Cosmopolitanism is most widely understood as a political position that, based on a shared status of citizens of the world (kosmopolitês), all human beings are equal. Populism and cosmopolitanism are typically framed in opposition to one another. However, such accounts overlook a crucial dimension: how supporters of populists engage with cosmopolitan discourses themselves. This article examines how supporters of Islamic populist movements in Turkey and Pakistan engage with the idea of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on 105 qualitative interviews with supporters of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), we argue that Islamic populism does not simply reject cosmopolitan ideals. Instead, supporters articulate a form of conditional, hierarchical cosmopolitanism, in which diversity and pluralism are rhetorically embraced but practically constrained by Sunni Muslim moral and political supremacy. This analysis contributes to both populism and cosmopolitanism studies by demonstrating that populist movements can reconfigure cosmopolitan discourses within exclusionary religious-nationalist frameworks. Islamic populism thus presents not a wholesale rejection of cosmopolitanism, but its selective appropriation and redefinition to justify moral and political hierarchies. Populism scholarship needs to reconsider the framing of populism and cosmopolitanism as inherently antagonistic.

This study investigates Turkey’s middle class and its changes in terms of income, socio-economic profile, and living standards using the 2006–2023 Survey of Income and Living Conditions. It estimates the size of the middle class using various median income thresholds and compares these relative measures with absolute benchmarks. The results indicate a steady expansion of the middle class between 2006 and 2017, followed by a contraction after 2018 in a context of macroeconomic instability and persistent and high inflation. This study further analyzes changes in the demographic and employment characteristics of the middle class and evaluates changes in their standard of living indicators. Findings reveal demographic aging and a growing concentration of middle-class employment in lower-wage service sectors. Declining homeownership, reduced consumption capacity, and rising financial strain point to a deterioration in living standards relative to their 2017 level, even though several indicators remain improved compared to 2006. The study concludes that the middle class has become more economically vulnerable, and that the future direction of economic policy will be critical for sustaining both its size and its economic well-being.

Discursive attacks towards the opposition are often a harbinger of polarisation, democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. We study the evolution of negative language about the opposition in Turkey under Erdoğan, a pioneering case of democratic backsliding. We distinguish between two types of negative language: a valid competitor – ‘rival’ – versus an enemy that needs to be destroyed – ‘villain’. We leverage machine learning to examine every opposition-related sentence in two major newspapers from 2009 to 2022. Our data allow us to compare the depictions of the main opposition party as a rival or villain between media outlets, before and after media ownership change, during election times and beyond. We also test how these depictions respond to currency shocks and military casualties, as the incumbents could try to contain the fallout from these adverse events by discursively attacking the opposition. We find that vilification of the opposition is driven by security challenges rather than economic troubles, which are associated with increases in rival discourse. Results also suggest that political competition can appear unrepresentatively civil precisely during election periods, as an already polarising incumbent may try to present himself in a more reconciliatory light during the campaign period.

This study aims to analyze how two popular television series, Famagusta (produced in Greece) and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs (Once Upon a Time in Cyprus, produced in Turkey), reflect the political approaches of Greece and Turkey toward the Cyprus issue. Television series are often powerful media for national narrative building, and both Famagusta and Bir Zamanlar Kıbrıs series demonstrate the ways historical events are selectively portrayed to reinforce contemporary political perspectives regarding Cyprus. Beyond simply retelling historical events, both series are used to reflect the ongoing efforts of Greece and Turkey to assert rights over Cyprus, a geopolitically significant island with a complex colonial past. This study will analyze how these series engage in narrative framing to legitimize national claims over a distant territory, using television series as a medium for both national narratives and colonial continuity. The study will explore the underlying messages, rhetorical tools, and symbolic elements that each series uses to shape the public perception about the Cyprus issue, drawing on concepts from media studies and international relations.

This article analyses multiple visions and perspectives offered by Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals during the Republican era (1912–1949) concerning their status as a Muslim community by looking into their debates on the modernization and secularization of the Turkish Republic under the Kemalist regime. The transformation of the multi-ethnic and religious Qing empire into a Republican Chinese nation-state presented new challenges to the ruling elite, intellectuals, and minority communities. This article explores how Chinese Muslims navigated the complex intellectual landscape as alternative visions and ideologies concerning nation-building, ethnic autonomy, religion, and modernity emerged in China. The article focuses on how Han Chinese intellectuals, the Kuomintang (KMT) elite, and Chinese Muslims selectively interpreted Turkish modernization in different ways to promote their socio-political cause. It analyses the overlaps and the complex, nuanced differences between Chinese Muslim interpretations of Turkey as a success story of the awakened modern Muslim and the KMT ruling elites’ view of Turkey in the 1930s as a model of developmental authoritarianism, highlighting Turkey’s success in establishing a homogenous nation-state that superseded religion with a sanctified state ideology. The article thus demonstrates how Chinese Muslim intellectuals responded to the KMT state’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion and the subsequent era of the Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a powerful alternative to KMT rule and ideology.

