The post-1980 generation in Turkey (those born after 1980) have abstained from political activism. The statistical figures are telling: Only around four percent of youth are members of political parties (UNDP, 2008:79), only six percent have recently joined lawful demonstrations (World Values Survey, 2007), and only a small minority are activists in the NGOs (UNDP, 2008:80) or new social movements. The Republican and the 1968 generations who perceived themselves as the “guardians of the regime” and as those who were politically mobilized to “save the country” from illegitimate governments respectively, have berated the post-1980 generation for their political apathy (Neyzi, 2001). They argued that the current generation of young people are “apolitical” (Lukuslu, 2005:29), “selfish, and individualistic consumers” lacking a sense of collective responsibility (Neyzi, 2001: 424). “How and to what degree might the state be cultivating political apathy among youth?” is the major question of my research, which will aim to track the sources of disengagement from politics among the post-1980 generation in Turkey. I argue that the Turkish state in the post-1980 period has employed a range of means in order to regulate the domain of youth political activism. These means include direct forms of intervention through laws, rules and policing as well as more indirect forms of governance practiced through cultural and social policies, which have envisioned a particular youth identity. I hypothesize that the state displays a de-mobilizing agency through these interventions and sets both the concrete and symbolic limits for the politically possible among youth. My research objective is then to document how various forms of state activity in post-1980 Turkey should be interpreted as attempts to deter youth political activism. I believe that interpretivist methodology is most suitable for my research. Revealing how the post-1980 Turkish state has aimed to cultivate a politically compliant generation necessitates an immersion into the multiple meanings state elites attribute to the particular state activities targeted towards youth. Among methods of interpretivism, I will make use of discourse analysis. Specifically, I will engage in the discourse analysis of particular laws, which have been adopted in post-1980 Turkey to regulate youth activism, institutional rules and procedures targeted towards governing young peoples' lives, as well as youth-specific cultural and social policies.

Since 1930s, Turkish state instrumentalized building large-dams as a significant way of confirming its power in its frontiers. These dams had been the symbols of modernized Turkish state and they affirmed the capabilities of the state in terms of technological expertise and innovation. In the last five years, by a series of legal reforms, the Turkish state started to give use rights of the rivers to private companies to build small-scale dams for the production of energy. The government legitimized this policy switch to small-scale dams by referring to the sustainable development discourse and the discourse of efficient resource management. Although environmental activists and local residents criticized the large-dam projects, these critiques had not been as vocal as we observe in the case of small-dam projects. Therefore, the kind of resistance that the small-scale dam projects encountered in local areas was surprising for both the government and the companies that undertake these projects, especially when the silence of the public towards the large-dam projects in Turkey is taken into consideration. Taking the emerging public critique of small-dams as a vestige to trace, this paper will try to understand the impact of the private sector-involvement in water-management on the ways rural people experience state and reconfigure their positionality vis-à-vis the state. Considering the fact that the practical impacts of state-led hydropower projects have been as harsh as the current private sector-led hydropower projects, it is significant to better understand the particular conjuncture that rendered such a public critique possible. Relying on ethnographic observation and historical investigation, this paper critically engages with the political-economy literature, which focuses on the social impacts of water privatization. The paper aims to contribute to this literature by bringing an analysis of privatization that accounts for not only material but also subjective impacts of privatization. The paper argues that one significant factor that determines the possibility of a public critique, is how affected public give meaning to inequalities, frictions, dispossessions and externalities caused by development projects. Accordingly, the paper concludes that the absence of the state as a symbol of “public good” and “national pride” is a factor that should be taken into consideration for a better understanding of emerging public critique and resistance regarding the small-scale dams.

