The establishment of the Turkish Republic marked a sharp break from the centuries-old connection between education and Islam. Within two decades, secular reforms had nearly erased religious education from the public sphere. The subsequent rise of religious education after the 1940s is often interpreted with respect to reactionary forces challenging political actors of progressive secularization. This study offers a critique of this narrative by problematizing popular dualisms and reframing the phenomenon within broader trajectories of twentieth-century legitimacy and governance. By tracing late-Ottoman antecedents, it shows that modalities of state involvement and moral education were reorganized rather than invented. The rise of religious education was a product of statist and modern conservative synergies between dominant center-right and secular actors which shaped policy agendas through functionalist and pragmatic frameworks. This dynamic interplay was defined not only by the changing grounds of international and domestic political legitimacy, but also by a transformation of the role and meaning of religion in Turkish public life. After World War II, religious education became both an instrument and a product of negotiated consensus on moral and civic foundations of citizenship and collective identity, which was further reinforced by the expansion of mass education, populism, and anti-communism.

This article investigates how autocratizing regimes instrumentalize the cultural domain to manufacture consent, assert societal dominance, and socialize oppositional actors into authoritarian logics. In contexts of competitive authoritarianism, memory politics becomes central not only to the incumbent’s efforts to legitimize power and construct hegemonic narratives of citizenship, identity, and history, but also to the opposition’s attempts to propose alternatives. Drawing on fieldwork, curator interviews, and audience responses, the article analyzes two large-scale centennial exhibitions held in İstanbul in 2023 and 2024 that offer contrasting portrayals of the Turkish Republic – one Islamist–authoritarian, the other liberal–Kemalist. Despite clear ideological differences, divergent aesthetic approaches, and distinct target audiences, both exhibitions rely on exclusionary, state-centric framings that inhibit critical or pluralist engagements with the past. The article argues that this convergence signals a deeper transformation: the autocratization of the cultural field, wherein even oppositional institutions internalize authoritarian norms and practices. In this context, history is staged as spectacle – either triumphant or nostalgic – narrowing the cultural imagination, consolidating incumbent power, and diminishing spaces for meaningful contestation.

Although Turkey’s authoritarian turn is often interpreted as a reaction to the Gezi resistance of 2013, this article argues that its foundations were laid much earlier through the gradual accumulation of infrastructure and legal frameworks. Rather than emerging as a sudden response to dissent, Turkey’s networked authoritarianism must be understood as the outcome of long-term infrastructural decisions that have extended through successive waves of privatization, legal control, and market consolidation. Drawing on a cartographic ethnographic methodology, this article maps the entanglement of media ownership, regulatory centralization, and expert discourse, as reflected in the Internet Conferences of Turkey (INET-TR) conferences, to show how early quiescence and missed interventions enabled a gradual shift toward centralized control. Unlike fully nationalized Internet models, Turkey’s approach is hybrid and strategic: it maintains international connectivity and commercial integration while exercising tight control over domestic information flows through a combination of layered legal and technical instruments. This historical context complicates linear narratives of rupture and resistance, demonstrating that authoritarian consolidation in digital infrastructures is not only about state repression but also about infrastructural and institutional standardization of control.

This study decomposes aggregate labor productivity growth in Turkey from 1999 to 2023 using a chain-linked gross domestic product (GDP) series with an exactly additive decomposition method. Traditionally, this growth has been decomposed into two components: productivity growth within sectors and labor reallocation across sectors. Using the chain-linked GDP series introduces a third component: changes in relative sectoral prices. Although these relative price changes cancel out at the aggregate level, they influence sectoral contributions to overall labor productivity by altering each sector’s weight in total output. Incorporating them, therefore, provides a more comprehensive view of sectoral dynamics by capturing their contributions to aggregate productivity growth. On average, the contribution of structural change slightly exceeds that of the within component. However, both the magnitude and composition of contributions vary considerably across sub-periods. During crisis years, structural change contributed positively while the within-sector component was negative. In contrast, during non-crisis periods, aggregate labor productivity growth declined because the structural-change component weakened persistently and nearly vanished after 2018, despite a positive though limited within-sector component. At the sector level, construction, finance and real estate, community, personal, and government services, and transport and communication largely account for the slowdown, while manufacturing’s contribution stayed steady; its composition shifted away from within productivity across periods.

Distributive justice preferences are important because they can influence the policy orientations of political actors and can help create conditions conducive to policy change. Yet, these preferences have received relatively little scholarly attention in countries that are not included in major cross-country surveys such as Turkey. This article examines Turkish distributive justice preferences across four key social policy sectors: education; healthcare; old-age pensions; and unemployment insurance. The analysis draws on 2019 data from an original nationwide survey (n = 2,272), designed by a research team including the authors and implemented by a professional survey firm using multistage stratified random sampling. Our findings confirm that, as in mature welfare states, distributive justice preferences vary across social policy sectors in the Turkish case. However, the equality principle is strongly favored in three of the four areas, while equity is preferred only in old-age pensions, possibly reflecting policy feedback effects. In the context of high inequality and low social and institutional trust, we introduce distrustful egalitarianism as a concept to capture egalitarian preferences driven more by distrust of official allocation mechanisms than by purely ideological commitments to equality. These findings highlight the need for further research in middle-income countries with less mature welfare systems.

