In The Minority Concept in the Turkish Context, Samim Akgönül presents a conceptual discussion of the term 'minority' from various perspectives, most notably history, sociology and political science. The concept of minority has a specific understanding in the Turkish political, sociological and legal context due to the Ottoman Millet system approach. The conceptual discussion is illustrated by there case studies: religious minorities in Turkey that are the result of the elimination policies during the Turkish nation building process, Muslim minorities in Greece as heritage of the Ottoman domination until the 20th century, and new minorities originating from Turkey and living in France as the result of the Turkish immigration of 1960's and following decades. Book jacket.

The Minority Concept in the Turkish Context discusses the concept of minority in the specific Turkish context by using three different case studies: religious minorities in Turkey, Muslims of Greece and Turks in France.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two “others.” The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the “others” of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the “other” of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.

This volume, Minority Self-Government in Europe and the Middle East: From Theory to Practice, is novel from several perspectives. It combines theory with facts on the ground, going beyond legal perspectives without neglecting existing laws and their implementation. Theoretical discussions transcend examining existing autonomy models in certain regions. It offers new models in the field, discussing such critical themes as environmentalism. Traditional concepts such as self-determination and well-known successful autonomy examples, including the Åland Islands, Basque and Catalonian models, are examined from different perspectives. Some chapters in this volume focus on certain regions (including Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) which have only recently received scholarly attention. Chapters complement one another in terms of their theoretical inputs and outputs from the field.

This book addresses the constitutional journey of religious minorities in modern Turkey, specifically the Lausanne minorities, who have been both coded and blacklisted in the official records for decades. It focuses on the non-Muslim citizens who have maintained their lives with confidential codes without knowing that these codes have been instrumentally used for strategic purposes. In spite of such discriminatory practices, they are on the way to a new democratic and civil constitution. It is significant to note that this will be their first constitutional experience in post-republic history. The first book to document the role of religious minorities in constitution making in modern Turkey, it lists recent discussions and findings on this controversial process. One of the important findings of this study is that government-led initiatives endeavouring to be inclusive have had the opposite effect.

Despite being democratically elected, Turkey's ruling AKP party moved towards increasingly authoritarian measures in the years that followed. After the coup attempt in July 2016, the AKP government declared a state of emergency which President Erdo?an saw as an opportunity to purge the public sector of pro-Gülenist individuals and criminalise opposition groups including Kurdish separatists, Alevites, leftists and liberals. The country experienced political turmoil and rapid transformation, and debates around constitutional amendments began that would change the regime to a “Turkish style” presidential system. This book identifies the process of democratic reversal in Turkey. In particular, contributors explore the various ways that a democratically elected political party used elections to implement authoritarian measures. They scrutinise the very concepts of democracy, elections and autocracy to expose their flaws which can be manipulated to advantage. The book includes chapters discussing the roots of authoritarianism in Turkey; the political economy of elections; the relationship between the political Islamic groups and the government; Turkish foreign policy; non-Muslim communities' attitudes towards the AKP; and Kurdish citizens' voting patterns. As well as following Turkey's political trajectory, this book contextualises Turkey in the wider literature on electoral and competitive authoritarianisms and explores the country's future options.

In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide “whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person”; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turks’ whiteness, was cheekily entitled “Is the Turk a White Man?” Within a few decades, having understood the importance of this question for their modernization efforts, Turkish elites had already started a fantastic scientific mobilization to position the Turks in world history as the generators of Western civilization, the creators of human language, and the forgotten source of white racial stock. In this book, Murat Ergin examines how race figures into Turkish modernization in a process of interaction between global racial discourses and local responses.