This study aims to analyze how two popular television series, Famagusta (produced in Greece) and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs (Once Upon a Time in Cyprus, produced in Turkey), reflect the political approaches of Greece and Turkey toward the Cyprus issue. Television series are often powerful media for national narrative building, and both Famagusta and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs series demonstrate the ways historical events are selectively portrayed to reinforce contemporary political perspectives regarding Cyprus. Beyond simply retelling historical events, both series are used to reflect the ongoing efforts of Greece and Turkey to assert rights over Cyprus, a geopolitically significant island with a complex colonial past. This study will analyze how these series engage in narrative framing to legitimize national claims over a distant territory, using television series as a medium for both national narratives and colonial continuity. The study will explore the underlying messages, rhetorical tools, and symbolic elements that each series uses to shape the public perception about the Cyprus issue, drawing on concepts from media studies and international relations.

This article analyses multiple visions and perspectives offered by Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals during the Republican era (1912–1949) concerning their status as a Muslim community by looking into their debates on the modernization and secularization of the Turkish Republic under the Kemalist regime. The transformation of the multi-ethnic and religious Qing empire into a Republican Chinese nation-state presented new challenges to the ruling elite, intellectuals, and minority communities. This article explores how Chinese Muslims navigated the complex intellectual landscape as alternative visions and ideologies concerning nation-building, ethnic autonomy, religion, and modernity emerged in China. The article focuses on how Han Chinese intellectuals, the Kuomintang (KMT) elite, and Chinese Muslims selectively interpreted Turkish modernization in different ways to promote their socio-political cause. It analyses the overlaps and the complex, nuanced differences between Chinese Muslim interpretations of Turkey as a success story of the awakened modern Muslim and the KMT ruling elites’ view of Turkey in the 1930s as a model of developmental authoritarianism, highlighting Turkey’s success in establishing a homogenous nation-state that superseded religion with a sanctified state ideology. The article thus demonstrates how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the KMT state’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion and the subsequent era of the Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a powerful alternative to KMT rule and ideology.

How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey’s infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey’s infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state’s predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.

This study aimed to identify determinants of influenza vaccination among older adults using nationally representative data from the Turkey Older Persons Profile Survey 2023. Data from 11 657 individuals aged 65 and over, collected by the Turkish Statistical Institute, were analysed. Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression was employed for variable selection, followed by binary logistic regression to identify significant predictors. Only 19.4% of older adults reported receiving an influenza vaccine during the 2022/2023 influenza season. Higher education, income sufficiency, social security coverage, regular medication use, physical activity, and use of mobile health (mHealth) applications were significantly associated with higher vaccination uptake. Former smoking, alcohol consumption, older age, higher body mass index, and greater independence in daily living were also positive predictors. Traditional barriers to healthcare access (e.g., transportation, waiting times) were not significantly associated. Regional disparities were evident, with lower vaccination rates in the eastern regions. Vaccine uptake among older adults in Turkey is low despite universal access. Promoting engagement with primary healthcare services and increasing the use of mHealth applications may contribute to increasing vaccination coverage. Special attention should be given to socially disadvantaged groups and underperforming regions to enhance preventive healthcare among the aging population.

This article examines Turkey’s constitutional trajectory through Carl Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty, exception and dictatorship. It argues that Turkey’s political development cannot be fully understood as a process of gradual democratic erosion alone but must be analyzed as a sequence of constitutional ruptures in which exceptional powers have repeatedly redefined sovereign authority. From Abdülhamid II’s suspension of the 1876 Constitution to the Grand National Assembly’s exercise of wartime sovereignty in 1921, the military interventions of 1960 and 1980, and President Erdoğan’s post-2016 consolidation of power, sovereignty has shifted among personal, collective and institutional actors capable of suspending legality and founding new constitutional orders. By situating Turkey within a longer history of sovereign reconstitution, the article critically reworks Schmitt’s framework to show how emergency provisions – initially designed to defend constitutional order – can be transformed into instruments of constitutional refoundation. It demonstrates how commissarial responses to crisis may evolve into sovereign dictatorships, enabling regime transformation under the appearance of legal continuity. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on authoritarian constitutionalism and emergency governance by clarifying the constitutional mechanisms through which legality is suspended, reconfigured and redeployed. Beyond the Turkish case, the article advances a broader comparative agenda for global constitutionalism: integrating the study of democratic erosion with an analysis of sovereign reconstitution in moments of exception, thereby illuminating how contemporary constitutional orders are reshaped through crisis.

