Suchergebnisse

This paper analyzes the creative city policy for Istanbul, which has recently become a popular throughout the world. Cities are expected to be creative milieus that foster free circulation of people, ideas, and interactions for economic growth, global competitiveness, and social development. Drawing on Foucault and governmentality studies, this paper first argues that the creative city policy is a neoliberal political rationality that seeks to stimulate individuals' creative capacities through structuring urban space. Neoliberalism includes the de-governmentalization of state and the active participation of non-state actors in the governing processes. Second, using examples from street gentrification, industrial heritage re-functioning, and co-working spaces in Istanbul, this paper dissects how creativity, freedom, and economic growth intersect in urban space and how a broad coalition of political parties, state agencies, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, small-scale cultural entrepreneurs, and creative professionals have been formed around the creative city. As a result, creative city policy is a form of governmentality that includes official documents as well as spatial strategies of a heterogeneous coalition of state and non-state actors.

When British travelers visited Kurdish regions in the first half of the twentieth century they recorded their memories and opinions on Kurdish society, especially the position of women. This article analyses the text the British travelers produced to understand whether they were written from an orientalist perspective. The freedom of Kurdish women impressed the British travellers and officers, and in particular they differentiated between Kurdish women and other Muslim societies. They admired the high status of Kurdish women in society regardless of class, in both rural and urban communities. That freedom was reflected in their clothing, lack of face coverings and confident treatment of foreigners. Women participated in politics, became leaders of their communities, and educated themselves, leading British travelers to make comparisons between Kurdish and European women. This article challenges the idea that British travelers considered Kurdish women solely from an orientalist perspective. While orientalism determined many of their views on Kurdish society, British views of Kurdish women were informed by comparison with Europeans.

The term co-radicalization refers to intergroup hostilities leading to conflicts through cycles of reciprocal threat. This article explores the concept of co-radicalization in violent and non-violent terms and its potential application particularly in Turkey and broadly in the Middle East, a region characterized by ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, as well as socio-economic disparities. Drawing from the social fragmentations recently observed in Turkey, where scientific research on radicalism and co-radicalization is insufficient, the article offers several subjects of scrutiny, including (1) socio-economic co-radicalization between the native and migrant people in the fringes of the urban spaces, (2) the religious norm carriership led by the state institutions and the rise of "Deism" and atheism in response, and (3) the variety of non-violent radical expressions feeding each other, from music to satire. We conclude that the study of co-radicalization should be distinguished from the reductionist approaches to the concept, which tend to take terrorism and radicalism synonymously; the social scientific goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics behind societal divisions.