This article analyzes women’s experiences of human papillomavirus (HPV) in Turkey under gendered health governance, a lack of public vaccine coverage, and conservative moral norms. Interviews with twenty-three mostly urban, university-educated women show that the diagnosis is experienced as shame, anxiety, and individualized responsibility. The burden is deeply felt despite the high cultural capital of the sample, indicating that stigma and access barriers to vaccination are not mitigated by individual resources alone. After diagnosis, women perform extensive emotional and moral labor, arranging follow-ups, insisting on condom use or choosing abstinence, and calculating disclosure risks to partners and family. Men are largely absent from prevention and care. Clinical routines also produce moral judgment and turn medical risk into a disciplinary test of respectability through marital-status questioning, limited privacy, and admonishing talk. The case in Turkey aligns with global feminization and moralization of HPV yet is distinctive for increasing official familism, rising conservatism on sexuality, and a prolonged lack of HPV vaccine coverage, as well as related civil-society campaigns and pay-it-forward schemes. In such a context, assigning risk management to women creates a double burden of dealing with moral discourses and caring for their and others’ health. Even if free HPV vaccination begins, equitable uptake will require non-moralizing clinical communication, confidentiality, and partner-inclusive, de-gendered prevention.

Drawing on Agamben’s notion of “bare life” and Fassin’s critique of “humanitarian reason,” this article asks when refugees become recognizable as fully human in Turkish news discourse. It analyzes a simple random sample of 2,285 migration-related news items published in eight national newspapers between 2011 and 2020 through qualitative content analysis, and complements this with a close reading of sixty items that cluster around positive/humanitarian storytelling. Overall coverage is largely massifying and predominantly negative in tone; framing is dominated by threat–security–control (40 percent) alongside a substantial humanitarian–moral frame (32 percent). The paper’s main contribution is to identify and theorize three recurring “good refugee” figures: (1) the vulnerable woman/child; (2) the heroic young man; and (3) the talented/entrepreneurial refugee whose exceptional skills and achievements are foregrounded. The paper argues that these figures do not merely individualize refugees; they also function as privileged sites where Turkish nationhood is narrated as compassionate, modern, and sovereign – while “ordinary” refugees remain outside the horizon of unconditional humanity and rights. The article argues that humanization strategies may backfire, ultimately eliminating individual subjectivity and agency. The article critiques the news items’ compassionate, patronizing, and moralizing tone, highlighting the urgent need to politicize and historicize the issue.

This article investigates how feminist praxis in Turkey incorporates refugee women into their advocacy practices, and uncovers the extent to which these interactions expose the boundaries of solidarity. Anchored in Gramscian political theory, it asks whether feminist activism continues to operate as an inclusive counter-hegemonic political sphere, and the degree to which refugee women are incorporated within it. Drawing on interviews with feminist- and migrant-led non-governmental organizations in Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that interactions with refugee women frequently unfold through short-term, humanitarian-oriented, project-funded initiatives rather than collective practices of solidarity. These dynamics highlight tensions between the emancipatory claims of feminist politics and the selective solidarities that take shape under conditions of intersecting inequalities and governance frameworks. Rather than offering a definitive critique of feminist politics, the article treats the question of refugee women as an analytical lens through which the constraints of solidarity within contemporary feminist politics in Turkey become visible.

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.

This article offers the first systematic assessment of environmental studies (ES) on Turkey over the past decade (2013–2023), situating its development against the backdrop of intensifying ecological crises and shifting academic paradigms. Drawing on a dataset of 585 journal articles and book chapters indexed in the Web of Science, complemented by manual coding and interviews with scholars across disciplines, we map the thematic, methodological, and institutional trajectories of the field. Our findings reveal a significant growth in ES, with climate change, sustainability, and energy emerging as dominant themes, and gender representation among scholars showing relative balance. Yet this expansion is uneven: research remains clustered in a few universities, more reliant on quantitative approaches, and largely shaped by economics, management, and political sciences. Critical perspectives, particularly those engaging grassroots mobilizations, environmental justice, and post-anthropocentric frameworks exist, but cannot dominate. Interviews further highlight the persistent ambivalence of scholars toward ES as a disciplinary identity, raising questions about whether the field is coalescing or persisting as fragmented conversations. By charting both the advances and enduring oversights of ES on Turkey, this study contributes to global debates on the institutionalization of environmental knowledge and points toward more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and justice-oriented futures.

