Burak Gürel

Koc University

Turkey's Community Development Program (CDP), implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, has remained a largely underexplored subject in the global history of rural community development schemes. Based on detailed archival research, this article shows that the programme's central goal was to mobilize the labour and financial resources of the villagers to...

İçinde bulunduğumuz kriz ortamı –iklim değişikliği ve ekolojik yıkım, ekonomik sorunlar, otoriterleşme, toplumsal eşitsizliklerin derinleşmesi, toplumsal kutuplaşma ve bunların üzerine eklenen COVID-19 salgını– insanlığı ve ekolojiyi ciddi ölçülerde tehdit ediyor. Ancak bu kriz ortamı hem egemen –ve neredeyse doğal kabul edilen– toplumsal yapıların...

What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India? Combining quantitative analysis with a close reading of government documents and a survey of the existing literature, we suggest that the Indian government's counter‐insurgency stra...

This article contributes to the study of the collectivist legacy in Chinese agriculture after 1978 by making five main arguments. First, it demonstrates that the construction of a robust agricultural infrastructure in the collective era enabled the government of the reform era to reduce its infrastructural spending without harming agricultural prod...

The database creation utilized automated text processing tools that detect if a news article contains a protest event, locate protest information within the article, and extract pieces of information regarding the detected protest events. The basis of training and testing the automated tools is the GLOCON Gold Standard Corpus (GSC), which contains...

This article contributes to the literature on rural politics in Turkey by investigating peasants' land occupations between 1965 and 1980. We show that agricultural modernization after 1945 created the structural conditions for land conflicts by enabling the reaching of the frontier of cultivable land and facilitating landlords' displacement of tena...

Turkey’s inclusion in the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015 has raised the expectations of Turkish businesses and government concerning growth-generating investment from China. Existing studies on Chinese investments in Turkey lack sufficient data on the volume of investment, types of firms, and sectoral composition. Based on a novel dataset of Chin...

We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise various local and international English language sources from various countries. The corpus contains document-, sentence-, and token-level annotations. This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event-relate...

China has undergone a rapid process of modernization since 1949. The modernization process has accelerated with the development of the market economy and rural-to-urban migration after the 1980s. Nevertheless, Chinese regions still exhibit substantial differences in terms of individualist/collectivist cultural orientations. The rice theory and the...

This course examines the economic, social, and political change in major Asian countries from the nineteenth century until today from a comparative and historical perspective. It discusses capitalism, modernization, colonialism, nationalism, socialism, developmentalism, and neoliberalism with reference to the experiences of China, India, Japan, Sou...

We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise of various local and international sources from various countries in English. The corpus contains document, sentence, and token level annotations. This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event-related inf...

We present an overview of the CLEF-2019 Lab ProtestNews on Extracting Protests from News in the context of generalizable natural language processing. The lab consists of document, sentence, and token level information classification and extraction tasks that were referred as task 1, task 2, and task 3 respectively in the scope of this lab. The task...

This study investigates the changing positions of social classes and status groups during the capitalist transformation of agriculture in Turkish Çukurova region throughout the last century from the perspective of Yaşar Kemal’s literary works. The study begins with a methodological discussion on the use of literary works in historical and sociologi...

This paper puts forward three arguments regarding the nature and consequences of China's rising labor unrest. Firstly, China's rapid economic growth in the reform era was made possible by a large reserve army of labor, consisting mainly of semi-proletarianized migrant workers from the countryside. Secondly, the deepening proletarianization of and d...

This article analyzes the role of the state in the development of capitalist agriculture in contemporary China by focusing on the implementation of the central-government-sponsored National Grain Security Project and Agricultural Industrialization Project in Pingwan county of Hunan province since 2009. It demonstrates that by providing significant...

This essay discusses Minqi Li’s 2016 book on China. Li’s study examines China’s transition to capitalism since the late 1970s, and class-struggles during and after that transition. By linking this transition with the crisis of the capitalist world economy in the second half of the 1970s, Li provides a solid analysis of China’s transformation as the...

