In this article I am going to compare the relation between immigration and security policies in Turkey and Germany. I will be looking at how the two states, a European and a non-European, and two distinct governments, an Islamic Conservative Democratic one and a National Conservative one, are reacting to immigration to their state-territory at a legislative level. In both ...

We Should Listen to the Master Yoda: Hate Leads to Suffering The construction of “enemy image” is the most salient component within the political scene. Political actors or citizens employ their own perceptions within the politics in order to emphasize the division of “us and them” in particular sentiments. Strong and competent leaders (mostly presidents) respond to these grievances if ...

The last decade of the neoliberal era, with its destructive economic policies created broad and deep social and spatial inequalities. In recent years, people from different cities around the world raised their voices against the neoliberal attack on public spaces that showed itself as state-led privatization and commodification of the daily life. The voices grew into urban social movements, as ...

Competitive authoritarianism is a hybrid form of regime which combines “a democratic access to power” with the “authoritarian exercise of power.”[1] In this sense, the main feature of electoral/competitive authoritarianism is its relation to democratic institutions that are viewed as the principal means of exercising political authority.[2] Democratic institutions can be used to contest for power, but these regimes lack ...

“Cities—including their sub-urban peripheries—have become increasingly important geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy experiments, […] urban development corporations, public-private partnerships […] The overarching goal of such neoliberal urban policy experiments is to mobilize city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.”1 As the above string of ideas by ...

In 2015 election campaign promises, Justice and Development Party (AKP) publicly declared that it would continue to commit its previous social policies, such as universal healthcare, that have been supposedly reduced the poverty to a considerable degree since it first took office in 2002. As a proof of this success, it is asserted that there is no people left under ...

In the context of migration, Internet means ‘death of distance’ and it transforms the traditional understanding of migrant networks and migration processes by adding a new dimension. The below analysis provides an overview on the role of social networking sites, the most popular sites on the Internet, in the context of migration discourse by focusing on; migrant integration, diaspora engagement ...

This article proposes a short overview on the benefits that body movement and sports can offer for contributing to rehabilitation of displaced children. After considering diverse aspects of traumas caused by displacement in children, I will give accounts from experiences of working on body movement with children in different cases, trying to frame general common conclusions from them. This article ...

This analysis basically concentrates on the case of Alevis in Turkey and offers a snapshot of the discrimination towards the community. European Union countries such as Austria, Germany, United Kingdom, which have migrant Alevi population, began to recognize Alevilik as a religious belief and to ensure equality in the public realm. However, the question turned into a vicious circle in ...

Recent studies on the spatial inequalities in the urban sphere in Turkey underscore increasing social injustice arising from urban regeneration projects and strives for participation of local people in the decision-making process of these projects. However, in comparison to extensive and comprehensive power of this new urbanism, ability to resist it looks hardly possible, if not unrealizable. I argue that ...