E. Fuat Keyman

• Managing Director at Sabancı University

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of an...

Our globalizing world is presently in a state of global turmoil. While felt everywhere in the world, it is the Middle East in general, and Syria and Iraq in particular, where the meaning and the implications of the global turmoil have recently coalesced. As a regional hegemon bordering Syria and Iraq, Turkey is situated at the heart of these challe...

In a time when our globalizing world is confronted by a deepening global turmoil, political instability and multiplying security threats have set in motion a global tectonic shift. Turkey is not immune from these challenges; on the contrary, with its pivotal state/regional leadership position, its foreign policy choices will shape the effectiveness...

It is not possible to make Turkish modernity multicultural, Turkish democracy consolidated, Turkish economy sustainable, Turkish society a society of living together, and Turkish foreign policy proactive, multidimensional, and effective, without resolving the Kurdish question. The consolidation of Turkish democracy is the key to the solution of the...

Our globalising world is presently in a state of global turmoil. Risk, uncertainty, and insecurity are the terms that shape global/regional/national/local affairs and developments. The refugee crisis and the war against ISIL constitute the twin crises creating seismic impacts and consequences that in turn escalate risk and turmoil. Turkey is situat...

The twin refugee and ISIL crises have emerged from failed states in the MENA region, particularly Syria and Iraq, and are exacerbated by geopolitical power games, a lack of hegemonic leadership in the region, sectarianism, and the absence of inclusive and rules-based institutions of good governance.

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in r...

It has been almost five years now since a new collective consciousness of Arab masses transformed the political landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. In just a short period of time, the people of the Arab world protested against their rulers, putting an end to long-time authoritarian leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, while bring...

A series of breakthroughs in Iran’s contentious affairs with the West necessitate a new way of thinking on Turkey-Iran relations. Hassan Rouhani’s victory in the 2013 Iranian presidential elections and the signing of the interim Geneva nuclear agreement between Iran and the ‘P5 + 1’ shortly thereafter warrant an overhaul of the conventional policie...

Turkey has witnessed significant social, cultural, and political change over the last decades. This transformation has manifested itself in all segments of society and resulted in the alteration of political ideologies and institutions. The twelve authors of this volume shed light on the complexities of a changing Turkey through an interdisciplinar...

One of the fiercest electoral battles fought in the Turkish political history, the March 30, 2014 local elections yielded results akin to an outcome of a general election. The AK Party's victory in the ballot box has serious implications for Turkish politics and society in general. This paper will thus discuss and explain the implications of the el...

As we have shown in the previous chapters, Turkey, in the last decades, has been undergoing significant changes and transformations lived and felt in each and every sphere of life. On the one hand, Turkey has embraced a proactive foreign policy, and its regional power role in world politics has become more important with its identity as a modern se...

Modern Turkish history is one of change and continuity insofar as it involves radical changes and ruptures alongside significant continuities across different periods. This chapter defines the nature of transformation in the Turkish context starting with the early republican period and provides a historical and theoretical background to the most re...

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the sources of AKP’s electoral hegemony with respect to the four transformational processes which have started at different points after the establishment of the republic and continue to the present in Turkey. We also analyze the ways in which AKP’s hegemony shaped these processes as well as corresponding socia...

The history of Turkish modernity is a history of transformation along four dimensions: modernization, democratization, globalization, and Europeanization. The process of globalization starting in the 1980s has played a particularly important role in challenging the state-centric modernization established in 1923 by the republican elite. Accordingly...

Antonio Gramsci’s famous statement that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” though penned as early as the 1930s, captures and expresses eloquently the transformative and ambivalent nature of the world in which we live. 1 The Middle East and North Africa in the aftermath of th...

As we have already demonstrated in the previous chapters globalization has played an important role in shaping the course of Turkey’s transformation in recent decades. Specifically, we have discussed how economic globalization starting in the 1980s affected Turkish society and politics by enlarging and empowering particular socioeconomic groups. We...

As we have shown in the previous chapter, with the onset of globalization Turkish modernization has faced significant challenges manifested in the rise of identity politics. While the Kurdish question constituted a crucial front through which Turkish state-centric modernization was challenged, so has the politicization of Islamic identity since the...

This chapter discusses the implications of AKP’s hegemony for democratic consolidation in Turkey and argues that the power of the AKP, stemming from its transformative role in Turkey’s modernization and globalization, has not paved the way to consolidation of democracy, despite the initial democratic reforms the party implemented in its first term...

