Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya launches its new Syria page . . . Click here.
The Culture Page Returns . . . . click here
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Internship Opportunities at ASI (Jadaliyya, Arab Studies Journal, FAMA). Click here!
The Jadaliyya Egypt Elections Watch page archives! Click here for comprehensive coverage.
Egypt Election Results: Of 427 seats settled, MB got 193, Nour 108, Wafd 38, Bloc 30, RDP 11, Rev. Cont. 10, Wasat 8 (Click Here)
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
Turkey
Turkey's Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: An Interview with Asli Bali (Part 2)
![[Turkish flag. Image from mfa.gov.tr.]](/content_images/3/sm_turkishfppart2.jpg "[Turkish flag. Image from mfa.gov.tr.]")
This is Part 2 of a two-part interview in which Asli Bali discusses Turkey's foreign policy interests and objectives with regards to the Middle East. In this second part of the interview, Asli discusses Turkey’s foreign policy in the face of the Arab uprisings, with particular reference to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The interview was conducted on 11 February 2012. It was transcribed by Ziad Abu-Rish and Kristina Benson. Edited Transcript (Complete audio file below) Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): Last time in the interview, you talked to us about how over the past ten years Turkish foreign policy has featured a transformation to a more focused engagement with Turkey’s ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hakan Ozoglu, From Caliphate to Secular State
Hakan Özoğlu, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Hakan Özoğlu: Critical works on the early years of the Turkish Republic are quite rare, especially in Western scholarship. In the field of history, scholarly works on the Ottoman Empire overshadow the republican period. In Turkey, the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey has long been considered “sacred” for intellectual inquiry, and the majority of books rarely step away from the line of the official history. Yet the significance of this period, not only for Turkey but for ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part Two)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. [Part One of this review essay, which considers Gönül Dönmez-Colin's Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging, can be found here.] Asuman Suner’s New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory may be in many ways the perfect ...
Keep Reading »My Lonely and Beautiful Country: Recent Work on the Cinema of Turkey (Part One)
Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. London: Reaktion Books and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Asuman Suner, New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity, and Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Deniz Bayrakdar, Aslı Kotaman, and Ahu Samav Uğursoy, editors, Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Upon being awarded the Best Director honor at Cannes in 2008 for his film Üç Maymun [Three Monkeys]—becoming the first Turkish director to receive this award—Nuri Bilge Ceylan declared that he wanted to dedicate the award “To my lonely and beautiful ...
Keep Reading »The New Kurdish Movie
![[Image from stargazete.com]](/content_images/3/sm_newturkishplitics.jpg "[Image from stargazete.com]")
Turkey’s decades-old “Kurdish Question” has recently changed its trajectory. There is a new movie playing in town. The Turkish state is determined to follow a new kind of politics in order to resolve the issues that have been haunting Turkish-Kurdish relations for almost a century. In this commentary, I would like to describe what this new politics looks like. Let us begin with the question, Why did Prime Minister Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) choose a new and contentious political path? Behind the rationale for this choice lies the collapse of the negotiations initiated by the AKP government with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – the militant ...
Keep Reading »AKP's Passion For Kurds: Either You Belong to Me, Or to the Courts
![[Individuals arrested as part of the KCK operations being transported. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_arrestsescorted.jpg "[Individuals arrested as part of the KCK operations being transported. Image from unknown archive.]")
The collective imprisonment of political figures who are expressing the desires of the Kurdish people is an old reflex of Turkey’s state tradition. Collective arrests that started in 1959 with the imprisonment of forty-nine Kurdish intellectuals turned into collective executions in the 1990s and now—in proportion to the Kurdish people’s political development during the tenure of the AKP [the governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) of Prime Minister Erdogan]—they have taken the form of sensational mass detentions. The ring encompassing the area where detentions have been carried out, once concentrated in the east, has expanded to the west of ...