This article aims to demonstrate that the “Alevi Revival,” commonly described as the sudden increase in visibility of Alevis in Turkey in the early 1990s, was actually the result of a decade-long transformation experienced by Alevis in Europe since the late 1970s. This historical contextualization is not entirely novel but is typically only framed in reference to certain milestone events. The present article substantiates this approach based on an analysis of nine issues of Yurtseverler Birliği, one of the earliest Alevi political journals, published from 1982 to 1989 in Berlin and not yet studied. The evolving discourse surrounding Alevism in this journal’s issues provides the earliest substantial evidence for understanding the emergence and evolution of strategies employed to promote the visibility of Alevism from the 1980s to the 1990s. By the end of this period, the strategy of “making Alevism known” had become dominant in defining Alevism in Europe, in contrast to heterogeneous approaches to framing Alevism in Turkey. In this sense, the “Alevi Manifesto,” an open letter published in 1990 in Turkey, and the first Alevi Culture Week, organized a year before in Germany, should be regarded as outcomes of the preexisting context rather than the Revival’s initiation.

Previous research conducted in closed autocracies indicates that government propaganda can deter opposition, shift political attitudes, and influence emotions. Yet the specific mechanisms and contextual factors influencing how and when propaganda works remain unclear. We theorize how power-projecting government propaganda works differently for government supporters and opponents in polarized electoral authoritarian regimes, focusing on emotional reactions, sense of societal belonging, and downstream effects on contentious political behavior. Through two preregistered surveys in Turkey (N = 6,286), we find that supporters exposed to propaganda videos feel a greater sense of belonging and are more susceptible to engage in pro-government activities. Opponents report heightened anger and anxiety and seem deterred from protesting. However, the latter effect weakened during the highly contested 2023 electoral campaign. These results indicate that propaganda can help electoral authoritarian regimes deter anti-government action and encourage pro-government action, but that its deterrent effects may weaken during periods of high mobilization and contention.

This essay explores the formation of the Syria-Turkey border by examining the mobility of contraband merchants and couriers. Contraband commerce can be viewed as not only a technique of mobility but a technology of sovereignty. I parse out these linkages from within the semantic domain of kaçak (contraband; literally “fugitive”) repurposed in the hands of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials. At important historical junctures, contraband commerce between modern Turkey and Syria came to link regimes of value and territorialization, border delineation and land dispossession, and economic informality and political treason. Analyzing the paradoxically uneven distribution of physical mobility and transborder transactions among the inhabitants of the border as a central tenet of territorialization, I suggest conceptualizing the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty. This essay contends that such an approach recuperates the historicity and dynamism of arrested mobilities and their role in the spatial production of borders, and of other contingent forms they give to sovereignty over geography and history.

Building popular support for democracy is especially necessary in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. Can educational interventions promote democratic support in these countries and influence how citizens evaluate their country’s political regime? To answer these questions, we conducted two online experiments in Turkey comparing the effects of two pro-democratic educational interventions, a positive frame emphasizing gains from democratic institutions and a negative frame highlighting the losses under authoritarian regimes. Both treatment frames were successful at building democratic demand. However, only participants exposed to the pro-democracy messages with a positive frame took important additional cognitive steps, decreasing their evaluations of Turkey’s democratic supply and, therefore, becoming less likely to vote for the parties aligned with the autocratic regime. We offer a reference points theory to explain this divergence. Overall, our research makes significant contributions to the literature on democracy promotion and democratic support among ordinary citizens.

The Great Depression in 1929 had a transformative impact on Turkey. The institutions established to minimize the effects of the crisis propagated a set of statist measures. The National Economy and Savings Association and Public Press Directorate utilized photography and painting in the beginning of the 1930s to propagate those measures. In their efforts, these institutions constructed a new conception of landscape with a moral agenda: citizens and artists should travel in Anatolia to learn about the country, love it, and create art accordingly. Key to this conception was the productivity of the land. The most comprehensive cultural program during World War II, Homeland Tours, mimicked this new conception of a landscape. This article analyzes the conception of productive landscapes up until the end of World War II by drawing attention to the overlooked photography collection in the State Archives, which comprises paintings made during the Homeland Tours. One of the many tools that the statist economic institutions devised was agricultural statistics. The comparison between the paintings and actual land use statistics demonstrates that the artists collectively followed the statist economic agenda.