There has been growing public interest in traditional cheese production and consumption over the past decade, in contrast to the 1990s and 2000s, when food safety regulations excluded traditional cheesemakers from Turkey’s dairy commodity chains. This article focuses on two cheeses, Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri, designated in 2015 with national Geographical Indication and international Slow Food Presidium labels. Drawing on archival and long-term ethnographic research, we trace the historical trajectory of commercial dairying in Kars and its articulation and disarticulation within national and international commodity chains. Against the backdrop of twentieth-century transformations, we investigate how place-based labels have contested neoliberal agricultural policies that imposed industrialization and standardization on the dairy sector. We argue that the re-articulation of Kars in the 2010s relied on community development and collective action, and practices negotiating between tradition and standardization to establish new conventions of quality. This article conceptualizes re-articulation as a transformative socio-ecological process rather than a simple reversal of disarticulation. It demonstrates how peripheral regions re-enter markets through locally negotiated strategies balancing standardization, authenticity, and solidarity. It also foregrounds material and ecological relations, recognizing the agency of non-human elements – such as pastures and artisanal tools – in shaping value and quality.

This article examines the historical and ongoing role of public agricultural research and extension in shaping avocado production in southern Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I find that the making of Turkey’s avocado production base owes to a century-long state involvement in agricultural research and development. Contrary to the assumption that global markets single-handedly shape contemporary production and export geographies in the global South, in the case of Turkey’s avocado production it is not the market per se, but extensionists on the ground who actively advocate for risk-taking, efficient, export-oriented production methods. Despite the push for export-oriented production, smallholders continue to prioritize the domestic market by choosing to produce locally popular and more cold-hardy cultivars that are less prone to frost damage. Findings suggest that while public agricultural research and development were indispensable in creating the material conditions for this high-value crop boom in southern Turkey, farmers’ agency and local contextual factors ultimately shape the trajectory of this production geography. The analysis also demonstrates a persistent disconnect between the state’s agricultural vision and farmers’ realities, which explains why the avocado boom has remained a primarily domestic, rather than export-oriented, phenomenon.

This article investigates the position of hazelnut cultivation in Turkey within the global hazelnut value chain. Conceptually, it seeks to bring together the insights of the scholarship on global agrifood value chains and studies on seasonal migrant agricultural labor. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork that included interviews with farmers, wholesalers, and seasonal migrant farm workers in three provinces along the Black Sea coast and an analysis of secondary literature, it argues that being part of a global value chain has not brought positive social outcomes in terms of income and working conditions, and that hazelnut farming itself is maintained largely thanks to the availability of seasonal migrant farm workers. Despite international development agencies’ expectations of social upgrading – higher wages and incomes – in agrifood value chains, the case of hazelnuts in Turkey points to social downgrading for both farmers and farm laborers.

The rise of neoliberal statism in Turkey, where the state acts as a developer in both urban and rural contexts, illuminates the multi-scalar, negotiated, and power-laden nature of frontier-making in the twenty-first century. The expansion of export-oriented sweet cherry production in western Turkey’s peri-urban landscapes exemplifies the uneven, non-linear, and contested trajectories of contemporary agrarian capitalism. This paper examines how a niche-commodity frontier is produced not only through shifts in political–economic and socio-ecological relations of production, but also through articulations of nationalism and moral authority grounded in religion. Among the various actors involved in this process, smallholders occupy a paradoxical position: structurally subordinated within export value chains yet discursively mobilized as key agents of frontier expansion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that the ideological hegemony underpinning the frontier hinders the formation of smallholder class consciousness. Instead, the articulation of agrarian capitalism with nationalist and developmental imaginaries, expressed through the party politics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), secures widespread allegiance to Turkey’s current iteration of neoliberal development.

Production of seafood has received relatively little attention in agri-food debates despite the fact that, since the 1960s, seafood production has been transformed through the industrialization of fisheries and globalization of seafood commodity chains. Intensive aquaculture emerged as a new industry in response to declining fish catches. Global commodity chains of seafood and capital accumulation processes changed tremendously, leading to complex international trade dynamics and rising inequalities. The Turkish aquaculture sector has also been transformed via government subsidies, and a few vertically integrated aquaculture companies started to produce farmed sea bass and sea bream (SBSB) in Turkish waters, while organizing their operations both upstream (processing of fish feed in Africa) and downstream (sales and distribution in Europe) in the global SBSB value chain. We adopted a single commodity approach to uncover how seafood production has been transformed via expanding commodity frontiers of capital-intensive SBSB production by focusing on the strategies of Turkish aquaculture enterprises, trade dynamics, and socio-ecological implications of SBSB production via in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and a review of legislative documents and trade data. Our analysis offers critical insights into the agrarian-change debate in Turkey by analyzing the global and regional socio-ecological inequalities created by Turkish SBSB production.