Keep Reading »Van Earthquake Exposes Turkey's Ethnic Fault Lines
![[Ercis, Van. Image from deccanchronicle.com]](/content_images/3/sm_turkcrop_display1.jpg "[Ercis, Van. Image from deccanchronicle.com]")
The recent earthquake in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish province of Van not only caused loss of life and damage, it also exposed the country’s political and ethnic fault lines. In the last two decades, there were ten earthquakes with a magnitude of six or more in Turkey. In 1999, two powerful earthquakes struck the country’s northwestern provinces, causing massive damage, costing billions of dollars and leaving more than eighteen thousand dead. The latest natural disaster on 23 October reminded the Turkish people, yet again, that they live in a major seismic zone. It also revealed their government’s uncoordinated aid efforts and the country’s growing ethnic ...
Keep Reading »Where the Truth Lies
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, 2011. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia opens with a scene in which the truth is buried; it is there in front of us but hidden. The first thing we see is an image that is shot from outside a dirty window. The camera remains outside, but the faces behind the window slowly become visible: three men are having drinks inside a car-mechanic's workshop. We are left outside, the sound is distant, and the image is blurry. A truck passes by and wipes the image out. This was it; that is when it happened. Shortly after this scene, we learn that one of those men was killed by one of the other two. ...
Keep Reading »The UN Palmer Inquiry and Israel's Attack on the Mavi Marmara
![[Image from palestinenote.com]](/content_images/3/sm_2402.800px-Mavi_Marmara_side.jpg "[Image from palestinenote.com]")
The UN released its report, "Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident" on Friday, 2 September 2011. The report addressed issues relating to Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara – which left 9 Turkish civilians dead, and some 55 others wounded – and concluded, amongst other things, that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip is lawful and that Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara was justified, but involved excessive force. The panel then recommended that Israel issue an “appropriate statement of regret," and offer compensation. The report generated a swift response. Turkey promptly expelled Israeli diplomats, suspended military ...
Keep Reading »Egypt's Path Could be Distinct from Turkey's and Iran's
![[Image of book covers--in English and Turkish--by Jadaliyya]](/content_images/3/sm_tb.jpg "[Image of book covers--in English and Turkish--by Jadaliyya]")
It is striking that as Egypt turns a new page in history, voices as diverse as Financial Times, Le Monde and the New York Times want it to follow the Turkish model. But is the process in Turkey really repeatable? And who would stand to gain if it were taken as a model? It seems that liberals in the West and elsewhere want to use the Turkish model as an example because it shows the possibility of Islamist empowerment without Islamist dictatorship. The “Turkish model” emerged from a split within the (Islamist) Virtue Party in 2001, after which the pro-business and pro-EU wing of the Islamists were joined by politicians escaping the debris of failed center-right ...
Keep Reading »Turkey and Syria: A Breakup Bound to Happen
While Syria and Turkey have called it quits for now, a possible regime change in Syria could bring them even closer together. The sultans must be green with envy. At no time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire have Turks held such sway over the Middle East. In the context of Arab uprisings, Turkey has been able to solidify a position it has been carefully trying to establish for the past decade. So far, Turkey appears to have made all the right choices. Now, it is navigating everyday turns in the Arab ...
Keep Reading »"Operational Accidents": On the Turkish State and Kurdish Deaths
Reading the press release issued by the Turkish Armed Forces on Thursday, 29 December 2011, it is impossible to get the sense that during the previous night, its warplanes struck and killed thirty-five citizens of Turkey, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. When referring to the young Kurdish villagers it killed, the Turkish Armed Forces merely noted that it received drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The ...
Keep Reading »Letter from Istanbul Bakirkoy Women's Prison
[An October 2011 report on the so-called “KCK operations,” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years, noted that the Erdoğan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. Since 2009, as many as 7748 people have been taken under custody on the alleged grounds that they are associated with the KCK—an organization ...
Keep Reading »Turkey's Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: An Interview with Asli Bali (Part 1)
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview in which Asli Bali discusses Turkey's foreign policy interests and obejectives with regards to the Middle East. In Part 1, Asli tackels the question of whether Turkey's foreign policy positions vis-a-vis the Middle East have changed with respect to what is otherwise described as a "western orientation." She also explores whether whatever changes have occured can be traced directly to the AKP's rise to power within Turkish domestic policy, or rather ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Ayca Cubukcu, On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq
Ayça Çubukçu, “On Cosmopolitan Occupations: The Case of the World Tribunal on Iraq,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.3 (2011): 422-442. Jadaliyya: What made you write this article? Ayça Çubukçu: The origin of this article goes back to my fieldwork with the global network of activists that constituted the World Tribunal on Iraq from 2003 to 2005. The World Tribunal on Iraq was an experimental project of the global anti-war movement, which emerged in response to the ...
