Turkey's Social Policy Response to Covid-19: Labor Market Reforms to Protect Employment

Turkey's social policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic combined various conventional and unconventional social policy tools. In a context of already persistently high unemployment rates, the government put an emphasis on labor market reforms to protect employment, with a short-time work scheme playing an important role. For those left unprotected by protective labor market policies, the government provided relatively meagre one-off social assistance payments that reached large parts of the poor. While these policies cushioned the social impact of the pandemic to some degree, they also amplified already existing inequalities: Labor market insiders (regular employees) were far more effectively protected than labor market outsiders (self-employed, people in informal employment). In addition to these social policy instruments the government also implemented 'social policy by other means', which included boosting consumer credit. With regards to future prospects, it remains unclear whether the social policy response that was devised as a temporary intervention will be unwound or result in more permanent changes to the country's welfare regime

The rise and fall of Turkey’s soft power discourse

Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Turkish foreign policy, a similar cycle can be observed regarding the discourse on Turkey’s “soft power”. This paper seeks to appraise Turkey’s “soft power” and “model” discourses by establishing the chronology of their emergence and highlighting the multidimensional structure of their production. The authors argue that the discourses on Turkey’s “soft power” are created within a triadic system of discourse production. This system works through the domains of think tanks, academia, and foreign policy actors in Turkey and beyond. These domains are bound to each other through reciprocal relations of interest and are negotiated by gatekeepers, i.e. well-connected persons of influence. Turkey’s “soft power” discourse is as much a product of Turkish foreign policy itself as it is a product of Turkey’s relations with the United States (US). Circulating through these different domains, and being appropriated by a large number of actors with differing and sometimes contradictory interests, these discourses, reconstructed by the authors in this study, are highly permeable, diverse, and unstable. For a brief period, they did, however, collectively contribute to the emergence of an almost hegemonic discourse on Turkey’s soft power, thereby reinforcing the AKP regime at the beginning of the 2010s

The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey

This paper discusses demographic engineering and the renaming of places as closely interrelated policies of nationalising states seeking to increase their hold over contested territories. Such policies comprise destructive –deportation, ethnic cleansing, population exchange– as well as constructive aspects, such as the establishment of national institutions, and the creation of narratives, foundational myths and toponymes. It argues that emerging nation-states in Southeast Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century evicted undesired ethno-religious groups and projected their national visions of time and space on their newly acquired territories. This ‘Hellenisation’, ‘Bulgarianisation’ or ‘Turkification’ was achieved, inter alia, by the destruction of the status quo ex ante that is the pre-national, heterogeneous toponymical order and by the construction of a system of place names reflecting the nascent national order of time and space. Within this context, the case of Turkey between 1915 and 1990 is particularly insightful as it illustrates the causal relationship between demographic engineering and renaming places, highlights the indispensable role of a semi-autonomous bureaucratic regime and exposes the power and the constraints of state-directed efforts imagining a purely ‘national’ order of things

Analysis of using OFDM for short-range, multı-user, underwater acoustic communication

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Acoustic waves are being used in several underwater applications, such as SONARs, underwater communication systems. Most of already developed and deployed underwater communication systems use narrow band communication and lacks layered communication approach. In this thesis, we propose a spread spectrum, layered architecture for underwater communication system, such as for SCUBA divers. The communication device shall be designed such that divers can communicate with each other in shallow water, short range in a multi-user fashion and provide not only voice communication but also data transmission as well. The device shall use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as a spread spectrum technique. The OFDM technique is selected from other spread spectrum techniques due to it’s inherent ability to combat the channel impairments and flexibility of implementing the communication system using software defined radio (SDR). The spread spectrum system shall operate in 100 kHz to 300 kHz frequency band using wideband acoustic transducers. In this work, we studied a layered architecture for the communication device. We mainly studied the application layer, data link layer and physical layer in order to analyze the achievable data rate and performance. In this work, we tried to find the optimal communication parameters to achieve guaranteed communication performance for possible scenarios. The communication parameters are set in order to achieve best performance for the worst condition. Using the optimal parameters, the system shall occupy 5 users voice and data communication at the same time using the entire frequency band at the same time, however with certain Grade of Service (GOS) the capacity shall be increased. The capacity of the system shall further be increased if the system uses adaptive communication parameters that are adapted to changing channel and user conditions. The system using adaptive communication parameters shall provide at most 16 users’ voice and data communication using the entire frequency band at the same time.Öktem, Kemalettin KeremM.S

