Current Analysis Unpacking Turkey's "Court-Packing" Referendum The news reports and commentary on Turkey in the middle months of 2010 have sounded alarmist themes. Analysts have warned that Turkish foreign policy is undergoing a reorientation away from the West, ominously foreshadowed by deteriorating relations with Israel. Commentators worry about creeping Isl Aslı Bâli • 27 min read
Current Analysis Turkey's Search for Regional Power Under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey is carving out a greater role for itself in Middle Eastern affairs. Since 2008, Turkey has sought the role of Middle East intermediary in trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Syria and to resolve the Iranian nuclear Yuksel Taskin • 14 min read
Current Analysis The PKK and the Closure of Turkey's Kurdish Opening At a community hall in Diyarbakır, a majority-Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey, a shrine is draped with the illegal flag of the Kurdistan Workers Party, otherwise known as the PKK. On top of the flag is a framed photograph of Özgür Dağhan, a young man who died fighting for the outlawed rebel grou Alexander Christie-Miller • 17 min read
Current Analysis Another Struggle: Sexual Identity Politics in Unsettled Turkey What happens when almost 3,000 men, women and transgender people march down the main street of a major Muslim metropolis, chanting against patriarchy, the military and restrictive public morals, waving the rainbow flag and hoisting banners decrying homophobia and demanding an end to discrimination? Alyssa Bivins • 14 min read
MER Article Turkey's Rivers of Dispute In the waning years of the twentieth century, it was common to hear predictions that water would be the oil of the twenty-first. A report prepared for the center-right Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, forecast that water, not oil, would be the dominant sourc Hilal Elver • 13 min read
MER Article Livelihoods Up in Smoke On the streets of Turkish cities, the cigarette packs being traded and tucked into shirt pockets are adorned with the familiar brand names of Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. The ubiquity of foreign brands is remarkable, for Turkey is the world’s leading producer of Oriental tobacco—the s Ebru Kayaalp • 11 min read
Current Analysis “Road Maps” and Roadblocks in Turkey’s Southeast “Whether you call it a terror problem, a southeastern Anatolia problem or a Kurdish problem, this is the first question for Turkey,” Abdullah Gül declared in May. “It has to be solved.” With these words from the president, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, Andy Hilton, Marlies Casier, Joost Jongerden • 17 min read
Current Analysis Another Struggle What happens when almost 3,000 men, women and transgender people march down the main street of a major Muslim metropolis, chanting against patriarchy, the military and restrictive public morals, waving the rainbow flag and hoisting banners decrying homophobia and demanding an end to discrimination? Kerem Öktem • 14 min read
MER Article The Politics of Poverty in Turkey's Southeast “There’s not a kid in this neighborhood who hasn’t shined shoes or sold tissues,” says Mehmet, 19, laughing deeply. His is the black humor born of misfortune: Like so many Kurdish youths in Diyarbakır, seat of Turkey’s troubled southeast, Mehmet slowly made his way to the city with his family after Will Day • 7 min read
Current Analysis Lawfare and Wearfare in Turkey With war on its eastern borders, and renewed turmoil inside them, Turkey is transfixed by something else entirely: the desire of university-age women to wear the Muslim headscarf on campus, a seemingly innocent sartorial choice that has been forbidden by the courts, off and on, since 1980. At public Hilal Elver • 18 min read
MER Article Being Muslim at the Margins On January 6, 2008, newspapers in the province of Tunceli in eastern Turkey appeared festooned with the holiday wishes, “May your Gaghand be merry.” [1] Celebrated on the same day as Armenian Christmas and bearing the same name, Gaghand is an important, if almost forgotten event in the religious cal Kerem Öktem • 11 min read
Current Analysis Harbingers of Turkey’s Second Republic On July 23, the day after the ruling Justice and Development Party won Turkey’s early parliamentary elections in a landslide, Onur Öymen, deputy chairman of the rival Republican People’s Party (CHP), interpreted the results as follows: Kerem Öktem • 14 min read
