scholarly journals Watershed moment in US-Turkey relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-30
Author(s):  
David L. Phillips

President Joe Biden recognized atrocities committed against Armenians as the Armenian Genocide in his statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day  (24 April 2021). The statement represents a watershed moment in US-Turkey relations. President Tayyip Erdogan can address US and international concerns prior to the Biden-Erdogan summit on the margin of June’s NATO meeting, or he can double down and intensify repression against Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities. Erdogan’s course will define international relations prior to the centennial of the founding of the Turkish republic in 2023.

Author(s):  
Taner Akçam

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.


Poligrafi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Beylunioglu ◽  
Özgür Kaymak

The relationship between state and non-Muslim communities has been a delicate issue since the founding of the Turkish Republic despite the principle of secularism stated in its constitution. Against this background, the association of national identity with Sunni-Islam has been the main marker of inclusion/exclusion to the national identity. Especially since 2002 when the Justice and Development Party (JDP) came to power, the debates with regard to freedom of religion and the rights of religious minorities came to fore. Over the course of decades there have been numerous studies approaching the state’s perspective towards religious minorities. However, there are still scarce amount of academic studies that focuses on citizenship experiences of the members of these communities in their daily and social life practices. In this article, we first provide a historical perspective of the state towards religious minorities from the establishment of the Republic until today including the JDP period. In the second part of this study we aim to explore recasting perspectives of the non-Muslim minorities over the previous decade by taking the standpoint of the members of Greek Orthodox, Jews and Armenian communities. To this end, we conduct in-depth interviews with the members of these communities who are residing in Istanbul. Finally, new negotiation fields which have been flourishing among these communities will be addressed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-311
Author(s):  
Deniz Yonucu ◽  
Talin Suciyan

Abstract The author of The Armenians in Modern Turkey, historian Talin Suciyan, puts the Armenian genocide survivors at the center of her research to provide a new perspective on the history of the Turkish Republic. Suciyan analyzes the experiences and lives of its Armenian population several decades after the genocide. In this interview, Deniz Yonucu speaks with Suciyan on her research and innovative anthrohistorical approach to understanding the paths that led to the annihilation of Armenians, the effects of the genocide in modern Turkey, and the importance of focusing attention on the experiences of survivors after catastrophic experiences of genocides. The survivor as described in this interview is neither a wretched of the earth, who is forced to live a tortured life, nor a subaltern whose voice cannot acquire speech. The survivor instead is an existence whose past, present and future is constantly denied, and therefore robbed from her.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Klímová-Alexander

The post-1989 rise of ethnic conflicts in the former Eastern Bloc have led to the renewed salience of minority rights and their prominence in international relations. The 1990s witnessed a proliferation of legal instruments and offices dedicated to minority rights at the intergovernmental level (mainly within the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Council of Europe, but also the United Nations). After decades of arguing that rights of persons belonging to national, ethnic or religious minorities can be sufficiently ensured within the framework of universal human rights, attributed to individuals regardless of group membership, liberal political theorists (most notably Will Kymlicka) have started to advocate the need to supplement these traditional human rights with minority rights (meaning certain group-differentiated rights or “special status” for minority cultures) in order to ensure justice in multicultural states.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-554
Author(s):  
Vladimir Alekseevich Avatkov

The paper explores the role and peculiarities of the populism in the modern foreign policy of the Republic of Turkey. Populism became especially popular in Turkeys foreign policy discourse when the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002 and R.T. Erdoğan as President in 2014. Special attention is paid to R.T. Erdoğans populist statements made in the context of the key foreign policy ideologies - Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Panturkism and Islamism. The propaganda of Neo-Ottoman ideas is aimed at restoring Turkey to its former Imperial greatness. The ultimate goal of Turkeys populism in Turkic states is to form a new Turkish-centric subsystem of international relations - the Turkic world. Turkeys Islamic populism within the country is primarily aimed at the conservative part of the population and at the world Islamic community on the international arena. The main task of such populism is the gradual abandonment of the principles of M.K. Ataturk and the secularism, as well as the formation of public opinion that Ankara is the center of the Islamic world. The author comes to the conclusion that Turkeys populism is quite effective and assists the ruling elite in achieving its foreign policy goals. In many ways, the success of Turkeys populism depends on the competent policy of its implementation by R.T. Erdoğan - a classic example of an Eastern politician with a charismatic type of leadership. However, the situation may change significantly in case of the power change in Turkey, emergence of a new leader and, consequently, new populist mechanisms.


Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel J. Hirst

A number of recent comparative works have drawn attention to parallels and similarities between the Soviet Union and the early Turkish Republic. In this article, Samuel J. Hirst takes a firmly transnational approach to Soviet-Turkish interactions in the 1930s to demonstrate that the similarities were not merely circumstantial. The manifest ideological conflict between nationalist Turks and internationalist Bolsheviks has led many historians to dismiss Soviet- Turkish cooperation as a necessary response to geopolitics, a pragmatic alliance against the west. Hirst argues that opposition to the western-dictated international order was a coherent element in Soviet-Turkish exchanges that stretched beyond diplomacy into the economic and cultural spheres. The antiwestern elements of Soviet-Turkish relations suggest that convergence was more than a case of homologous responses to similar conditions; it was part of a broader narrative that, in the Soviet case at least, continued to shape international relations beyond World War II.


Author(s):  
Brynne D. Ovalle ◽  
Rahul Chakraborty

This article has two purposes: (a) to examine the relationship between intercultural power relations and the widespread practice of accent discrimination and (b) to underscore the ramifications of accent discrimination both for the individual and for global society as a whole. First, authors review social theory regarding language and group identity construction, and then go on to integrate more current studies linking accent bias to sociocultural variables. Authors discuss three examples of intercultural accent discrimination in order to illustrate how this link manifests itself in the broader context of international relations (i.e., how accent discrimination is generated in situations of unequal power) and, using a review of current research, assess the consequences of accent discrimination for the individual. Finally, the article highlights the impact that linguistic discrimination is having on linguistic diversity globally, partially using data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and partially by offering a potential context for interpreting the emergence of practices that seek to reduce or modify speaker accents.


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