This dissertation asks how practices of security and development intersect in the operation of political power in conflict and post-conflict zones. Recent investment in gendered development as a mechanism of conflict mitigation mark a historic shift in the security imperatives of Turkish policy towards the predominantly Kurdish Southeast. The visible growth in gendered education and welfare programs in post-conflict urban Southeast Turkey indicate that women are taking center stage in the social, economic, and cultural struggles underpinning the Kurdish Question. In other words, national security strategy and local political struggles for cultural legitimacy are increasingly tied to the intimate management of family, education, and livelihood decisions of Kurdish women. This substantive shift in policy and its deployment in practice necessitate a nuanced approach to the study and understanding of the Kurdish Question. This dissertation explores the complexity of state-society power relations that are unfolding in the day-to-day lives of impacted migrant neighborhoods in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Through the conversations and practices of development actors (administrators, teachers, doctors) and participants (migrant women), political narratives of national belonging (Turkish and Kurdish) are upheld and challenged against the differential distribution and access to resources, commitments to family and culture, and disturbing trends of domestic violence. To this end, the dissertation highlights persistent discrepancies between the security goals of the state and nation and the day-to-day security concerns of women and their families.

Revised; Originally Published: 2007 / 2 pp.

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By ‘bringing in' the global dimension, this thesis aims to explain the main reasons for Turkey's failure to comply with EU conditionality. Existing studies in the field either look at the hardships in Turkish-EU intergovernmental bargains or at the ‘cultural mismatch' that triggers opposition in the conservative circles of both Turkey and Europe. Such tendencies mislead many students to miss the ‘bigger picture'; in other words, the global legitimation processes underlying Turkey's interactions with the EU. By introducing World Polity theory, an innovative sociological institutionalist theory developed by a Stanford University sociologist, John W. Meyer, since the 1970s, this thesis promises a fuller analysis of the difficult relations between Turkey and the EU through the study of three key sectors where EU-led reforms prove particularly problematic: foreign land ownership, ombudsmanship, and Turkey's Cyprus policy. Benefiting from original interview and survey findings, the thesis demonstrates that the likelihood of EU-led reform depends on the extent to which it is perceived as globally legitimate in the candidate country, Turkey. The main argument is that Turkey-European Union relations should be considered within the context of a wider global cultural environment in which they are deeply embedded and which constitute their agency. This argument is innovative in three ways. First, it adds the global context, which is severely neglected in the prevailing studies on EU-Turkey relations, as a constitutive element to the analysis. Second, it offers new analytical tools to rethink the EU as an ‘organizational carrier' of world models and better explain the domestic motivations behind compliance with EU conditionality. Finally, it contributes to World Polity research that is increasingly criticized for having a top-down approach and lacking in-depth case studies on how world models spread.

This doctoral thesis examines the impact of moderate Islamist parties on party system institutionalization in Turkey. Its focus is on the political emergence of ‘Muslim-Democrat’ parties. This term was coined by the scholar Vali Nasr and refers to a new sub-type of party actor in the spectrum of political Islam that employs Islamic religiousity in its electoral appeal but operates within the normative framework of liberal democracy. The central question driving this thesis is to uncover how Turkey’s Muslim-Democrat parties have had a positive effect in advancing the institutionalization of Turkey’s party system. This thesis attempts to contribute to the broader debate regarding the compatibility of Islamist parties and democratic politics in demonstrating that the former, when adopting a moderate format akin to the ‘Muslim-Democrat’ ideal type, can have a positive effect in advancing processes of party system institutionalization. This effect would then be critically discussed within the context of its impact on broader democratic consolidation. The AKP, Turkey’s incumbent party, is chosen as the case study of a Muslim Democrat party. The theoretical basis for the empirical element of this thesis is informed by the research framework for party system institutionalization that was formulated by Mainwaring and Scully in the context of Latin American ‘third-wave’ democracies. They posit four specific factors to examine the institutional strengths of democratic party systems. This framework is used to examine the development of the Turkish party system and the impact of the Islamist parties, especially Muslim-Democrat parties, on these processes. The bulk of this thesis uses statistical analyses of aggregate electoral as well as attitudinal survey data as well as examining the political discourse of the election manifestoes of Turkey’s Islamist and Muslim-Democrat parties using content analysis as well as discourse analysis. The findings of this analysis conclude that Muslim-Democrat parties like the AKP have indeed contributed towards party system institutionalization in Turkey both in terms of stabilizing inter-party competition and social rootedness as well as increasing the legitimacy of democratic civilian politics. In that sense, their effect on party system institutionalization has had a beneficial effect on Turkey’s democratic consolidation.

