selected publications

Turkish Politics and the People: Mass Mobilization and Populism, Edinburgh University Press, 2022

Turkish Politics and the People rethinks populism as a phenomenon rooted in particular ways of visualizing politics and society and as one that, in turn, promotes particular visualizations of political subjects, democracy, and rights. At a more empirical level, it seeks to understand the present moment in Turkish politics by setting it in dialogue with its past. It covers a period of one hundred years of modern Turkish statehood and traces the iterations of “the people” as a political subject as Turkish politics unfolds. It seeks to uncover traditions of interpellation of “the people,” as well as the evolution of structural and cultural aspects of the Turkish political system. And, last but not least, it attempts to make sense of Turkey’s populist turn of the past decade against this background.

From an interview with Jadaliyya’s NEWTON (New Texts Out Now)

In this excellent book, Sofos critically explores the ways the notion of the people, and the allied notions of the national and the plebeian/vernacular have been shaped by the history of the Turkish republic. He elegantly shows us how these very notions have informed ways of envisaging society and politics in Turkey by taking us on a journey through Turkish political history from the end of the Ottoman era to the reign of the AKP. He meticulously elucidates the transformations of the people during one hundred years of republican politics and gauges the ramifications of the populist turn in Turkey’s political trajectories. The book situates Turkey’s experience with populism in broader literatures by showing its unique aspects as well as commonalities with other cases all around the world. No one has shown us the continuities and changes in Turkish populism from this perspective before. – Bahar Baser, Associate Professor in Middle East Politics, Durham University

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Islam in Europe: Civic Networks and Public Spaces, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2013 (with Roza Tsagarousianou)

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and suggesting novel ways of approaching the phenomenon of European Islam and the continent’s Muslim communities, Islam in Europe examines how European Muslims construct notions or identity, agency and belonging, how they negotiate and redefine the notions of religion, tradition, authority and cultural authenticity. In this volume the authors take us beyond analysis of society and politics. Their focus is the complex and tense field of the conceptual: in what ways are Muslims in Europe European Muslims; what do events and related discourses do to affect the formation of European Muslim identities? A valuable pointer to future lines of research.

Jørgen S. Nielsen, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Tarihin Cenderesinde: Türk ve Yunan Milliyetçiliği, Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press 2013 (with U Özkırımlı)

Yunanistan ve Türkiye’deki milliyetçilik tartışmalarını tarih ile harmanlayan, oldukça akıcı bir dille yazılmış, etkileyici bir eser. Daha önce böyle bir karşılaştırmalı çalışma görmediğimi söylemeliyim – özellikle de Yunanca ve Türkçe malzemeleri büyük bir ustalıkla kullanan. Ayrıca birbirini rakip olarak gören iki ulustan aydının dünyada fazla örneği görülmeyen bu işbirliği, sadece bu yönüyle bile son derece cesur bir “müdahaledir”.
Fred Halliday, London School of Economics

Modern Türkiye ve Yunanistan tarihyazımlarına kendine özgülüğü temel alan ve birbirlerini “öteki” olarak kurgulayan milliyetçi bakış açıları hâkimdir. Bu dikkate değer çalışma, her iki ülkedeki milliyetçilik tartışmaları ile daha genel anlamda kuramsal tartışmaları uzman bir bakış açısıyla ele alarak söz konusu milliyetçi bakışı aşmaktadır. Farklı temaları hem Yunanistan, hem Türkiye örneklerinde karşılaştırmalı bir bakış açısıyla değerlendiren bu çalışma, tarihsel anlamda aydınlatıcı bir yaklaşım sunmanın yanı sıra iki ülkenin birbirlerini daha iyi anlamasına da katkıda bulunacaktır.
John Breuilly, London School of Economics

Eser, bir denizin iki kıyısında benzer ayrımcı tahayyüllerle gelişip köklenen iki milliyetçiliğin karşılaştırmalı bir analizini yaparak, karşılaştırmalı çalışmaların ender rastlandığı milliyetçilik literatürüne de önemli bir katkı yapmış oluyor.
Melike Akova, Bahar 2015, Bilge Strateji

Το βάσανο της Ιστορίας: Ο εθνικισμός στην Ελλάδα και στην Τουρκία, Athens: Καστανιώτης 2008 (with U Özkırımlı) [ISBN 9789600347913].

Το βάσανο της Ιστορίας είναι η πρώτη συγκριτική μελέτη του εθνικισμού στην Ελλάδα και στην Τουρκία. Eξετάζοντας τα έργα της λαϊκής και της επιστημονικής ιστοριογραφίας και λογοτεχνίας σχετικά με τον ελληνικό και τον τουρκικό εθνικισμό, αναζητεί τα ίχνη της εμφάνισης και της ανάπτυξης του ελληνικού και του τουρκικού εθνικιστικού οράματος κατά τα τελευταία 200 χρόνια, αμφισβητώντας την επικρατούσα αντίληψη για την αναπόφευκτη ανάδυση του «ελληνικού» και του «τουρκικού» έθνους.

