How Erdoğan Rules Through Crisis

What does the enduring rule of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tell us about the resilience of authoritarian populism despite economic and governance crises? This essay argues that a key source of authoritarian resilience lies in the mutually reinforcing interaction of state capture and market capture. The AKP government not only established firm control over state institutions but also reshaped state-market relations in a way that helped the party build an extensive network that closely ties different segments of society to the state. The authors maintain that the fallout from Turkey's growing crisis of governance is not felt evenly across society and thus defies expectations that economic and governance crises necessarily result in the downfall of an authoritarian-populist regime

The Changing Waves of Migration from the Balkans to Turkey: A Historical Account

Ahmet İçduygu and Deniz Sert tell the history of migration from the Balkans to Turkey from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. They relate this history to nation-building, but also to economic conditions and specific Turkish concerns, such as the perceived need for immigration to compensate for a declining population at that time. They also demonstrate that after 1990, ethnic migration decreased and irregular labour migration became more important

Discourses of Collective Spirituality and Turkish Islamic Ethics:An Inquiry into Transcendence, Connectedness, and Virtuousness in Anatolian Tigers

Based on case studies and qualitative interviews conducted with 40 stakeholders in five SMEs, or so called Anatolian tigers, in Turkey, this article has explored what collective spirituality and Turkish Islamic business ethics entail and how they shape organizational values using diverse stakeholder perspectives. The study has revealed six emergent discourses around collective spirituality and Islamic business ethics: Flying with both wings; striving to transcend egos; being devoted to each other; treating people as whole persons; upholding an ethics of compassion; and leaving a legacy for future generations. These discourses are organized around three themes of collective spirituality, respectively: Transcendence, connectedness, and virtuousness

State Capacity and Populist Rule in Times of Uncertainty: Covid-19 Response in South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey

In an age of “radical uncertainty,” state capacity proves critical for countries to contain “wicked crises” and improve the resilience of societies. At the same time, authoritarian populism has come to dominate politics in several countries. The impact of populist leadership on state capacity, however, remains an under-researched theme. We explore how populist rule has impeded effective management of the COVID-19 pandemic by weakening state capacity. We compare Brazil and Turkey as cases with similar degrees of state capacity but diverging pandemic management performance. We also examine South Korea as a benchmark case combining high state capacity and effective leadership. We show that state capacity is central in managing “wicked crises,” but populist leadership undermines it through a set of mechanisms. On a broader scale, we aim to contribute to the debate by exploring the interactions among crises, state capacity, and populist rule

Turkish foreign policy, its domestic determinants and the role of the European Union

This paper investigates whether Turkish foreign policy has changed in recent years, specifically in line with the EU accession process, and tries to uncover the main dynamics behind these changes. The main proposition in the paper is that domestic changes in Turkey have led to a reshuffling of foreign policy objectives with a renewed emphasis on improving relations with the country's neighbours. The paper investigates whether such a policy change is complementary to the Turkish goal of inclusion in the EU, and further proposes that the changes in Turkish foreign policy since 2002 involve an increased activism partly in line with the EU accession process and as a result of the changes in domestic politics