While the growing representation of women in diplomacy is often celebrated, scholarship on occupational feminisation warns that feminisation can trigger a devaluation of professional work. This article focuses on two conditions identified as inhibitors of such devaluation – the overall status of the occupation and the value accorded to female labour within the occupation – and traces how these two conditions have varied over time and interacted with feminisation in diplomatic work. We contend that in the transition from a classical to a polylateral mode of diplomacy, feminisation has not led to devaluation, as it coincided with an increase in the status of diplomatic work and reinforced the salience of ‘feminine’ skills. However, currently, the rise of populism is undermining these safeguards against devaluation in diplomatic work by constraining the autonomy of diplomats and delegitimising their expert knowledge. To illustrate these dynamics, the article examines the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (TMFA). We show that the growing diversification and ambition of Turkish foreign policy in the 2000s enhanced the status of diplomatic work and the value of female labour in it. However, by the mid-2010s, these safeguards against devaluation for a more gender-equal TMFA have weakened in the populist–authoritarian political context. Thus, in the context of rising populism in Turkey as well as globally, it is imperative for initiatives to increase women’s representation to be accompanied by strategies that preserve and elevate the status of diplomatic work.

This study aims to investigate how and at what level civil society organizations fulfill strategic leadership implementations. The scope of the study involves Turkish Charities that have international operations under the name of civil society organizations. We have collected the data from the interviews of the charity managers, and we have preferred using the qualitative method. We have analyzed the data with descriptive analysis technique. As a result of the study, we have found out that the charities operating internationally under the name of civil society organizations have fulfilled strategic leadership implementations effectively, in identifying and developing the core competences, forming a sustainable and effective organizational culture, and controlling the strategic activities in a balanced way. On the other hand, we have determined that these organizations cannot implement strategic leadership effectively in identifying the strategic intent of the organization, developing human capital and emphasizing ethical practices in organizational culture. We have also derived from the study that the Turkish charities do not have planned strategic leadership implementations, and the managers have benefitted from strategic leadership implementations depending on the conditions which they are in.

In some countries, direct democracy is used successfully to increase legitimacy of decisions or mitigate conflict, and in other countries, authoritarian leaders seem to instrumentalize and manipulate referendums. How can referendum integrity be analyzed? This article presents an empirical instrument to evaluate the variety and integrity of referendums. This encompasses criteria for the analysis of direct democracy. First, we develop a referendum cycle model based on the electoral cycle framework, assessing referendum quality in a number of dimensions from electoral laws and electoral procedures, thematic limitations of referendums, to voter registration, the initiation of referendums, campaign and media coverage as well as campaign financing. The empirical instrument is designed to be used in expert surveys, and piloted in the Turkish constitutional referendum of 2017. The article presents the results of the pilot study, draws out opportunities and limitations of this approach and suggests avenues for its future development.

The case of Prof. İştar Gözaydın is one of the most visible and tragicomic examples for academics who have been victimized in Turkey by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Gözaydın was not the first one and perhaps will not be the last because the authoritarian mindset that encapsulates the academics and scholars started long before the foundation of AKP, despite the fact that it was deepened and broadened by it. This article aims to explain the intense recrimination of academics by a repressive and hegemonic political power in Turkey in the second decade of the 2000s. It also tries to shed light on the essential weakness of the authoritarian strong state practices on the face of academic freedom.

A new form of civic activism is taking root in many countries, which diverge from traditional civic actors with their structural and membership patterns. This article focuses on the relationship between the new and the traditional civic actors in Turkey, investigates the alliances established between them and discusses how these alliances contribute to civic activism. The discussions in this article are informed by existing conceptual debate in the literature on alliances. This article contributes to this literature by showing how the respective strengths of the new and the traditional activists complement each other. New civic activists’ closer ties to grassroots and their flexible organizational structure allow for quick reaction, more visibility and legitimacy. Traditional civic actors complement this with their stable structure that enables them to sustain their campaigns, engage in and follow up the legal struggles and act as a transmission belt to relations with public institutions and governance.

This study investigates the extent to which newspapers are polarized in representing civil society organizations in Turkey. In examining the news in 15 printed newspapers and 2 online newspapers in 2017, we found that (1) 1499 associations and 499 foundations were mentioned but not equally distributed across the newspapers, (2) Turkish newspapers’ coverage of associations/foundations was affected by the type of association/foundation (religious/conservative vs. secular) and newspaper (pro-government vs. anti-government), (3) when news about an association/foundation appeared in pro-government newspapers, it did not appear in anti-government newspapers, and vice versa, and (4) secular associations/foundations were covered more often by anti-government newspapers than by pro-government newspapers. We therefore argue that in countries such as Turkey, where civil society organizations have historically been closely allied with state or political ideologies, newspapers’ political stances affect the media coverage of civil society organizations.