Αναγνωρίζοντας την πολυπλοκότητα της σχέσης μεταξύ των δύο εθνικιστικών σχεδίων, ο Oυμούτ Οζκιριμλί και ο Σπύρος A. Σοφός, ένας Τούρκος και ένας Έλληνας, αναλύουν τις πολιτικές που υιοθετήθηκαν σε σχέση με τη γλώσσα, τη θρησκεία, τη μνήμη και την ιστορία, την εδαφική επικράτεια και το τοπίο, όπως επίσης και τις διαδικασίες ομογενοποίησης, περιθωριοποίησης και «μειονοτικοποίησης» πληθυσμών και πολιτιστικών παραδόσεων, αλλά και τη θεσμική υποστήριξη του ελληνικού και του τουρκικού εθνικισμού. Οι συγγραφείς πραγματεύονται επίσης τη θέση της «καταστατικής βίας» –φυσικής και συμβολικής– στην εθνικιστική φαντασίωση, καθώς και το επακόλουθο συλλογικό τραύμα και την αίσθηση της απώλειας κατά τη διαδικασία θεμελίωσης και εδραίωσης της ελληνικής και της τουρκικής ταυτότητας.

Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey, London: Hurst 2007 and NY: Oxford University Press 2007 (with U Özkirimli) [ISBN 9781850658993].

Tormented by History is the first comparative study of nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Grounded in an extensive critical review of the popular and scholarly historiography and literature on Greek and Turkish nationalisms, it traces the emergence and development of the Greek and Turkish nationalist projects over the past two hundred years, challenging the received wisdom about the inevitability of the rise of a ‘Greek’ and a ‘Turkish’ nation.

Acknowledging the complexity of the relationship between the two nationalisms, Ozkirimli and Sofos, one a Turk, the other a Greek, examine a complex terrain involving the politics of language, religion, memory and history, territory and landscape; processes of homogenization, marginalization and minoritization of populations and cultures as well as institutional support of Greek and Turkish nationalism. They also discuss the place of ‘constitutive violence’ – physical and symbolic – in the nationalist imagination and the ensuing trauma and sense of loss in the process of establishment and consolidation of Greek and Turkish identities.

Introduction: The Nationalist Imagination – Modernity, Enlightenment, Westernization – Between Coexistence and Separation – Searching for Salvation, Discovering the Nation – Culture, Identity, Difference – Dual Heritage or Existential Schizophrenia? – Modernity, Ambivalence and Nostalgia – Past, Memory, History – Amidst Stone Paths and Tumbled Columns – Mythical Past, Elusive Present – Space, Territory, Homeland – The Incomplete Kingdom and the Impossible Empire – Imperial Dystopias, National Realities – Minorities and the Politics of Homogenization – Encountering Difference: Marginalization,
Aporia and Suppression – The Perils of Diversity: Assimilation, Exclusion and Expulsion – Nationalism in Greece and Turkey: The Quest for Hegemony

Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe, London: Routledge 1996 (with B. Jenkins) [ISBN 0415123127]

The resilience of nationalism in contemporary Europe may seem paradoxical at a time when the nation-state is widely seen as being ‘in decline’. The contributors of this book see the resurgence of nationalism as symptomatic of the quest for identity and meaning in the complex modern world. Challenged from above by the supranational imperatives of globalism and from below by the complex pluralism of modern societies, the nation-state, in the absence of alternatives to market consumerism, remains a focus for social identity.

Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe takes a fully interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the ‘national question’. Individual chapters consider the specifics of national identity in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Iberia, Russia, the former Yugoslavla and Poland, while looking also at external forces such as economic globalisation, European supranationalism, and the end of the Cold War.

Setting current issues and conflicts in their broad historical context, the book reaffirms that ‘nations’ are not ‘natural’ phenomena but ‘constructed’ forms of social identity whose future will be determined in the social arena.

The Meanings of the People in Turkish Politics: A Genealogy (U of Copenhagen – 2020)

A critical examination of the uses and constructions of the people in Turkish politics since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, to the present, distinguishes between different modalities of appeals to the “people” and their implications. Appeals to the people (often conflated with the nation as the words halk – people. and millet – nation, have frequently been used interchangeably) have been central in Turkish political discourse both left and right, secular, nationalist and Islamist and have been used both as a pretext for legitimizing curtailments of the democratic process and for the perpetration of human rights abuses on the one hand, and as a means of democratic political mobilization on the other, yet the term people has been used to refer to diverse parts of the population and to denote diverse political values and cultures in time and space. This book explores the ways that “the people” have been interpellated as well as “labelled” since the outbreak of the Turkish War of Liberation and follows the intellectual and political debates around it.