How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey’s infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey’s infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state’s predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.

This study aimed to identify determinants of influenza vaccination among older adults using nationally representative data from the Turkey Older Persons Profile Survey 2023. Data from 11 657 individuals aged 65 and over, collected by the Turkish Statistical Institute, were analysed. Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression was employed for variable selection, followed by binary logistic regression to identify significant predictors. Only 19.4% of older adults reported receiving an influenza vaccine during the 2022/2023 influenza season. Higher education, income sufficiency, social security coverage, regular medication use, physical activity, and use of mobile health (mHealth) applications were significantly associated with higher vaccination uptake. Former smoking, alcohol consumption, older age, higher body mass index, and greater independence in daily living were also positive predictors. Traditional barriers to healthcare access (e.g., transportation, waiting times) were not significantly associated. Regional disparities were evident, with lower vaccination rates in the eastern regions. Vaccine uptake among older adults in Turkey is low despite universal access. Promoting engagement with primary healthcare services and increasing the use of mHealth applications may contribute to increasing vaccination coverage. Special attention should be given to socially disadvantaged groups and underperforming regions to enhance preventive healthcare among the aging population.

This article examines Turkey’s constitutional trajectory through Carl Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty, exception and dictatorship. It argues that Turkey’s political development cannot be fully understood as a process of gradual democratic erosion alone but must be analyzed as a sequence of constitutional ruptures in which exceptional powers have repeatedly redefined sovereign authority. From Abdülhamid II’s suspension of the 1876 Constitution to the Grand National Assembly’s exercise of wartime sovereignty in 1921, the military interventions of 1960 and 1980, and President Erdoğan’s post-2016 consolidation of power, sovereignty has shifted among personal, collective and institutional actors capable of suspending legality and founding new constitutional orders. By situating Turkey within a longer history of sovereign reconstitution, the article critically reworks Schmitt’s framework to show how emergency provisions – initially designed to defend constitutional order – can be transformed into instruments of constitutional refoundation. It demonstrates how commissarial responses to crisis may evolve into sovereign dictatorships, enabling regime transformation under the appearance of legal continuity. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on authoritarian constitutionalism and emergency governance by clarifying the constitutional mechanisms through which legality is suspended, reconfigured and redeployed. Beyond the Turkish case, the article advances a broader comparative agenda for global constitutionalism: integrating the study of democratic erosion with an analysis of sovereign reconstitution in moments of exception, thereby illuminating how contemporary constitutional orders are reshaped through crisis.

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.

Previous research conducted in closed autocracies indicates that government propaganda can deter opposition, shift political attitudes, and influence emotions. Yet the specific mechanisms and contextual factors influencing how and when propaganda works remain unclear. We theorize how power-projecting government propaganda works differently for government supporters and opponents in polarized electoral authoritarian regimes, focusing on emotional reactions, sense of societal belonging, and downstream effects on contentious political behavior. Through two preregistered surveys in Turkey (N = 6,286), we find that supporters exposed to propaganda videos feel a greater sense of belonging and are more susceptible to engage in pro-government activities. Opponents report heightened anger and anxiety and seem deterred from protesting. However, the latter effect weakened during the highly contested 2023 electoral campaign. These results indicate that propaganda can help electoral authoritarian regimes deter anti-government action and encourage pro-government action, but that its deterrent effects may weaken during periods of high mobilization and contention.

This essay explores the formation of the Syria-Turkey border by examining the mobility of contraband merchants and couriers. Contraband commerce can be viewed as not only a technique of mobility but a technology of sovereignty. I parse out these linkages from within the semantic domain of kaçak (contraband; literally “fugitive”) repurposed in the hands of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials. At important historical junctures, contraband commerce between modern Turkey and Syria came to link regimes of value and territorialization, border delineation and land dispossession, and economic informality and political treason. Analyzing the paradoxically uneven distribution of physical mobility and transborder transactions among the inhabitants of the border as a central tenet of territorialization, I suggest conceptualizing the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty. This essay contends that such an approach recuperates the historicity and dynamism of arrested mobilities and their role in the spatial production of borders, and of other contingent forms they give to sovereignty over geography and history.