Keep Reading »Turkish Politics, Kurdish Rights, and the KCK Operations: An Interview with Asli Bali
Turkey recently has witnessed a massive police operation against activists, advocates, academics, and publishers who are pro-Kurdish on the grounds of alleged links to the outlawed “Union of Communities in Kurdistan” (sometimes also referred to as the Kurdish Communities Union), known by its Kurdish-language acronym, the KCK. In the following interview, Aslı Bali provides some context for the “KCK Operations,” with particular reference to the role of the Justice and Development Party—known by its ...
Keep Reading »Turkey: Arrests Expose Flawed Justice System
[The following statement is the latest from Human Rights Watch (HRW) on domestic developments in Turkey. It was released in both English and Turkish.] Turkey: Arrests Expose Flawed Justice System Academic, Publisher Held in Crackdown on Pro-Kurdish Party (Istanbul) – An Istanbul court’s decision on 1 November 2011 to imprison a publisher and a political science professor pending their trial on terrorism charges exposes the huge deficiencies of Turkey’s criminal justice system, Human Rights Watch said ...
Keep Reading »Urgent Appeal: Stop Arbitrary Detentions in Turkey
The international public has so far been oblivious to the so-called “KCK operations” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years. Under the guise of “fighting terrorism,” the Erdogan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. The “KCK operations” in particular have been deployed to spread fear amongst activists, to ...
Keep Reading »Legal Brief: Flotillas and the Gaza Blockade
[This legal brief is the latest from Diakonia on the Gaza blockade and the use of flotillas.] Legal Brief: Flotillas and the Gaza Blockade (July 2011) The Gaza Strip is currently under a continued naval and land blockade.[1] New flotillas are trying to reach Gaza to provide assistance to the people of the Strip. In light of the deadly outcome of the previous flotilla of 31 May 2010, Diakonia IHL Programme would like to reiterate the relevance and importance of international humanitarian law ...
Keep Reading »Another Credible Israeli Investigation
A state's investigation of its own armed forces and their conduct is not absurd--or at least it shouldn't be. In fact, the practice is encouraged in international law, which seeks to balance a state's sovereignty with universally applicable laws so to speak. However, in the case of Israel, which has empowered its military to investigate itself on the one hand and whose recent investigations have done more to justify its foreign policy than it has to uphold principles of international law, absurdity ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Launches Syria Page
.jpg){kind=small}
Jadaliyya Launches O.M.A.R.
Egypt Page
.jpg){kind=small}
Hot on Facebook
The overarching concern of the UK-led NATO roadmap is to avoid a repetition in Libya of the catastrophic US-led handling of the situation in post-invasion Iraq.click me | أنقرني email quote to a friend
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- It Is What It Is
- New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
- Plundering the Past: Scholarly Treasures
- A Year After: The February 20 Protest Movement in Morocco
- حين يكون الكوكب بأسره ضد الثورة
- The Real Me and the Hypothetical Syrian Revolution - Part 1
- Searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah
- Remembering Anthony Shadid
- Saving Khader Adnan's Life Saves Our Own Soul
- نداء الأسير خضـر عدنـان إلى العالم
- الإخوان في البرلمان؛ محاولة للفهم
- "Violating Sacred Values" in Morocco: Free Speech with an Exception
- Our Friend Anthony Shadid's Stories
- Statement on Hunger Strike of Khader Adnan by Palestinian Human Rights Organizations
- Struggles That Fueled a Revolution
- Immunity, Accountability, and the Arab Uprisings: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses the Role of the Human Rights Community
- Anthony Shadid Is No Longer with Us
- Patent for an Invented People
- The Insha'at Exodus
- New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
Archive
©2010-2012 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design