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In this paper, I discuss how the earthquake risk is exploited by 'disaster capitalism', in order to convert Istanbul to a massive construction site. The shock of the 1999 Marmara Earthquake has been effectively used by the neoliberal market and government as 'a shock therapy' to implement a construction‐led development model for Turkey and to favour the construction sector by introducing new incentives, exceptional rights and interventions, which otherwise might be challenged. The current Turkish government justify the ongoing massive urban transformation and new mass housing projects as an improvement of the housing stock to make residential buildings stronger and more resilient to earthquakes. However, areas actually under earthquake risk do not match the areas that are officially declared under disaster risk by the government. The Disaster Law #6306 that granted the government the absolute right to expropriate land based on the justification of 'protecting residents against earthquakes and other natural disasters' was applied in a selective way to seize valuable land in Istanbul. In the paper I explore how the disaster was quickly converted to an opportunity for economic growth. To do that I introduce stories of three different neighbourhoods in Istanbul, namely Moda, Tozkoparan and Fikirtepe, each of which experience the ongoing massive urban transformation differently based on the land value of the neighbourhoods, class position of the residents, and residents' capacity to organise in order to protect their rights. I describe, how disaster capitalism is lived and experienced differently in these three neighbourhoods. Although the massive construction projects are indifferent to life's sustainability, those projects are justified as interventions in terms of public health and safety through making housing resilient to earthquakes. I critically discuss how in each case biopolitics presents disaster capitalism's massive urban transformation projects as a manifestation of liveliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the right‐wing populist rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) in Turkey, focusing on the crisis of capitalism, emerging discontent in the rural populations, and opportunities for and obstacles to a successful left‐wing populist mobilisation. We put forward three arguments. First, through an examination of the historical evolution, class‐based and social‐demographic foundations of the ruling right‐wing populist alliance between the AKP and the Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP), we argue that the MHP is a more classical case of far‐right populism, whereas the AKP is a "heterodox" case that borrows several elements from the left. These "heterodox" features of the AKP, together with the interlinked crisis of the 1990s, played a significant part in the support the AKP received from the subordinate majority. Second, we argue that the success of the AKP's hegemonic right‐wing populism from 2002 to 2013 was linked to an unusually favourable macro‐political‐economic climate that helped the AKP counterbalance its neoliberal policies with pragmatic social assistance programmes. However, together with the disappearance of this macro‐political‐economic climate in the second decade of its rule (2013‐present), the disastrous consequences of the AKP's neoliberal policies became more explicit, and the AKP's populism moved from a hegemonic to an authoritarian right‐wing populist type. Third, we claim that today, due to the deepening of the current economic crisis (further exacerbated by the Covid19 pandemic), the AKP's cross‐class alliance began to break down, and the rural movements in the Turkish countryside have been playing a major role in unmaking the AKP's hegemony. However, in the absence of a strong left‐wing populist movement with a stronghold in the Turkish countryside, emergent possibilities for a radical progressive transformation are not utilised. Instead, the groundwork is being laid for another wave of right‐wing populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dialectical relationship between secularism and capitalism, where contradictions in this relationship are resolved on the basis of class relations, results in various state‐religion relationships in different social formations. The limitations and particularities of secularism are exaggerated in countries that arrived late at capitalism, such as Turkey. These late‐developers are subject to the dynamics of uneven and combined development. This paper borrows from Marxism, particularly the theory of uneven and combined development, in order to explore the relationship between the consolidation of the modern nation‐state and its secularisation process during the bourgeois revolution of 1923 in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the pessimistic predictions of the classical theories of capitalist development, simple commodity production (SCP) has continued to persist under capitalism. While some, following the classic Marxist-Leninist interpretation, insist that SCP is only a transitional phenomenon and will disappear eventually, others argue that necessary conditions for the reproduction of simple commodity producing families may exist within capitalist formations and as long as these conditions exist, persistence of SCP will not be an anomaly. There are also significant differences between those who argue that SCP can survive under capitalism, in explaining the reasons for its persistence in agriculture. For this reason significant variations occur throughout the world, depending on the way it relates to the dominant capitalist mode of production. This paper will examine the post-World War II transformation in the tobacco sector that led to the consolidation of small ownership and simple commodity production in the Aegean region of Turkey. Within the given historical and commodity context, this paper will examine the natural imperatives of tobacco production, characteristics of family production, the tobacco market and state policies and their roles in the emergence and persistence of SCP in tobacco production in Aegean, Turkey.

In this paper an attempt is made to reassess how and why the laic/Islamic dual opposition has come to be a decisive factor in the politics of Turkish capitalist modernity. The question as to whether this opposition may survive into the twenty-first century is briefly discussed. It is noted that in the aftermath of the prolonged confrontation between the emergent imagined community of the Gezi Revolt and the Islamist AKP government, a religiously neutral political identity came into sight in public life, which can be considered as the harbinger of a new kind of social individuality, one which is incommensurate with the laic/Islamic dual opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative to the modernization, dependency and bourgeois-revolution accounts of the creation of the Turkish Republic. It presents a theoretical framework for a materialist, but non-instrumentalist, analysis of the modem nation-state and the ideology of nationalism, and places the history of transformation from the patrimonial Ottoman Empire into the modem Turkish Republic within that theoretical framework. It argues that this transformation took place incrementally, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a process of Ottoman resistance-and-accommodation to globally expanding capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]