This report comprises the results of the Canal Istanbul Workshop held at the Istanbul Congress Center on January 10, 2020. The Canal Istanbul Workshop aimed to evaluate the Canal Istanbul Project in all aspects by discussing its possible effects from economic, strategic, legal, environmental, and social standpoints, as well as to review the project from the perspective of security, spatial planning, transportation, disaster risk, and seismicity. The Canal Istanbul Workshop report provides a comprehensive summary of the workshop to the public and all relevant stakeholders.

This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their historical and political complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law.

Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. Including a diverse array of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases drawn from the Global South and North, this collection illustrates the analytical power of attending to authoritarianism’s diverse scalar and spatial expressions, and how intimately connected it is with identity narratives, built landscapes, borders, legal systems, markets, and other territorial and extraterritorial expressions of power.

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the state of policy analysis in Turkey for an international audience. Noting Turkey’s traditionally strong, highly centralised state, the book documents the evolution of policy analysis in the country, providing an in-depth review of the context, constraints, and dominant modes of policy analysis performed by both state and non-state actors. The book examines the role of committees, experts, international actors, bureaucrats as well as public opinion in shaping policy analysis in the country through their varying ideas, interests and resources. In doing so, it presents the complex decision-making mechanisms that vary significantly among policy-making actors and institutions, documenting the key, yet unexamined, aspects of policy analysis in Turkey. It will be a valuable resource for those studying policy analysis within Turkey and as a comparison with other volumes in the International Library of Policy Analysis Series.