Since the ruling pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP hereafter) came to power in 2002, there has been a general transformation in Turkish politics from a secularist orientation toward a mainstream Muslim conservative line. This conservative political transformation manifests itself in the socio-cultural domain in terms of a proliferation of discourses on "family crisis" and the "decline of family values" as well as social programs and projects aimed at "strengthening the Turkish family." While the family crisis discourse situates the family as the source of socio-economic and demographic problems facing the Turkish society, strengthening the family is offered as the primary solution to these problems since the family is conceptualized as the foundation of a firm and stable social order. The Turkish state's intervention into the family sphere has occupied a central place in the governmental and legislative policies of the state since the rise of modern forms of governance in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. What is novel about the configuration of family governance under the AKP government, however, is the extension of family governance beyond the formal institutions of the state to a wide array of actors, institutions, mechanisms, and rationalities and the deployment of religious or religiously-inspired actors, institutions and organizations in the conceptualization, production, and implementation of social programs and projects aimed at "strengthening the Turkish family." Within the past decade, this concern for maintaining family values and fortifying the family institution has been widely circulated among Muslim conservative circles, and the family has constituted the foundation of most social projects designed and implemented by not only formal political institutions such as the Ministry of the Family and Social Policies and AKP-governed municipalities but also various religious or religiously-inspired organizations and institutions such as the Presidency of Religious Affairs, Islamic civil society organizations, and Islamic television channels. This dissertation focuses on the role of these religious or religiously-inspired actors, institutions, and organizations in shaping the politics of the family in contemporary Turkey. It argues that the increasing prominence given to the family by the state and these religiously-inspired institutions and organizations points to emerging forms of governance as well as reconfigurations of religion and secularism in contemporary Turkey. It also demonstrates how the dominant political discourse on declining family values and the social projects that aim at recuperating these values situate the family as an object of governmental intervention as well as a site of discursive proliferation, disciplinary practices, and biopolitical governance.

This thesis consists of an anthropological investigation of discourses and practices associated with premarital sexuality in the context of contemporary urban Turkey. Grounded in thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, this thesis draws on the experiences of local women – and to some extent, local men – threading on their concerns and experiences about virginity and premarital sex while exploring the relationship between sexual moralities and the city, controversies on the theme of abortion, the relationship between contraceptive choices and sexual moralities, the normativity of marriage and the respective construction of the marriageable subject, and the centrality of perceptions about the hymen in articulating processes of social reproduction. Through an exploration of these realms of experience, the thesis argues that an ethnographic approach to sexual moralities in the context of Turkey benefits from an historical approach to the events of the foundation of the republic. I suggest that the rhetoric of territorial loss, territorial partition and defence of actual and symbolic frontiers is a crucial part of processes of socialisation of new generations into contemporary identities, and is relived in people’s perceptions of the rupture of the hymen. Thus, the hymenocentric approach to virginity in Turkey conflates history and a politics of belonging in terms of a mereographic nexus of part/ whole, manifested in dilemmas of belonging as ‘part of’ (family, neighbourhood, city, and nation) or as ‘apart from’ (family, neighbourhood, city, and nation). This, I suggest, allows younger generations into an embodied mimetic experience of the initial dramas posed at the foundation of the republic.

This paper studies determinants of FDI in Turkey using panel data analyses. The results of the study show that political stability, education level, rule of law, and trade cost have significant impact on FDI inflow in Turkey while similarity in economy size of home and host country (Turkey) has not. The effect of the trade cost and rule of law was surprising but it gave a clue to new research area. It was concluded that next studies of FDI determinants in Turkey must be conducted at firms' level to better understand the behaviour of foreign direct investments in the country.

This study attempts to analyze the efficiency of intervention policy in Turkey during the period between 4.1.2005 and 31.12.2012 with a sub period which is between 4.1.2007 and 31.12.2010. For our study purpose, therefore we investigated how interventions with pre-announced auctions as a whole influence the exchange rates. Further, we analyze whether there is an asymmetric effect among the buying and selling transactions with respect to their impact on the exchange rates. In the study, the E-GARCH model is employed to find the asymmetric effect. The final object of this study is whether buying auctions which are conducted to serve for only purpose of increasing international reserves influence the exchange rates. We evaluate the efficiency of transactions in the same direction of central bank statements. In conclusion, the findings did not amount to any significant impact of total transaction on exchange rates. The study findings also suggest that there is asymmetric effect among the selling and buying transactions. The amounts of selling transaction have a negative impact on both level and volatility while buying auctions did not have any significant effect on them. As a new research result, we found that buying auctions served well with respect to their contributions to reserves while they do not...

This project explores a curious facet of early cinema that has not been studied as yet: the relationship between Turkish modernity and the culture of spectatorship within the context of the late nineteenth century’s viewing habits along with the era of early and silent cinema in Istanbul. The aim of this project is to examine the evolution of viewing habits in Istanbul at a particular period in which a radical cultural transformation was experienced, namely from the 1890s to the 1930s, when the late Ottoman era with its pre-cinematic shows, the cinematograph, and silent films led to the early Turkish Republic and the end of silent cinema. In order to cover the shift in the reception of early cinema, this study makes use of revisionist works on early cinema and on modernity in Ottoman history. To this end, newspapers, novels, memoirs and consular trade records that formed the majority of the primary sources of this project are analyzed. The transformation of Istanbulite spectatorship was initially experienced through a rupture in the late nineteenth century created by the global flow of mechanical images. The cinematograph was viewed by a multi- ethnic public that was accustomed to seeing both traditional and other more widely recognized pre-cinematic shows such as the shadow play, public storytelling, dioramas, panoramas and magic lanterns. At first the early cinematograph displays were haphazard and parts of other shows. Yet, the international influence of the early cinema attracted a curiosity-driven public even if the same public was critical of the imperfect technology of the apparatus. With the outbreak of World War I, nationalist resistance played a role in the reception of popular European films, particularly Italian melodramas. The end of the war caused the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic, after which, cinema started to be seen as an educational tool in the service of nation-building.