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This book considers the key issue of Turkey’s treatment of minorities in relation to its complex paths of both European integration and domestic and international reorientation. The expectations of Turkey’s EU and other international counterparts, as well as important domestic demands, have pushed Turkey to broaden the rights of religious and other minorities. More recently a turn towards autocratic government is rolling back some earlier achievements. This book shows how these broader processes affect the lives of three important religious groups in Turkey: the Alevi as a large Muslim community and the Christian communities of Armenians and Syriacs. Drawing on a wealth of original data and extensive fieldwork, the authors compare and explain improvements, set-backs, and lingering concerns for Turkey’s religious minorities and identify important challenges for Turkey’s future democratic development and European path. The book will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of minority politics, contemporary Turkish politics, and religion and politics.
Examining the on-going dilemma of the management of diversity in Turkey from a historical and legal perspective, this book argues that the state’s failure to accommodate ethno-religious diversity is attributable to the founding philosophy of Turkish nationalism and its heavy penetration into the socio-political and legal fibre of the country. It examines the articulation and influence of the founding principle in law and in the higher courts’ jurisprudence in relation to the concepts of nation, citizenship, and minorities. In so doing, it adopts a sceptical approach to the claim that Turkey has a civic nationalist state, not least on the grounds that the legal system is generously littered by references to the Turkish ethnie and to Sunni Islam. Also arguing that the nationalist stance of the Turkish state and legal system has created a legal discourse which is at odds with the justification of minority protection given in international law, this book demonstrates that a reconstruction of the founding philosophy of the state and the legal system is necessary, without which any solution to the dilemmas of managing diversity would be inadequate. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this timely book will interest those engaged in the fields of Middle Eastern, Islamic, Ottoman and Turkish studies, as well as those working on human rights and international law and nationalism.
Though Turkey is a land of vast ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity - home not only to Turks, Kurds and Armenians, but also, among others, Alevis, Ezidis, Assyrians, Laz, Caferis, Roma, Rum, Caucasians and Jews, the history of the state is one of severe repression of minorities in the name of nationalism. This report sets current law and practice in Turkey against the backdrop of equivalent international standards on linguistic rights of minorities; freedom of religion, thought and conscience; freedom of expression; freedom of assembly and association; political participation; property rights and anti-discrimination.
This book explores the ways in which democratizing Muslim countries treat their ethnic minorities’ requests of inclusiveness and autonomy. The author examines the results of two important cases—the securitization of Kurds in Turkey and the “autonomization” (a new concept coined by the study) of Acehnese in Indonesia—through multiple hypotheses: the elites’ power interest, the international factors, the institutions and history of the state, and the ontological security of the country. By examining states with ethnic diversity and very little religious diversity, the research controls for the effect of religious conflict on minority inclusion, and so allows expanded generalizations and comparisons. In non-Muslim majority countries, and in so called “mature democracies,” the problem of the inclusion of old or new ethnic minorities is also crucial for the sustainability of the “never-ending” democratization processes.
Ayhan Aktar has been working on anti-minority policies in modern Turkey since 1991. In the Ottoman Empire’s final decade (in 1906), non-Muslims constituted 20% of the population; by 1927, they were reduced to 2.5% and, nowadays, they make up less than 0.02% of the population of Modern Turkey. Armenians were subjected to deportations (1915), Greeks were ‘exchanged’ (1922–1924) and Jews were forced to migrate abroad (after 1945). Like many other nation-states in the Near East, Turkey has been able to homogenize its population on religious grounds. This book is a collection of Aktar's articles about this transformation. Aktar criticises nationalist historiographies and argues "For instance, a scholar conducting research on the Jewish community during the republican period could easily come to the conclusion that only Jews were discriminated against by the Turkish state. However, this is only partially true! All non-Muslim minorities were discriminated against and their stories cannot be understood unless the Turkish state and its policies are placed at centre stage. Utilizing diplomatic correspondence in the British and US National Archives has enabled me to understand anti-minority policies as a whole and to treat the subject within a totality." This book will interest scholars and students of nationalism, minority studies and Turkish history and politics. CONTENTS Foreword Chapter 1. Debating the Armenian Massacres in the Last Ottoman Parliament, November – December 1918 Chapter 2. Organizing The Deportations and Massacres: Ottoman Bureaucracy and the Cup, 1915 – 1918 Chapter 3. Homogenizing the Nation, Turkifying the Economy: The Turkish Experience of Population Exchange Reconsidered Chapter 4. Conversion of a ‘Country’ into a ‘Fatherland’: The Case of Turkification Examined, 1923–1934 Chapter 5. “Turkification” Policies in the Early Republican Era Chapter 6. “Tax Me to the End of My Life!” Anatomy of Anti-Minority Tax Legislation, (1942 - 3) Chapter 7. Turkish Attitudes vis à vis The Zionist Project by Ayhan Aktar and Soli Özel Chapter 8. Economic Nationalism in Turkey: The Formative Years, 1912 – 1925
Ethnic minority communities make claims for cultural rights from states in different ways depending on how governments include them in policies and practices of accommodation or assimilation. However, institutional explanations don’t tell the whole story, as individuals and communities also protest, using emotionally compelling narratives about past wrongs to justify their claims for new rights protections. Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of state and paramilitary violence to shame states into cooperating with minority cultural agendas such as the right to mother tongue education. Shaming and claiming is a social movement tactic that binds historic violence to contemporary citizenship. Combining theory with empirics, the book accounts for how democratization shapes citizen experiences of interest representation and how memorialization processes challenge state regimes of forgetting at local, state, and international levels. Democratization and Memories of Violence draws on six case studies in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador to show how memory-based narratives serve as emotionally salient leverage for marginalized communities to facilitate state consideration of minority rights agendas. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in comparative politics, development studies, sociology, international studies, peace and conflict studies and area studies.
In contemporary Turkey, a plethora of Muslim NGOs, spanning the sectarian divide between Sunni and Alevi Muslims, has called into question statist sovereignty over Islam. Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey is an ethnographic study of these institutions and their distinctive, nongovernmental politics of religious freedom.
The issue of minority rights is highly contested in both member and candidate states of the European Union. Compared with other policy areas, the Europeanization process in minority rights is much slower and more problematic. Turkey, though, differs from the majority of the member states by showing positive development, although admittedly it is still characterised by both accelerations and slowdowns. This book examines how minority protection, as a highly sensitive and controversial issue, is promoted or constrained in the EU’s neighbourhood, by focusing on the case of Turkey. It draws on current external Europeanization theories and suggests a rationalist model comprising both the role of the EU and also domestic factors. It integrates two models of external Europeanization provided by Schimmelfennig and Sedelmier (2005), i.e. the external incentives and lesson-drawing models, and the framework of the pull-and-push model of member state Europeanization by Börzel (2000), to derive a comprehensive model for external Europeanization. The book argues that the push by EU conditionality and the pull by domestic dissatisfaction are influential in promoting change. Without one or the other, domestic change remains incomplete, as it is either shallow or selective. Focusing on the Turkish case, the book enhances the theoretical understanding of external Europeanization by shifting focus away from EU conditionality to voluntarily driven change, and by providing a theoretical model that is applicable to other countries. It will therefore be a valuable resource for students and scholars studying minority rights and Turkish and European ethnic politics.
Turkey's hostile approach to the LGBTI community leads Muedini to document the history of LGBTI rights, rights abuses, and activist strategies to secure LGBTI rights in Turkey.