The Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange (1919-1924) uprooted over two million Greek and Ottoman citizens, signaling the definitive end of empire in the region. Long-standing connections, trade systems and mobility patterns were severed so deeply in fact that Horden and Purcell have described this period, more broadly, as “the end of the Mediterranean” (Corrupting Sea, 474). This sense of twentieth-century fragmentation and disconnect is particularly acute in literary production. In the war’s aftermath, Greek and Turkish literatures effectively turned their backs upon each other; for over four decades no direct translations were made from Turkish to Greek or vice versa. Working within this process of national compartmentalization, my paper will nonetheless attempt to recover a broader map. To do so, I will return to the Greco-Turkish war and population exchange itself as a shared site of textual production: it served as an important milestone in the historical and literary narratives of both nation-states, leading in fact to the proliferation (in both languages) of a new literary genre: the testimonial -- i.e., “first-hand accounts” of survivors. From the 1930s until the end of the Cold War, the testimonials of the Greco-Turkish war and population exchange enjoyed a significant place within both national literary canons, whose aesthetic regimes were deeply invested in traditional realism. Indeed, literary historians in both countries continue to speak of these “eye-witness” testimonials as if they offered readers direct historical access. They are, as one critic remarked, “a valuable document for the world to learn what happened there in Anatolia ... The truth emerges from facts, not from rhetorical flairs.” I will complicate this assessment, using the methodological tools of Book History to recover the problematic textual history of certain key testimonials (from among the work of Stratis Doukas, Ilias Venezis, Halide Edib and Recai Sanay). In addition to examining successive editions and their emendations, I will pause over the multiple hands involved in the production of these texts -- survivors, interviewers, writers, editors, translators and transcribers -- and their role in shaping and reshaping these narratives. They were narratives, I will argue, that were articulated and embellished only over the course of several decades and editions, and through multiple layers of material, social, and ideological mediation. In both Greece and Turkey, the testimonial emerged from within the complex interplay and struggle of multiple authorial agencies, bearing the traces of the larger ideological projects of the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean.

During the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1922) missionary educators of the American Board of Foreign Commissioners (ABCFM) sympathized with Christian Greeks. By the end of the Ataturk era in 1938, however, missionary sympathies lay with the Kemalist regime; indeed, missionaries had become allies of the state in implementing social change. This paper will argue that the conversion of missionaries to Kemalism occurred because many of the Westernizing reforms elided with the missionaries’ sense of cultural superiority and because of their adaptation to changing American perspectives on mission work. In the 1920s, missionaries locked horns with the new republican government over issues such as Bible teaching, Turkish-language instruction, religious holidays, and centralized control over the curriculum. The missionaries’ attempts to countermand government control in some aspects of education transitioned in the 1930s to a more accommodating attitude toward significant Kemalist social reforms aimed at veiling, increased opportunities for women, the introduction of surnames, and educating a workforce for the future. The shift in attitudes of missionaries in the field in Turkey reflected the key debates about the goals and methods of mission work that was taking place in the U.S. in the 1930s. The debate among American mission groups centered on Re-Thinking Missions, a 1932 report on Protestant foreign missions, that advocated shifting from an emphasis on seeking converts through proselytizing toward seeking to spread Christian influence in indigenous societies through active involvement in social change. The American Board was an early adopter of the latter view. Thus, the confluence of Kemalist reforms and the shift toward a secularized social activist model led missionaries in Turkey to embrace the Ataturk revolution. By drawing heavily on personal letters and archival documents from the American Girls School in Bursa, the American Collegiate Institute in Izmir, and the Üsküdar American Academy, as well as correspondence between the mission and its Boston-based Board, and secondary sources on the American debate over mission work, this paper will examine the rationales and processes that led to the conversion of missionaries to Kemalism.

