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| 1 |
ID:
175046
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since the rise of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), Islam has come to play a more prominent role in public and political spheres in Turkey. This paper draws on ethnographic data gathered in Istanbul and Diyarbakir between 2013 and 2015 to highlight Kurdish attitudes to Islam. Following the electoral success of the AKP amongst Kurds in the general election of 2007, Kurdish actors have sought to incorporate Islamic sensibilities into their political offering in order to appeal to Kurdish constituents. Amid the AKP’s recent authoritarian turn and instrumentalization of religion, and the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), many Kurds have sought to redefine their relationship with Islam to clearly demarcate distinctly Kurdish religious and political spaces.
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| 2 |
ID:
175049
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Mubarak was perceived as an expression of the awakening of civil society in the face of authoritarian rule, leading to a re-examination of its role as an agent for democratic change. Nevertheless, the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism confirmed prior critical discussions regarding civil society limitations. This paper focuses on the role of the human rights movement during the revolution and its aftermath and reveals the activists’ reflections on its failure. The discussion refers to the limitations of human rights organizations but also exposes the possibilities created by the revolution and the impact of the ‘new civic activism’, which extricated human rights activism from the enclaves of the professional organizations. This analysis requires us to reconsider the definitions of civil society, which focus on formal organizations, and view it as a space in which various actors, including fluid and horizontal forms of activism, engage through contention and cooperation. Such an analysis drew our attention to the activists themselves and exposes the variety of actors working for reform, their various interpretations of the anti-democratic reality, and their potential to establish an anti-hegemonic narrative.
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| 3 |
ID:
175042
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Mubarak was perceived as an expression of the awakening of civil society in the face of authoritarian rule, leading to a re-examination of its role as an agent for democratic change. Nevertheless, the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism confirmed prior critical discussions regarding civil society limitations. This paper focuses on the role of the human rights movement during the revolution and its aftermath and reveals the activists’ reflections on its failure. The discussion refers to the limitations of human rights organizations but also exposes the possibilities created by the revolution and the impact of the ‘new civic activism’, which extricated human rights activism from the enclaves of the professional organizations. This analysis requires us to reconsider the definitions of civil society, which focus on formal organizations, and view it as a space in which various actors, including fluid and horizontal forms of activism, engage through contention and cooperation. Such an analysis drew our attention to the activists themselves and exposes the variety of actors working for reform, their various interpretations of the anti-democratic reality, and their potential to establish an anti-hegemonic narrative.
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| 4 |
ID:
175041
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| Summary/Abstract |
My study is an attempt to examine recent developments in post-Arab Spring fiction by Anglo-Arab immigrant authors. Instead of conforming to the traditional narrative modes and strategies, post-Arab Spring literature provides a bitter evaluation of the so-called Arab Spring and deconstructs the revolutionary rhetoric that heralds a new era for the Arab world by producing a counter-narrative. The selected novels, Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles, use peculiar strategies to portray the fractured and cryptic realities of the Arab world. Written within the framework of realism, utilizing the literary strategies of postmodern literature, these writers unsettle the boundaries of literary genres and give rise to diverse phenomenal trends in Arab fiction. Using magical realism, Alrawi expands the traditional realist narrative style by blending realist elements with magical. By employing metafiction, Rakha formally exhibits the precarious scenario of the Arab world. Drawing on the theory of Magical Realism and Metafiction, these works are investigated in order to emphasize how this new writing reflects the unstable reality of the Arab Spring. While it is too early to discern the characteristics of Post-Arab Spring literature, my research is a contribution to developing a framework in which to do so.
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| 5 |
ID:
175047
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| Summary/Abstract |
Mainstream analyses of Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition have been largely divided along two mutually exclusive narratives. There are those hailing the country as ‘the Arab Spring’s only success story’ on the one hand and those sounding sensationalist alarms about the country’s democratization failure and return to authoritarianism on the other. This is consistent with, and perpetuates, a problematic zero-sum binary in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scholarship between either a linear democratization process or authoritarian resilience. Furthermore, these reductionist representations highlight the failure of predominant democratization theories to account for the nuances and complexities of democratic transition. This paper critically examines the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s democratization and explores their underpinning in two competing Orientalisms: the classic Orientalism underscoring an ontological difference (and inferiority) of the ‘Arab world’ to the West, and a liberal civilizing Orientalism which, while acknowledging an ‘essential sameness’ between the West and the ‘Arab world’, places the West as the temporal pinnacle of democracy and the normative monitor of democratic success. This paper thus rejects the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s transition and advocates for a more nuanced narrative which accounts for the patterns of continuity with and change from authoritarian structures within the democratization process.