In 2000, for the first time in Anatolian history farmers were not the largest working population. It is commonly argued that the decreasing number of farmers in Turkey is a direct result of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which induce distorting effects on countries’ rural dynamics and precipitate exodus of small farmers from land and agricultural production in the post 1980 era. This study intends to analyze the micro world of these macro policies, the SAPs, in Harmanl? village in Karacabey, Bursa. The original contribution is to show ongoing rural transformation in a micro-environment by emphasizing what the SAPs mean on the ground. Surveys and statistical data reduce farmers to production units so many goods and services they generate become invisible from a neoliberal perspective. Therefore, here, the challenge is to tease out the political, social, and economic consequences of the SAPs in a micro-environment with special emphasis on the experiences of farmers who are facing impacts of structural reform one-to-one. For the majority of small farmers, SAPs continuously diminish the level of income and farming on its own becomes unable to provide sufficient livelihood for rural dwellers. This study teases out the process of easing away from a strictly agrarian existence and engaging in multiple activities by examining recent trends in rural employment, occupational shifts, changes in the main income sources, emerging economic activities, and spatial relocation in Harmanl? village. It illustrates how rural inhabitants in the village manage their subsistence and overhaul consumption patterns, gender roles, and environment in order to surmount the vicissitudes of structural reform with reference to the political dimensions of livelihood adaptation and relations with the state. In this study, the attention given to real experiences of rural producers instead of statistics enables us to investigate micro-level impacts of SAPs and what kind of coping strategies derive in Harmanl? village. Besides, a comprehensive analysis on livelihood strategies reminds us that resistance to free-market system begins with the mechanisms used by households to preserve subsistence level and social reproduction. Finally, it is important to note that this study would have been ineffectual without a critical perusal of the rural-urban linkages because these linkages are useful lens for understanding the complexities of rural inhabitants’ livelihoods and their coping strategies which usually include some form of mobility and diversification of income sources and occupations.

In post-1980 period, specifically since mid-1990s, local governance in Turkey has been politically more significant and structurally more complex than before. On the one hand, cities like Istanbul have become nodal points of global economy due to Turkey’s shift from import-substitution industrialization to export-oriented growth. On the other hand, the local government reforms in 1984 and later on in 2004 delegated considerable decision-making powers, resources and responsibilities to local governments. Amidst these structural changes, multiple layers of governance and multiple actors have emerged and partook in the production and application of local governance discourses and practices. This paper focuses on one of the actors of local governance, the municipalities, and their role in interpreting norms of “good governance” and in their application of such norms into municipal policies and practices. The paper is based on the case study of Istanbul. Field research, and in-depth interviews with mayors, municipal councilors and bureaucrats in Istanbul municipalities (both metropolitan and district levels) took place in 2011 and 2012. Qualitative analysis of the field data suggests that municipal authorities in Istanbul consciously and systematically choose to conceptualize and envision the institution of municipality as a firm. The author argues that municipal authorities view “seeing like a firm” as an indispensable requirement in the governance of the metropolis. Accordingly, norms like competitiveness and effectiveness took precedence over norms such as participation and accountability. The author concludes that this hierarchy among norms of governance has serious implications for municipal policies and practices as well as for the democratizing prospects of local governments.

The Turkish economy under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments has been considered by some experts a great success story and a role model for other developing economies. Indeed, according to the IMF data, between 2002 and 2012, the Turkish economy increased its GDP from around $230 billion to over $783 billion with an increase in per-capita GDP from $3,500 to $10,500 in the same period. The economy did not seem to be harmed much by the recent world-wide recession and ongoing economic crisis in Europe, either. Currently, the IMF ranks the Turkish economy the 17th largest in the world and identifies it as one of the fastest growing economies (9.2% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2011) in Europe and among the G-20 economies in the recent years. Behind this seemingly successful story, however, there lies a more complicated picture for the majority of the population, especially for the vulnerable groups, such as women and poor. It is the contention of this paper that the aggregate, macroeconomic data used by the IMF and the World Bank fail to capture the changes in social policy, an area that directly affects the ordinary people’s lives. With this premise in mind, this study examines the AKP’s social policy especially as it applies to particularly women and poor. The paper specifically examines the policies on employment, healthcare, retirement and pension. The study is based on field research in Ankara, Turkey, and utilizes documents, statistics and archives.