Turkey’s place in the Middle East petro-geographies: Kurdish contraband oil economies and critical oil studies
FIRAT BOZÇALI
As a country that consumes far more oil than it produces, Turkey is not typically considered a prominent site for research on Middle Eastern petro-geographies—that is, the spaces and actors involved in oil production, circulation, and consumption. Similarly, studies on Turkey often view the Middle East as a separate political geography. This article argues that, regardless of whether it possesses significant oil reserves, Turkey has become a part of Middle Eastern petro-geographies through Kurdish oil smuggling economies. Specifically, I examine the Oil Pipeline on Wheels (OPW), a form of oil smuggling that emerged in the 1990s, connecting Turkey, Iraq, and Kurdish regions, as well as contraband oil refinery technologies that emerged and circulated within the Kurdish petro-geography spanning Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. I argue that Turkey must be understood as a critical site where contraband oil circulation channels and production technologies —designed to circumvent border, trade, and sanction regimes imposed by regional states and international organizations like the UN— are developed and disseminated. I propose contraband oil economies, along with the diverse actors, practices, and technologies they foster, as new analytics for Middle Eastern studies and oil studies. To pursue these analytics, I suggest moving beyond methodological nationalism, challenging the assumption of state categories as given, engaging with the perspectives of actors criminalized by states, conducting ethnographic fieldwork, and building long-term mutual trust relationships with communities in the field. Within this methodological approach, I emphasize the importance of critically reflecting on the researcher’s subjective experience and journey, considering both the positive and negative impacts of this subjectivity on the knowledge produced in the field.
Keywords: Middle Eastern Studies, Oil Studies, contraband oil economies, ethnographic fieldwork, methodological nationalism, researcher subjectivity, critical self-reflection.
Temporary protection, permanent vulnerability: A contribution to debates on the Syrians in Turkey
MEHMET NURİ GÜLTEKİN
It is possible to say that the primary actor of the migration and refugee crisis that the whole world has been experiencing for more than a decade is the Syrians. As part of that phenomenon, Turkey also hosts a population of more than three million Syrians under temporary protection. There is a significant density of the Syrian population in Turkey’s prominent cities and provinces, especially in the regions bordering Syria. Syrians’ demographic patterns, dispersal throughout the country, population growth rates, roles and functions in daily life, and positions in the employment and labor market contain remarkable and meaningful data. Beyond all the dynamics regarding Syrians in Turkey, addressing and discussing the issue under a few main headings will help describe the phenomenon. This article aims to bring to light and discuss some aspects of the Syrian issue in Turkey by starting with facts such as historical migration and movement axes, population, class, work, and labor. At the same time, the study will try to emphasize some points not reflected in the data beyond what official data and statistics tell and contribute to the discussions through them.
Keywords: Syrians, historical routes, class, temporary protection, vulnerability.
Middle East Studies: Background, formation, and uses
ENGİN DENİZ AKARLI
This article outlines the development of the concept of the Middle East from its origins in the early 20th century through its becoming the subject matter of a specific field of area studies. The article insists on the significance of understanding this development with due attention to historical context. The concept acquired strong connotations based on generalizations that developed under specific historical circumstances. Recent critical new approaches and sophisticated studies on the region expose the crudeness of these generalizations. Yet they tend to persist and metastasize when new tensions inflict the region.
The article gives two examples. One is the presentation of Islam as the marker of the Middle East and as a conservative force hostile to Western influence and progress. The other is the representation of Muslims (and the Middle East in general) as being accustomed to autocratic and arbitrary rule and a religious, therefore unreformable, legal tradition. New studies expose the weaknesses of these generalizations because they pay little attention to historical context, the complexity of human relations, and the multi-religious environments in which Islam emerged and prospered.
The establishment of academic programs, centers, and institutions to encourage the generation of export knowledge regarding the societies, states, and cultures of the Middle East made a difference. Works that offered more sensible narratives based on subtler analyses proliferated and challenged old views. Yet, new opportunities for profit and access to scarce resources, the eruption of new incessant tensions, and open confrontations provide a fertile ground for revoking old harsh judgments. Research institutions that serve special interests and specific purposes perpetuate these judgments and tensions rather than helping reconciliation, cooperation, and peace.
Middle Eastern intellectuals and academicians could make a difference. In general, however, they remain submissive, whether directly or indirectly, instead of playing an actively constructive role in building a peaceful environment. In Turkey, some reject any Western action or work as wicked but do little else, inadvertently reinforcing the image of an all-powerful West. Others generally agree with Western criticism and categorically reject historical legacies in the belief that society could be transformed with proper engineering. Still others, however, believe in the possibility of peaceful transformation. Toward that end, they seek ways of establishing a constructive dialog diachronically with the past and synchronically with others in the present. Institutions for the study of the Middle East have been increasing in Turkey as well. Whether they will make any difference depends on their objectives. They could help justify all the negative images regarding the Middle East or help change them positively toward constructing a peaceful environment within the nation, in the region, and the world.
Keywords: Middle East, West, East, research institutions.