Through data collected during fieldwork in Algeria and Turkey, I study how people understand justice for mass human rights violations. I focus on domestic human rights actors and relatives of victims of enforced disappearances. I examine whether and how the changes that have occurred in international politics - which emphasize individual criminal responsibility of high level government officials - have also impacted actors on the ground most intimately affected by the political context in which these violations have occurred. In semi-authoritarian Algeria, are people thinking of justice in the same way as seen recently in international politics – that is, justice through individual criminal prosecutions of former government and military officials? In semi-democratic Turkey, where domestic trials have occurred since 2009, I propose that elite infighting and legal mobilization can explain the emergence and recent stagnation of prosecutions. I study the mechanisms facilitating their emergence and how have these trials have impacted justice for families of the disappeared. This comparative analysis constitutes one of the first studies of the impact of international justice norms on the Middle East North Africa region. My data collection is based on in-depth interviews with human rights activists, legal professionals and relatives of the disappeared. I compare the findings of these two cases to understand more clearly how individual criminal responsibility emphasized in the international realm is affecting justice at the domestic level, and the accompanying political consequences.

The election of 1950 removed Turkey’s ruling Republican People’s Party (CHP) from power, ending twenty-seven years of single-party rule. This paper aims to understand how members of the CHP—the former ruling elite—made sense of their defeat and adapted themselves to a new set of political conditions; it aims, in short, to capture how “transitions to democracy” take root in a political culture—or do not. Using memoirs, newspapers, and parliamentary debate records, this paper considers events between 1950 and 1954—the “golden years” of the Democrat Party and an electoral nadir for the CHP. In particular, the paper focuses on the 1951 closing of the People’s Houses. These cultural centers tied to the CHP had been instrumental in promoting its ideological agenda during the 1930s and 1940s. The events leading up to their closure, the debates over the authorizing legislation, and the manner in which young CHP members reacted illustrate a number of themes that are useful in understanding this period. The fact that the People’s Houses remained a salient issue in 1951 reflects the CHP’s failure to fully establish democratic institutions and norms prior by the time of the 1950 election. On the other hand, the failure to resolve the issue in an equittable manner that stopped short of closing the People’s Houses stemmed from the ruling Democrat Party’s desire to hobble the CHP. Yet, following the closures, CHP members began to organize in new ways—through local associations, youth leagues, and cultural institutions that brought the party (rather than the state) into closer contact with its constituents. Rather than suggest that this period marks a fundamental turning point where Turkish politics became (or failed to become) democratic, this paper hopes to emphasize that “democratization” is an ongoing, contingent process; a series of endless challenges—sometimes legacies of the past, sometimes utterly new. As scholars of modern Turkey have increasingly argued, the early 1950s were a time when citizens of Turkey began to define a new sense of themselves as “Turks.” Likewise, I want to consider how the former ruling elite—individuals who had long seen themselves as leading the way for the society—came to terms with a nation that was no longer simply following their lead.

This paper is a critical exploration of how religious rhetoric coupled with the presumably populist project of “development” has been utilized to advance neoliberal economic policies in Turkey and India. Grounded in historical narratives of conservative religious ideology and nationalism, the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or Justice and Development Party) in Turkey and BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in India both emerged as reactions to the secular nation-building project championed by post-colonial and post-revolution secular political elites in both nations. These two parties are exemplars of what we refer to as neoliberla religiosity, a broader global movement of political parties (particularly in the Third World context) that use religiosity and social conservatism as a cloak to market neoliberal expansion under the guise of “development.” There are striking parallels in the trajectories of neoliberalism and ascendance of national religious parties in both countries. In both Turkey and India, nation-building elites, led by strong leaders in Ataturk and Nehru respectively, championed populist/socialist and secular-statist policies in an effort to mark a clear break from each country’s immediate past. In India, the immediate past was British colonial rule; in Turkey, the Ottoman Empire ruled by Islamic law. In each polity, the nation-building elite was represented in the founding political parties –Ataturk’s CHP in Turkey, and Nehru’s Indian National Congress Party in India. We trace the formation and rise of the AKP and BJP, analyzing the evolution of religious ideology and discourse within the development of these parties through an initial phase of religious-communal identity politics, to the current phase of neoliberal development coupled with a social conservative agenda. In both Turkey and India, religio-nationalist political movements eventually produce the current governing parties, AKP and BJP respectively, which in turn have become champions of a complex yet unsurprising mix of certain individual rights, implementation of conservative social policies, privatization projects, deregulation or easing of regulatory systems to benefit the private sector, to name a few. In tracing these parallel trajectories, we examine cases from the two countries’ constitutional courts and survey development projects including urban restructuring and environmental projects.