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| 6 |
ID:
175043
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is usually accepted that Saracens are evil and Christians are good in medieval narratives. The common medieval thought towards binary opposition can be pointed out by the Chanson de Roland: ‘paiens unt tort e Chrestiens unt dreit’. However, it seems that there is religious prejudice and ignorance towards the Saracens and their geographical location, the East. The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone is an early medieval narrative that focuses on cross-cultural interaction within a framework that combines political, social and religious events with geographical exploration both in the East and the West. Similarly, Bevis of Hampton is the Middle English version that reshapes the socio historical and religious events on which their sources have focused. The aim of this article is to explore the idea that another East existed during the Middle Ages. This article will address the question of what relation Boeve de Haumtone and Bevis of Hampton might have to crusading geography. It will be argued how and why the East is not portrayed as a scary, evil place as it is in other contemporary romances, and the evidence for this may be presented by the hero’s preference for living in the East for the rest of his life.
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| 7 |
ID:
175040
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| Summary/Abstract |
Literature on Turkey’s post-2011 authoritarian turn – especially after the eruption of the 2013 nationwide Gezi Protests – adopts modern concepts such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘one-party government’, ‘party-state fusion’, and even ‘fascism’ mainly in order to pin down the nature of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkish acronym) or depict the current character of Turkey’s regime. Through engaging the pre-modern concept of neopatrimonialism, which is derived from Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism, this paper argues that Turkey’s encounter with authoritarianism is deeply associated with the proliferation of neopatrimonial domination, into which the legacy of patronage politics, fracture of security power, and the metastasis of crony capitalism have been conflated. This article argues that neopatrimonial features have always, to a degree, marked state-society relations in Turkey. Furthermore, this article suggests neopatrimonial characteristics started to dominate Turkey’s modern legal structure under the AKP, which led to a state crisis culminating in the 2016 attempted coup. However, despite the fact that neopatrimonialism cannot be argued as a pathological deviation from modern-legal domination, this paper concludes that tension exists between the crony capitalism-based economic model of neopatrimonalism and Turkey’s decades-long market-based capitalism.
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| 8 |
ID:
175045
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| Summary/Abstract |
The historiography of the abolition of repartitioned mushāʿ—the practice of parcels substitution among cultivators in peasant communities—is mistakenly traced back to the Ottoman Land Code of 1858. Neither that Code, nor Ottoman land registration, attempted the abolition of this type of mushāʿ. It was instead the abolition ordinances of the British and French Mandatory governments during the 1920s which began a conflict over land titles. The common estimates of that time suggest about 50 per cent of the lands in the Levant were held under repartitioned mushāʿ, but this was an exaggeration for most localities. French officials in Syria and Lebanon were not unanimous in opposing mushāʿ and in practice resorted to a laissez-faire policy. The British, however, annulled the legal titles to large areas of repartitioned mushāʿ lands in Palestine and Transjordan, wrongly believing this would increase investment in and productivity of cultivated lands. Their view was backed by Zionist experts, possibly due to the realization that the abolition of mushāʿ would facilitate Jewish land purchases.
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| 9 |
ID:
175048
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) is one of the largest regional development projects ever implemented in the Middle East. Launched officially in the 1970s to develop the water and land resources of southeastern Turkey, GAP has over time evolved from a predominantly technical, largely state-led and mainly infrastructural and economic development-oriented project into a primarily social, largely market-friendly and chiefly sustainable and human development-oriented project. Parallel to this evolution, GAP has grown more visible in political and public discourses. The implications of the project, for instance, on the ecology and cultural heritages, on the Kurdish Question, and on water issue among Turkey, Syria and Iraq have become clearer. However, despite growing academic and policy interest on GAP, there has been no attempt to provide a literature review on the project. Even more than 40 years after GAP was begun, a bird’s eye view of researched and under-researched topics in the literature has not been introduced yet. This article seeks to present a qualitative review of GAP-related literature. In this way, it seeks to constitute an initial step to establish a base for more expansive reviews and to provide guidance to interested and involved researchers, practitioners and policymakers.
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| 10 |
ID:
175044
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper focuses on exiled minors from Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. It elucidates how the trauma of Yarmouk, resulting from the Syrian conflict, evokes the Nakba of 1948 and the loss of Palestine. It explains generally how this trauma has affected minors of Yarmouk, but on the other hand how they are able to engage positively in such situations. Therefore, it focuses on the agency of Yarmouk minors, and explores it through investigating their cultural forms such as poem reciting and singing, as well as through focusing on their engagement both in psychosocial activities and daily life actions. Poems that emphasize the displacement from Palestine and Yarmouk as well as illustrate the imagination of the lost land. Daily activities and psychosocial that stress the pursuit for a normal life. Theoretical concepts borrowed from Anderson, Chatterjee and Hage are employed in order to enable us understand in which ways minors demonstrate their agency in order to maintain the daily survival. The data analysed in this paper stems from interviews with Yarmouk residents, both adults and minors, along with visual materials such as videos and photos provided by relief workers and activists.
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