The Spring 2026 issue of New Perspectives on Turkey brings together a wide-ranging collection of scholarship that traverses temporalities, scales, and methodological approaches. Spanning from the late Ottoman period to the present, and from Cold War industrialization to contemporary socio-ecological crises, the contributions in issue no. 74 interrogate governance, cultural transformation, religion, gender, class, and multispecies life in Turkey. Together, the articles explore how power is institutionalized, contested, aestheticized, embodied, narrated, and remembered across different domains of social life.
We open this issue on a reflective note with Sema Erder’s obituary, “In memory of Nermin Abadan: a tribute to the academic women of the founding generation.” Erder not only honors Abadan’s intellectual legacy but situates her within a broader cohort of pioneering women scholars who helped shape Turkish social sciences under challenging institutional and political conditions. The obituary that includes a discussion of intellectual trajectories of Mübeccel Kıray and Behice Boran invites us to consider generational transmission, academic labor, and the gendered histories of knowledge production in Turkey. We anticipate that this work will serve as a valuable reference for future scholarship on women in the social sciences in Turkey.
The main section of this issue contains thirteen research articles; four are included in a special dossier, while the other nine are stand-alone research papers. The Special Dossier is titled “Revisiting the History of Islam in Turkey through Novel Approaches,” and was put together by guest editors Gökçen B. Dinç and Mark Soileau. The collection challenges essentialist portrayals of Islam in Turkey and proposes new conceptual and methodological pathways. In her own contribution, Dinç advances the concept of “Islam in Turkish” to rethink Sunni and Alevi religiosity beyond rigid doctrinal categories. Through a material approach to religious media, she shows how Mevlid, Karbala, and Ebâ Müslim books rendered Nur Muhammad and Ahl Al-Bayt tangible and accessible in vernacular forms, offering a framework that resonates with global debates on lived and vernacular Islam.
The second article is by Zeynep Oktay and Ulaş Özdemir and examines Alevi deyiş as a dynamic oral and musical tradition. Grounded in theories of emotion, embodiment, and orality, their study highlights the fluidity of transmission and the performative recreation of communal identity across centuries, from Ottoman palace compilations to modern reinterpretations. Brett Wilson’s article in the dossier revisits the early Republican period to analyze the varied trajectories of Sufi leaders after the abolition of Sufi orders in 1925. Challenging the dominant narrative of systematic persecution, Wilson demonstrates that many former shaykhs were integrated into state institutions and maintained relatively high social status, thereby complicating prevailing accounts of secularist rupture. Finally, Çiğdem Buğdaycı’s contribution to the issue explores the medicalization of Sufism in Refik Halid Karay’s novel Kadınlar Tekkesi. Drawing on Foucault’s insights on abnormality and power, she argues that psychiatric discourse reconfigured Sufism not simply as obsolete but as an object of scientific scrutiny, revealing a transformed regime of secular knowledge and its gendered dimensions.
In addition to the comprehensive special dossier, we present nine more research articles that explore the connections between state power, governance, and changes in institutions throughout various periods in history. The first article by Cansu Civelek develops a historical–relational framework to analyze states of emergency beyond their conventional framing as temporary and exceptional episodes. By juxtaposing spectacular violence in Diyarbakır with a seemingly mundane urban transformation process in Eskişehir under Law No. 6306, Civelek demonstrates how emergency governance becomes institutionalized through intertwined logics of rule and capital accumulation. Her intervention challenges reductionist understandings of emergency rule and blurs the line between spectacular and non-spectacular forms of power.
The second piece by Mehmet Beşikçi turns to cultural modernization within the military. Examining etiquette manuals and officers’ self-narratives, he analyzes the ambivalent incorporation of Western manners among Turkish military officers during the Republican era. By conceptualizing etiquette as a disciplined mode of conduct, Beşikçi reveals how Western norms were selectively adopted, negotiated, and sometimes resisted. His study illuminates the formation of a cultural identity marked by eclecticism and ambiguity, thus contributing to broader debates on modernization and cultural authority.
Can Dalyan’s ethnographic research also examines the military, specifically concentrating on leisure activities among military families. This approach complements the focus on the military by redirecting attention to aspects of everyday life. Through an analysis of summer camps and orduevis, Dalyan shows how aestheticized seaside leisure, bodily discipline, and militarized sociality have cultivated classed and racialized sensibilities among military families since the 1950s. Leisure emerges not as a neutral domain but as a site for producing white, secular, middle-class citizenship.
The fourth article focuses on Cold War geopolitics and industrialization as central themes. Neslişah Başaran-Lotz, Cangül Örnek, and Gözde Somel’s comparative study of the Ereğli and İskenderun iron and steel plants analyze differences in aid conditions, technology transfer, and ownership structures between US- and Soviet-backed projects. Authors situate Turkey within global Cold War dynamics while grounding their analysis in material and political realities. The comparison provides fresh insights into competing development models and enriches global literature on Cold War aid.
Questions of recognition, decolonial struggle, and political strategy are taken up by Bülent Küçük and Ceren Özselçuk in their analysis of the Kurdish movement. Through a close reading of Abdullah Öcalan’s recent texts, they examine how the movement navigates the tension between engagement with the state and radical critique of capitalist modernity and the nation-state. Drawing on Axel Honneth and Étienne Balibar, they conceptualize recognition not as depoliticizing incorporation but as a performative, ongoing process that sustains the constitutive tension between equality and autonomy.
The sixth article is by Feyza Akder and turns to the early Republican period and explores how statist economic policies shaped aesthetic representations of landscape. By analyzing paintings produced during “Homeland Tours” alongside agricultural statistics, she demonstrates how “productive landscapes” were visually constructed in line with a moralized economic agenda. Her innovative use of visual and archival materials reveals how art, travel, and statistics converged in nation-building efforts.
Contemporary transformations of religion and cultural hegemony are examined in Ece Cihan Ertem’s study of public Quran kindergartens introduced by the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Through qualitative research, Ertem analyzes how these institutions construct the figure of the “Muslim child” and reconfigure the role of mosques in everyday life. The article situates early childhood education within broader projects of cultural hegemony and moral governance.
Memory, gender, and political subjectivity are central to Gökhan Şensönmez and Eda Bektas’s analysis of leftist women’s prison memoirs after the 1980 coup. Drawing on 124 autobiographical narratives, they trace a tripartite process of distance, substance, and persistence through which revolutionary women collectively reconstruct identity and contest dominant narratives of defeat. Putting temporality in identity formation at the center, the article contributes to feminist memory studies and fills a significant historiographical gap.
Mehmet Bozok and Nihan Bozok’s study, featured as the ninth and last research article in this issue, examines environmental crises and relationships among multiple species. Focusing on the Köyceğiz–Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area, and adopting a more-than-human perspective, they analyze how deforestation, agricultural change, mining, forest fires, and lifestyle migration unravel longstanding multispecies partnerships and sustainable livelihoods. Their work underscores how socio-ecological crises simultaneously fragment human communities and biodiversity networks.
This issue also features a review article by Naz Yücel on state–capital relations during the rule of the AKP, weaving together journalistic and academic accounts. Finally, in five book reviews the issue covers wide-ranging themes from economic history to nation-state formation and cosmopolitanism, from pluralism to planning cultures and the making of the modern Middle East. By bringing these strands together, New Perspectives on Turkey continues its commitment to bridging historical and contemporary analysis while engaging critically with the evolving political, social, and cultural dynamics shaping Turkey.
