–Turkey Statement on irregular migration and the 2018–2020 Eastern Mediterranean Crisis. It demonstrates how Turkey’s specific foreign policy choices over the past decade, including certain cooperative arrangements with the EU, paired with its geopolitical rivalries with the Union, have caused the EU to associate Turkey with certain existential threats. This perception, in turn, has contributed to Turkey’s discursive dissociation from the EU enlargement process, especially during the last Commission term, which coincided with the intensification of a geopoliticised identity discourse within the EU.

States frequently use leadership decapitation in their domestic and cross-border counter-insurgency/terrorism operations, yet the literature is far from having a consensus regarding its effects. I argue that literature focuses on the military implications of decapitation (its implications for the organisation’s operational capabilities/ability to generate violence) at the expense of its implications for negotiations between insurgents and the state. Second, I argue that leadership arrest and killing are analytically distinct categories of leadership decapitation that can trigger different processes and outcomes and that an arrested leader’s possible role from the prison should be considered in the analysis since leadership arrest alters the leader’s incentives, resulting in a new bargaining game between the leader, the state, and the organisation. I empirically illustrate these arguments using the arrest of the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan as a theory-building case study. In the case study, I show that Abdullah Öcalan’s arrest was productive for terminating the conflict in the short run, whereas it was counter-productive in the medium and long run. These findings suggest that the literature may benefit from tracing the process closely, considering the dynamic nature of conflicts and the impact of decapitation on bargaining processes, without limiting the temporal scope of inquiry.

How can everyday entertainment shape gender politics in authoritarian regimes? Despite autocrats’ heavy control over media, political scientists studying authoritarianism largely neglect television programming. Particularly surprising given their target demographics, cooking shows are absent in political science gender analyses. Drawing from over 600 hours of Turkish cooking show content, I introduce conservative gender edutainment to capture the mechanisms by which TV shows facilitate authoritarian regimes’ gender construction projects. Using quantitative analysis of cooking show content, I first identify two complementary pedagogies — modeling and othering — that respectively teach adherence to, and vilify deviation from, regime-specified behavioral norms. I then use intertextual analysis to extract content that engagingly instructs viewers in the ideal woman in “New Turkey,” the neoconservative vision articulated by Turkey’s ruling (Justice and Development Party) AKP. Findings provide novel insight into vernacular channels of gender construction, while underscoring the added value TV-as-data holds for studies of identity politics in authoritarian contexts.

Utilizing data on household consumption expenditure patterns and sectorial greenhouse gas emissions, we study the extent of inequality over Turkish households’ differentiated carbon footprint incidences. We harmonize the household budget survey data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) with production-based gas emissions data from EXIOBASE3 and investigate both the direct and indirect emissions across household-level income strata. Our calculations reveal that the households in the highest income decile alone are responsible for 19.4 percent of the overall (direct and indirect) emissions, whereas the bottom 10 percent of households are responsible for 4.3 percent. We also find that for direct emissions, the per-household average of the highest income decile exceeds that of the lowest income decile by a factor of 11.2. Notably, 87 percent of the indirect emissions budget for the poorest decile is linked to food and housing expenses, underscoring their susceptibility to climate policies. We confer that in designing the net-zero emission pathways to combat climate change, it would not suffice to study the technological transition of decarbonization solely and that the successful implementation of an indigenous environmental policy will ultimately depend upon the socio-economic factors of income distribution strata, indicators of consumption demand, and responsiveness of the individual households to react to price signals.

Recent changes in the Turkish healthcare system aim to enhance efficiency by implementing various feedback systems, performance-based wages, and new auditing mechanisms to monitor resource and time use and cycle of motions in medical settings. This paper aims to answer the following question: how do nurses respond to changes that place them in a subordinate position, where supervisors and administrators dictate control over time and the nature of labor? In the literature on labor and neoliberalization, resistance by workers to control over work is mostly concluded as part of the reproduction of workers’ subordination. However, this paper challenges such a conclusion by presenting an alternative perspective. In-depth interviews with twenty-one nurses conducted in İstanbul revealed that nurses disrupt control mechanisms by refusing to conform to behaviors dictated by managerial principles, manipulating information about medication and equipment usage, and concealing beds and patients through their authoritative control over them. This study unveils new dimensions of contemporary nursing in Turkey through which covert solidarities between nurses enable efforts to maintain “good care” often shaped by gendered expectations. These efforts mostly resist the “hotelization” of hospitals and aim to remake the moral boundaries of care work.

The Turkish state long enforced intellectual property (IP) rights only loosely. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, market liberalization and trade agreements drove an overhaul of the country’s copyright regime that transformed musical ownership and creativity, though music copyright stakeholders view this legal reform as ongoing. This article builds on existing accounts of legal consciousness to ethnographically document how a range of music industry actors—including legal professionals, musicians, music industry executives, and commercial users of copyrighted music—participate in IP reform. I identify a distinct set of cultural schemas that mediate such actors’ legal consciousness in this context. The internationally integrated nature of the copyright system, together with Turkey’s geopolitical positioning on the margins of Europe, has produced a reflexive aspect of legal consciousness in which Turkish citizens exhibit a heightened group status awareness as they compare their experience of domestic IP law to the imagined situation elsewhere. In a novel contribution to the literature, I observe how they often make sense of perceived dissonances between the ideals and practice of the law through culturally intimate narratives, taking the copyright system’s purported failures to typify something essential about what it means to be a citizen of Turkey.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.

Migrant protest activity has been often analyzed from the perspectives of the protest nature and issues it addressed. A comparison of protest behaviour before and after migration is largely missing. It remains unclear whether people who were actively protesting in their home country continue to be engaged in protests after migration and why. This article addresses this gap in the literature and aims to explain what made the Ukrainian migrants protest before leaving their home country and in Turkey as a host country. The analysis uses individual data from an original survey conducted in May 2023 among 935 Ukrainian migrants living in Turkey. The findings show that there are different migrants who participate in the protests organized in the two countries, and the strongest predictor for political protest is civic engagement. Protest in Ukraine is rooted in the orientation towards domestic politics, while protests abroad are driven by identitarian dimensions.

This study examines how formal institutions in hybrid regimes, particularly presidentialism, party organization and electoral rules, actively foster and sustain clientelistic networks, leading to particularistic outcomes. While existing literature highlights the weakening of formal institutions and pervasive clientelism as drivers of democratic breakdown, this study uses the concept of neopatrimonialism to analyse how formal institutions themselves consolidate patron–client relationships to maintain power and stability. Focusing on Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that the institutional incentive structure consolidates the president's role as the central ‘patron’, controlling resources and offices, and encourages clientelistic networks to coalesce around the presidency. The discretionary allocation of resources through patron–client relationships sustains neopatrimonial authority as long as clients' loyalty is rewarded. However, this governance increases clients' dependence on the patron, binding them at the expense of representation and responsiveness. The analysis offers insights into how such institutional configurations contribute to authoritarianism and particularistic governance in hybrid regimes.