Turkey’s complex transformation has rendered Turkish domestic and international politics increasingly intertwined and interdependent. No other issue manifests this interdependence more than the Kurdish issue. The Kurdish issue has been a central aspect of Turkey’s transformation and a critical challenge before Turkish modernization and democratizat...

In the last twenty years, Turkey has witnessed significant social, cultural, and political change. This transformation has been visible in all walks of life and sectors of society, from political ideologies to the institutional set up of the state. As the country is changing, so is the academic literature, which has been expanding in parallel to Tu...

The series »Contemporary Turkey at a Glance« seeks to promote the work of young researchers committed to the study of contemporary Turkey. As series editors, we particularly wish to present interdisciplinary research that searches for holistic perspectives on the political, social, and cultural transformations of the country. This first volume of t...

This edited volume, comprising chapters by leading academics and experts, aims to clarify the complexity of Turkey’s Kurdish question. The Kurdish question is a long-standing, protracted issue, which gained regional and international significance largely in the last thirty years. The Kurdish people who represent the largest ethnic minority in the M...

This chapter attempts to explain why and how the Justice and Development Party (the AKP) has won two national elections and became the governing party with a majority rule in Turkey. The electoral success of the AKP and its impacts on Turkish society goes much beyond the domain of party politics, insofar as the very identity and political success o...

It is not possible to make Turkish modernity multicultural, Turkish democracy consolidated, Turkish economy sustainable, Turkish society a society of living together, and Turkish foreign policy proactive, multidimensional, and effective, without resolving the Kurdish question. In this article I will suggest that the democratic solution to the Kurdi...

In an era of global turmoil generating significant challenges to global security and requiring global solutions, humanitarian intervention, and assistance become central concerns at the intersection of globalization studies and international relations. In this context, Turkey is emerging as a more proactive and autonomous actor in foreign policy an...

The paper analyzes the main factors leading to the Justice and Development Party’s 2011 electoral victory and proposes that the party’s ability to engage with the Turkish public and its effective governance are the main reasons behind its electoral successes. The AKP’s position could be characterized by “electoral hegemony,” yet it seems...

Drawing on an original empirical study of the European‐level political practices of Turkish citizens/residents of Kurdish origin, this article advances the argument that political actors who lack the status of European citizenship can nonetheless engage in its ‘practice’. While practices of European citizenship by non‐citizen/non‐resident actors ar...

We argue that historically the official Turkish nationalism and citizenship regime have been marked by an ambiguity that arises from the simultaneous existence of – and repeatedly occurring swings between – the ethno-centric and civic-political understandings of citizenship. We also suggest that the concept of territoriality, which took precedence...

What does it mean to be a European citizen? The rapidly changing politics of citizenship in the face of migration, diversity, heightened concerns about security and financial and economic crises, has left European citizenship as one of the major political and social challenges to European integration. Enacting European Citizenship develops a distin...

Relying on the analytical distinction drawn by both Joel Migdal and Nicos Poulantzas in their own groundbreaking works on the state, between the idea/type and the reality/form of the state, this chapter employs an understanding of the state as both a "complex institutional ensemble with its own modes of calculation and operational procedures" and a...

Turkey has been undergoing a radical transformation process. Not only has the internal space of Turkish modernity become enlarged through the emergence and widening of identity‐based conflicts and demands for recognition, Turkish politics, economy, and culture have also become exposed to the challenges of globalization and Europeanization. The impa...

The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has initiated a number of democratic opening initiatives to tackle with the Kurdish question, the Alevi question, the Roma question, and the minorities question. This paper focuses on the reaction of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP) to the initiative. It seeks to...

Since its state-centric inception in 1923, Turkish secularism has operated in a multiplex fashion, and in doing so has always faced serious legitimacy, representation, and governing problems. Moreover, since the 1980s, and especially the 1990s, it has been subject to challenges and criticisms demanding democratic restructuring through institutional...

In recent years. Turkey has initiated a proactive, multi-dimensional and constructive foreign policy in many areas, ranging from contributing to peace and stability in the Middle East, to playing an active role in countering terrorism and extremism, from becoming a new "energy hub" to acting as one of the architects of "the inter-civilization dialo...

Desde el 11-S el discurso del “choque de civilizaciones” ha jugado un papel importante en la conformación de los asuntos mundiales, y ha llevado a una codificación del islam como negación de la modernidad secular y de la democracia liberal. En este contexto, han sido varias las respuestas a la urgente necesidad de luchar contra el terrorismo: “la e...