The rise and fall of Turkey’s soft power discourse

Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Turkish foreign policy, a similar cycle can be observed regarding the discourse on Turkey’s “soft power”. This paper seeks to appraise Turkey’s “soft power” and “model” discourses by establishing the chronology of their emergence and highlighting the multidimensional structure of their production. The authors argue that the discourses on Turkey’s “soft power” are created within a triadic system of discourse production. This system works through the domains of think tanks, academia, and foreign policy actors in Turkey and beyond. These domains are bound to each other through reciprocal relations of interest and are negotiated by gatekeepers, i.e. well-connected persons of influence. Turkey’s “soft power” discourse is as much a product of Turkish foreign policy itself as it is a product of Turkey’s relations with the United States (US). Circulating through these different domains, and being appropriated by a large number of actors with differing and sometimes contradictory interests, these discourses, reconstructed by the authors in this study, are highly permeable, diverse, and unstable. For a brief period, they did, however, collectively contribute to the emergence of an almost hegemonic discourse on Turkey’s soft power, thereby reinforcing the AKP regime at the beginning of the 2010s

An illiberal welfare state emerging? Welfare efforts and trajectories under democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey

Mainstream western-centric welfare state research has mostly confined itself to studying social policy in consolidated democracies and tends to assume a synergy between democracy and the welfare state. This article shifts the focus to welfare states in countries with declining democratic institutions and rising right-wing populist rule to explore a complex relationship between (de)democratization and welfare state reforms. We conduct a comparative case study of two extreme cases of democratic decline, Turkey and Hungary. We employ a sequential mixed method approach. First, we assess welfare efforts in the two countries to understand which policy areas were prioritized and whether autocratizing governments retrenched or expanded their welfare states. In the second stage, we explore the trajectory of welfare reforms in Hungary and Turkey, focusing on three analytically distinguishable dimensions of social policy change: policy content, policy procedures (including timing, parliamentary procedures, veto players); and the discourses accompanying reforms. We find that democratic decline facilitates rapid welfare state change but it does not necessarily mean retrenchment. Instead we observe ambivalent processes of welfare state restructuring. Common themes emerging in both countries are the rise of flagship programmes that ensure electoral support, a transition towards top-down decision-making and the salient role of discourse in welfare governance. Overall, similarities are stronger in procedures and discourse than in the direction of reforms. Differences in spending levels and policy content do not suggest that the two cases constitute a coherent illiberal welfare state regime. Instead, we see the emergence of authoritarian features that modify their original welfare models

Beyond national narratives? : centenary histories, the First World War and the Armenian Genocide

In April 2015 the centenary of the Armenian Genocide was commemorated. Just like the First World War centenary, this anniversary has provoked a flurry of academic and public interest in what remains a highly contested history. This article assesses the state of the current historiography on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It focuses on the possibilities for moving beyond the national narratives which continue to dominate the field, in particular through connecting the case of the Armenian Genocide to what has been termed a ‘transnational turn’ in the writing of the history of the First World War

Kalkınmakta olan dünyada refah devletinin oluşumu

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Thesis (Ph.D.): Bilkent University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2016.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-325).Are there welfare states in the developing world? According to conventional wisdom there cannot be. The ‘orthodox model’ of welfare state emergence assumes that only industrialised countries can become welfare states. Yet, there is a growing literature on welfare states in developing countries. In this dissertation, I address this puzzle through two research questions: are there welfare states in the developing world? And if there are, how can we explain the emergence of these deviant cases? I explore these questions through a sequential mixed-method research design. First, I conduct a large-n fuzzy set analysis to identify welfare states in the developing world. Second, I undertake a small-n comparative-historical analysis to explain how three developing countries - Brazil, Costa Rica and South Africa – became welfare states. I find two pathways to welfare stateness in lower income contexts: (1) a social democratic pathway in which centre-left parties build the welfare state in the context of democracy (2) a Bismarckian pathway, in which state elites build the welfare state in a non-democratic context. The first pathway resembles power resources theory, but labour’s role is different. The second pathway partially supports state-centred research. However, contradicting theoretical expectations, I find that state capacity is not a precondition for the welfare state. Finally, even in these deviant cases, welfare state building is connected to industrialization. By the time they became welfare states, the three cases were no longer low income countries. Therefore, I conclude that a moderate degree of development is necessary for welfare state emergence.by Kerem Gabriel ÖktemPh.D

The Welfare State as Universal Social Security: A Global Analysis

Öktem KG. The Welfare State as Universal Social Security: A Global Analysis. Social Inclusion. 2020;8(1):103-113.Over the past decades, the geography of comparative welfare state research has transformed. Whereas scholars used to focus on a limited number of advanced industrialised democracies, they now increasingly study developments in Europe’s periphery, East Asia, and Latin America. So, does this mean that the welfare state has spread around the world? To answer this question, we analyse different ways to measure welfare states and map their results. With the help of International Labour Organization and International Monetary Fund data, we explore measurements based on social expenditures, social rights, and social security legislations and show that each of them faces serious limitations in a global analysis of welfare states. For some measurements, we simply lack global data. For others, we risk misclassifying the extent and quality of some social protection systems. Finally, we present a measurement that is grounded in the idea that the welfare state is essentially about universalism. Relying on a conceptualisation of the welfare state as collective responsibility for the wellbeing of the entire population, we use universal social security as a yardstick. We measure this conceptualization through health and pension coverage and show that a growing number of countries have become welfare states by this definition. Yet, it is possible that at least some of these cases offer only basic levels of protection, we caution