Turkey Book Talk #206Cihan Dizdaroğlu, associate professor in the political science and international relations department at Baskent University and associate fellow at the Istanbul Policy Institute, on “Turkish-Greek Relations: Foreign Policy in a Securitisation Framework” (Edinburgh University Press).

The book looks at how ties between Athens and Ankara have gone through various cycles of improvement and deterioration from the early era of the Republic of Turkey to today.

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Turkey Book Talk #205Alp Yenen on “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” (Leiden University Press). 

Along with Erik-Jan Zürcher, Alp co-edited the volume, published to mark the centenary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey. It is a rich potpourri of 100 short chapters, written by over 70 scholars, examining different aspects of modern Turkish political, social, cultural and economic history.

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Turkey Book Talk #204Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, assistant professor of history at Florida State University, on “The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege” (Edinburgh University Press).

The book narrates the rise and fall of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire’s east, as well as how their autonomy was removed as the empire modernised and centralised from the 19th century.

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Turkey Book Talk #203Onur İşçi, associate professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, on his article “Turkey at a Crossroads: The Soviet Threat and Postwar Realignment, 1945-1946”, published in the journal Diplomatic History. 

The piece reexamines the years immediately after the Second World War, when Stalin’s Soviet Union made a series of military and territorial demands on Turkey, ultimately pushing Ankara to pursue Nato membership. The conversation also touches on the historic roots of Turkey’s present-day policy towards Moscow, combining cooperation and competition.

Read the article here.

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Check out Onur’s previous appearance on the podcast from March 2020.

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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, links to related content upon publication of each episode, and over 200 book reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.

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Turkey Book Talk #202 – Spyros Sofos, Assistant Professor in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University, on “Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism” (Edinburgh University Press).

The book delves into the nuances and ambiguities of the term “the people” from the late Ottoman era to today, and how religious, secularist, left-wing and right-wing projects have used it for different ends.

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Turkey Book Talk #201 – Pat Yale on “Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell” (Trailblazer).

The book describes Pat’s experiences tracking the footsteps of archaeologist, writer and explorer Gertrude Bell, who travelled extensively throughout Anatolia from 1899 until the outbreak of the First World War.

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Turkey Book Talk #200Anthony Gad Bigio on “A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic” (Hamilton Books). 

The book describes the turbulent and difficult life of Anthony’s grandfather, Gad Franco, a prominent journalist, social activist and lawyer in the late Ottoman and early republican eras. It also charts his gradual disillusionment after advocating Jewish integration into Ottoman and later Turkish society, which culminated in his imprisonment and impoverishment following the 1942 Wealth Tax.

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Turkey Book Talk #199James Meyer, associate professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University, on “Red Star over the Black Sea: Nazım Hikmet and His Generation” (Oxford University Press). 

The book is a new biography of the great 20th century poet Nazım Hikmet (1902-1963). It draws deeply on previously untapped archival sources from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Washington, situating him within a broader generation of border-crossing Turkish communists.

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Read excerpts from Chapter 11 of the book.

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Turkey Book Talk #198 – Şebnem Gümüşcü, associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, on “Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia” (Cambridge University Press).

The book looks in depth at how intra-party factional struggles were key in shaping the AKP’s authoritarian direction in Turkey, while also comparing this with Islamist parties that won elections in Egypt and Tunisia.

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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury (including the book from this episode), transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, links to related content upon publication of each episode, and over 200 book reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.

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Turkey Book Talk #197Constanze Letsch on “Territorial Stigmatisation: Urban Renewal and Displacement in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood” (Transcript).

The book examines a controversial project to demolish and rebuild Istanbul’s historic, troubled Tarlabaşı neighbourhood, the impact it had on locals and what that tells us about today’s Turkey.

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Download the ebook for free via the Transcript website.

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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, links to related content upon publication of each episode, and over 200 book reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.

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Turkey Book Talk #196 – Ci Demi on his photographs of Istanbul, which present an eerie, unflattering image of the city through depopulated landscapes, urban sprawl and surreal juxtapositions.

His latest photobook ”Sehri Fikri” (Notions of a City) was recently published by Onagöre.

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Check out Ci Demi’s work on Instagram.

Listen to the Spotify playlist “Something Is Missing”, created to accompany the “Sehri Fikri” photobook.

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Turkey Book Talk #195 – Political communications strategist Derin Koçer on Turkey’s critical recent presidential and parliamentary elections. 

The conversation addresses how economic woes may actually have helped Erdogan’s campaign, why the main opposition CHP repeatedly fails, whether nationalism is the real winner to emerge from the ballot boxes, and what awaits Turkey in the next five years.

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Read and subscribe to Derin Koçer’s Substack.

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