The question of Turkey's membership in the EU has been the subject of debates about the cosmopolitan future of Europe. Using the concept of cosmopolitanism as developed by Beck, Habermas, and Delanty, this article argues that the possibility of an antiontological and multicultural cosmopolitan European community will largely depend on how Europe an...

During the course of the 1990s, center-left and center-right parties around the world have attempted to revise their strategies to be able to cope effectively with the new environment and conditions of globalization. We suggest that the experience of social democracy in Turkey in this context presents a peculiar case, in that the kind of strategy t...

The resurgence of religious movements all over the world, their varying claims to identity and politics (from public deliberations to fundamentalism), and their success in generating system-transforming effects in both national and world politics have indicated clearly that there is a need to uncover the invisible interconnections between religion...

A quick glance at Turkish politics and their changing nature since the mid-1990s produces two contrasting images of Turkey. The period between 1995 and 2000 shows a highly state-centric, security-orientated and crisis-ridden image of Turkey, tackling a number of serious problems, such as democratic deficit, human rights violations, the rule of law,...

This paper is an attempt to provide a political economic analysis of the changing nature of Turkish modernity since the 1980s, especially in the 1990s. Our analysis is founded upon the three years-long research (1999–2002) we have done on the question of ‘the impacts of globalization on Turkey’. The Turkish economy has collapsed on 19 February 2001...

Therefore, we propose to analyze the consolidation of Turkish democracy by focusing our attention on what we call "the international /domestic interactions ". We put forward the argument that the process of Turkey's full accession into the European Union (the EU hereafter) has to be taken into account in any analysis of Turkish democracy and its po...

This paper’s general argument is that the Copenhagen political criteria constitute the leverage that is making Turkish modernisation and democratisation more plural, multi-cultural and consolidated. In the first section, a historical overview of modern Turkey is undertaken from the perspective of political modernisation and democratic consolidation...

In recent years, civil society has become one of the most important concerns of academic and public discourse. It would not be a mistake to propose that today there is a strong, effective and even over-glorified talk about and a global agenda for civil society and its role in the process of creating a better and humane world. In this talk and agend...

Turkey's economic and political system has been confronted with major challenges during the course of the 1990s. These challenges originating from economic crises, state-centric model of development, European integration and the problems of democratization have brought Turkey to crossroads. In this context, the November 3rd national election was of...

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Since its inception in 1648 Westphalian Treaty, modern international relations have contained both continuity and change. Today, there is a need to analyze both continuities and changes that have occurred in the course of the development of international relations, in order to better understand the main characteristics of world politics. In this ar...

Turkey did not rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It was ‘made’ in the image of the Kemalist elite which won the national struggle against foreign invaders and the old regime. Thereafter, the image of the country kept changing as the political elite grew and matured, and as it responded to challenges both at home and abroad....

This paper demonstrates that advancing our understanding of international political economy (IPE) entails posing the question of otherness and difference as an object of theoretical and historical inquiry. It suggests that the discourses of postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonial criticism directly contribute to IPE by locating the problematic of...

In "De-Centring the State: Political Theory and Canadian Political Economy" (Studies in Political Economy No. 26), Warren Magnusson and Rob Walker present a critique of 100 years of left politics and a plea to "listen to the movements" to discover what progressive politics might be like in the future.' Their intervention is representative of one ki...

A quick glance at Turkish politics in the last decade brings about two contrasting images of Turkey. The period between 1995 and 2000 gives us a politically unstable, economically crisis-ridden, ideologically nationalist, geopolitically isolated, and culturally conflictual portrait. Turkish politics appears to be detached from society, surrounded b...

On the eve of new millennium Turkey finds itself at a critical disjuncture. As a country whose economy has been going through a severe crisis and whose state-centric politics has been facing a strong legitimacy and governing crisis, and whose social and cultural life has been generating identity-based conflict, Turkey has to make a crucial decision...

In Turkey there is currently a lack of trust and an increasing feeling of ambiguity and insecurity about the future of Turkey-EU relations. However, this article ar-gues, EU-full membership should be the main axis of Turkish foreign policy. With Turkey-EU relations as the main axis, Turkey can play the roles expected of it most realistically and su...

The authors argue that the EU's decision about Turkey's readiness for the full accession negotiations at the end of 2004 will shape the future course of Turkish democracy and modernity as well as the formation of European identity. This paper's general argument is that the principle of fairness and objectivity should be the basis of the EU's decisi...