This graduate seminar aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of historical sociology. It will help the students to critically analyze the theoretical content and methodological aspects of some of the key works of the literature. This skill will enable them to design and carry out historical sociological research projects of their...

We present an overview of the CLEF-2019 Lab ProtestNews on Extracting Protests from News in the context of generalizable natural language processing. The lab consists of document, sentence, and token level information classification and extraction tasks that were referred as task 1, task 2, and task 3 respectively in the scope of this lab. The task...

Although the existing scholarship on the capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture uses the concepts of the Marxist political economy to analyze class differentiation, it has not systematically analyzed the role of the Chinese state (as manifested in the current semi-private land system) in this transformation with reference to Marx’s theory...

Based on a detailed review of the existing literature, this article makes four arguments regarding the dispossessory effects of development projects in the neoliberal era. First, it redefines “accumulation by dispossession” as the state’s transfer of lower-class people’s small-scale private property or common property over land, water, and other re...

This short critique of some of the reviews of Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing makes four points. First, the characterization of contemporary China as a non-capitalist market economy is the most serious shortcoming of Arrighi’s book. Second, Arrighi’s explanation of the Industrial Revolution in relation to the increasing military requiremen...

Cihan Tuğal, Caring for the Poor: Islamic and Christian Benevolence in a Liberal World. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xii + 246 pages. - Volume 60 Issue 1 - Burak Gürel

We propose a coherent set of tasks for protest information collection in the context of generalizable natural language processing. The tasks are news article classification, event sentence detection, and event extraction. Having tools for collecting event information from data produced in multiple countries enables comparative sociology and politic...

This paper puts forward four main arguments regarding the persistence of significant rural support of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey since late 2002. Firstly, since the previous coalition government implemented the harshest neoliberal measures in the agricultural sector, small farmers do not directly a...

Place name recognition is one of the key tasks in Information Extraction. In this paper, we tackle this task in English News from India. We first analyze the results obtained by using available tools and corpora and then train our own models to obtain better results. Most of the previous work done on entity recognition for English makes use of simi...

This paper makes a brief critical review of the different perspectives on the capital, state, and capitalism of Fernand Braudel and Giovanni Arrighi's world systems analysis, Charles Tilly's Weberian-Marxist synthesis, and Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood's Political Marxism. It mainly focuses on the relationships between the territorial logi...

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation...

Anievas Alexander and Nişancıoğlu Kerem . How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2015, xiii+386 pages. - Volume 56 - Burak Gürel

This article contributes to the study of capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture in recent decades by making five main arguments. Firstly, it argues that consecutive land tenure reforms since 1978 have primarily intended to promote capitalist agriculture by making land transfers from smallholders to larger farmers and agribusiness companie...

We will examine the transformation of the Asian countryside from the beginning of the twentieth century up until the present by looking at agrarian class structure, economic and social development, collectivization and decollectivization, rural industrialization, agribusiness, sustainable agriculture, and rural unrest. The course materials combine...

By linking the decline in the total fertility rate since the 1970s and the emergence of an unbalanced sex ratio at birth in different regions, this article defines two main types of fertility transition in rural China—a smooth and balanced fertility transition versus an obstructed and unbalanced fertility transition—and analyzes their regional dist...

Agrarian structures based on small peasant property can have two opposite kinds of impact on urban wages. In the first type, stable smallholder farming bringing high returns puts upward pressure on wages. In the second type, smallholder farming that does not bring sufficient returns leads to semi-proletarianization in which workers' access to rural...

Agrarian structures based on small peasant property can have two opposite kinds of impact on urban wages. In the first type, stable smallholder farming bringing high returns puts upward pressure on wages. In the second type, smallholder farming that does not bring sufficient returns leads to semi-proletarianization in which workers' access to rural...

This article attempts to show the existence of the division of the state apparatus in terms of political polarization in the 1970s Turkey. To reach this aim, the writer eleborates the examples from the Kahramanmaras Events that took place between 22 and 25 December 1978. By emphasizing the polarization in the ideological and coercive apparatuses of...