This book, one of the first in English about everyday life in the Republic of Georgia, describes how people construct identity in a rapidly changing border region. Based on extensive ethnographic ...research, it illuminates the myriad ways residents of the Caucasus have rethought who they are since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Through an exploration of three towns in the southwest corner of Georgia, all of which are situated close to the Turkish frontier, Mathijs Pelkmans shows how social and cultural boundaries took on greater importance in the years of transition, when such divisions were expected to vanish. By tracing the fears, longings, and disillusionment that border dwellers projected on the Iron Curtain, Pelkmans demonstrates how elements of culture formed along and in response to territorial divisions, and how these elements became crucial in attempts to rethink the border after its physical rigidities dissolved in the 1990s.
The new boundary-drawing activities had the effect of grounding and reinforcing Soviet constructions of identity, even though they were part of the process of overcoming and dismissing the past. Ultimately, Pelkmans finds that the opening of the border paradoxically inspired a newfound appreciation for the previously despised Iron Curtain as something that had provided protection and was still worth defending.
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, ...including medical treatises, hagiographies and travellers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
The first study of English historical plays about the Turks, using works in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic, McJannet shows that instead of adverse authorial ...commentary playwrights such as Marlowe and Fulke Greville use dialogue and commentary to enhance the sultan's stature and mitigate his negative acts.
For much of the twentieth century, the intellectual life of the Ottoman and Arabic-Islamic world in the seventeenth century was ignored or mischaracterized by historians. Ottomanists typically saw ...the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured - and text-centered - understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.
The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I ...and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Middle East. Shattering Empires draws on extensive research in the Ottoman and Russian archives to tell the story of the rivalry and collapse of two great empires. Overturning accounts that portray their clash as one of conflicting nationalisms, this pioneering study argues that geopolitical competition and the emergence of a new global interstate order provide the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the twentieth century. It will appeal to those interested in Middle Eastern, Russian, and Eurasian history, international relations, ethnic conflict, and World War I.
This book is the first monographic attempt to follow the environmental changes that took place in the frontier zone of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth ...centuries. On the one hand, it looks at how the Ottoman–Hungarian wars affected the landscapes of the Carpathian Basin – specifically, the frontier zone. On the other hand, it examines how the environment was used in the military tactics of the opposing realms. By taking into consideration both perspectives, this book intends to pursue the dynamic interplay between war, environment, and local society in the early modern period.
Turkey Reframed Akça, İsmet; Bekmen, Ahmet; Özden, Barış Alp
11/2015
eBook
Turkey Reframed documents the first decade of the 2000s, a period of radical change in Turkish society and politics, which has been marked by the major economic crisis of 2001 and the coming to power ...of ex-Islamist cadres organised under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The contributors analyse this period of radical change, with its continuities and breaks, and its main actor, the AKP, in relation to the creation of a neoliberal hegemony in post-1980 Turkey. They look at the conflictual, turbulent and painful history of neoliberal hegemony and the contested stabilisation strategy of the AKP government. Turkey Reframed is a cutting-edge guide for students, scholars and other interested readers who want to understand this period in Turkey’s recent history and its social tensions.
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies ...have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük’s European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfare in the global south. As such, this book is an ambitious analytical and empirical contribution to understanding the causes of a sweeping shift in the nature of state welfare provision in Turkey during the recent decades—part of a global trend that extends far beyond Turkey. Most scholarship about Turkey and similar countries has explained this shift toward poor relief as a response to demographic and structural changes including aging populations, the decline in the economic weight of industry, and the informalization of labor, while ignoring the effect of grassroots politics. In order to overcome these theoretical shortages in the literature, the book revisits concepts of political containment and political mobilization from the earlier literature on the mid-twentieth-century welfare state development and incorporates the effects of grassroots politics in order to understand the recent welfare system shift as it materialized in Turkey, where a new matrix of political dynamics has produced new large-scale social assistance programs.
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