Turkish Politics and ‘the People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism (Edinburgh University Press – 2022)

• Charts the transformations of the notion of ‘the people’ from the late Ottoman to current Turkish political discourses
• Explores Turkish political culture and institutional architecture through archival research and a critical rereading of the historiography of the Turkish state and society
• Proposes key conceptual tools to study popular and populist politics and applies them to the Turkish case
• Uses and integrates modes of analysis from a diverse body of scholarship such as sociology, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, political science and political theory into a genealogical narrative
• Turkish Politics and ‘The People’ enhances our understanding of ‘the popular’ in the study of politics through a critical examination of the uses and constructions of ‘the people’ from the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, to the present. It proposes ways of reading the insertion and operationalisation of the notion of ‘the people’ as a concept, a political subject, the object of policy and politics over the past century. It assesses the ways ‘the people’ have been shaped by the history of the republic, and, in turn, have informed ways of visualising society, the country’s political culture, institutional architecture and framed the parameters and repertoires of political action. Drawing on extensive archival research and contributions from historical sociology and social movement research, Spyros A. Sofos enriches the ways of approaching the ‘popular’ by proposing ways of integrating identity, discourse, strategy, organisation and leadership in the articulation of ‘the people’ in political discourse and action.

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. The notion of the “people” has been central in the political discourse of the republic, and even in the late Ottoman era. The new nation-state of Turkey declared that it was a “populist” state, with a strong anti-elitist and emancipatory emphasis and a promise of radical equality in its founding principles. The “people” has adorned the names of some of the key parties and many of the peripheral ones in the history of the republic, including some of the ones that sprang out of the Kurdish national movements. And, finally, the politics of the past twenty years have been described by researchers and the media as “populist”, so much so that Turkey has become for many a textbook case of populist politics. 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 will follow the intellectual and political debates around it as well as the development of relevant policies.

Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks (Palgrave – 2013)

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 (İstanbul Bilgi Yayınları – 2013)

Umut Özkırımlı ile Spyros Sofos’un bu çalışması, Yunanistan ve Türkiye’deki milliyetçilikler üzerine her iki ülkenin resmî tarihyazımını sorgulayan, karşılaştırmalı okuma yapmamıza imkân veren ortak bir kavramsal–kuramsal çerçeve sunuyor.

Kitapta öncelikle her iki ülkenin tarihine ilişkin literatür eleştirel bir gözle incelenirken, milliyetçi projelerin doğuşu ile gelişimi karşılaştırmalı bir analizle ele alınıyor. Ardından Yunan ve Türk milliyetçiliğine özgü mit ve kavramları yorumlayan yazarlar, bu milliyetçiliklerin aralarındaki benzerlikleri ve simbiyotik ilişkileri dikkate alarak, her iki ülkenin milliyetçi tahayyüllerinin kendilerine özgü özelliklerini vurgulayıp, ulus inşa etme süreçleri üzerine değerlendirmelerde bulunuyor.

Eser aralarındaki benzerlikleri ve ilişkileri göz ardı etmeden bu iki milliyetçiliğin ayırt edici ve kendilerine özgü yönlerine vurgu yapıp, birbirlerini “ötekileştiren” tarihî ve siyasî süreçler hakkında ayrıntılı bilgiler sunuyor.

Το Βάσανο της Ιστορίας: Ο Εθνικισμός στην Ελλάδα και στην Τουρκία (Καστανιώτης – 2008)

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 (Oxford University Press – 2008)

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 (Routledge – 1996)

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.