The Marginalization of “Armenian Studies” in the fields of Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies: A perspective from a Middle Eastern/Ottoman Scholar
BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN
Armenian studies have been marginalized in Middle Eastern, Turkish, and Ottoman studies for political and ideological reasons for decades. Ignorance and reluctance to understand the field also have contributed to this marginalization. While some scholars view the field as archaic, others consider it solely belonging to Caucasian Studies. With the development of the Ottoman and Turkish studies field, scholars outside and inside Turkey did not want to be associated with Armenian studies, concerned that any such association might endanger their access to the Ottoman archives or be tainted as advocating an “Armenian point of view.” However, in the past two decades, the situation began to change, as a new generation of young scholars, few and primarily based in the West (with a few in Turkey), have embarked on diverse research projects to understand the history and the culture of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab Middle East. Despite representing a small group, these works should be welcomed as an honest approach to understanding the history and contribution of the Armenians to the region that goes beyond the approach of “good Armenian, bad Armenian” that was endemic to Ottoman and Turkish studies during the Cold War period. Although the new trend tends to concentrate on the 19th and early 20th centuries, it should be considered a welcome step. This article will discuss the importance of using Armenian sources not only to reconstruct Armenian history in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the Arab Middle East but also the history of other ethnic groups in the region, which include but are not limited to Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Assyrians, Chaldeans, among other ethno-religious groups. The article will highlight how different Armenian primary sources can contribute to examining different facets of the region’s history.
Keywords: Armenian Studies, Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Turkey.
The journey of Environmental History writing in Turkey
FAISAL H. HUSAIN
Although there are studies examining the current state of environmental history writing in Turkey, a historical investigation of how this field emerged and evolved is lacking. This article aims to address this gap by examining the development of environmental history writing in Turkey and discussing the key events, institutions, and individuals that have influenced this field. By distinguishing environmental history writing from earlier works on Ottoman and Turkish history that touched on environmental themes, this article proposes a four-stage chronology to understand the development of environmental history in Turkey. This chronology examines various publication types, including books, articles, dissertations, and translations, highlighting key turning points in the field’s development and how these were shaped by both local contexts and international events. The study emphasizes the significant role of the Second UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held in Istanbul in 1996, in the initial discovery of environmental history in Turkey, and highlights the contributions of important figures in this field such as Ilhan Tekeli. This article challenges the prevailing assumption that links the birth of Ottoman environmental history to the 2011 publication of books by Alan Mikhail and Sam White, arguing that scholars in Turkey were writing about Ottoman and Turkish environmental history long before 2011 and that Mikhail and White’s books merely popularized a field that was already established in Turkey by 2011. Ultimately, this study provides an important framework for understanding the development and transformation of environmental history writing in Turkey.
Keywords: Environmental history, Turkey, Tarih Vakfı, Ilhan Tekeli.
Academic and social foundations of Middle Eastern Studies in Turkey
MELİHA BENLİ ALTUNIŞIK
The primary aim of this study is to discuss the historical and conceptual development and nature of Middle Eastern Studies from within the discipline of International Relations in Turkey. This debate will naturally focus on the relationship between Middle Eastern Studies and the discipline of International Relations from an area studies perspective, and therefore, in a sense, will also discuss the opportunities and limitations of the discipline of International Relations in Turkey. In doing so, an autobiographical narrative is also utilized. Thus, it will discuss what it means to develop Middle Eastern regional expertise in Turkey and to do so in relation to a discipline, and analyze its academic implications. On the other hand, by contextualizing Middle Eastern Studies in Turkey, this study will trace the effects of Turkey’s Middle East policy and its view of the Middle East on academic studies. Turkish political elites’ images of the Middle East, how these images have changed and their impacts on the policies will be discussed. It will be shown that even though they are based on different perspectives, these images are generally shaped by an essentialist perspective. In conclusion, this study aims to rethink the academic and social story of Middle Eastern Studies in Turkey and concludes with the questions of what issues are expected to be at the forefront of the field from now on and what openings are possible. Finally, it ends with a projection regarding the future of the field in general.
Keywords: Turkey, Middle Eastern Studies, International Relations.
Revivalist, loud, dissonant: The transmission of radical Islamism to Turkey and its effects with a focus on the Muslim Brotherhood
İSMAİL KARA
The 1960s and 1970s were two decades during which Turkey was confronted with layered and partly stimulated or conjunctural waves of translations, and when the new generations were seriously affected by them. On the left, the nationalist and Islamist wings, these were waves of influential translations that were ideologically “opposed” but linguistically and stylistically “close” to one another. It can be said that these translations —without assigning values for the time being— were refreshing, loud, discordant, nourishing, confidence-building and oppositional all at the same time. The new radical Islamist thought and discourse with religious, political, cultural and social demands emerged in Egypt and Pakistan through the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami in post-World War II conditions, at a time when the construction of the expansionist Zionist state of Israel in the middle of the Middle East was being completed step by step and the Palestinian problem was dragged towards an unsolvable solution. In fact, although the new movements have serious affinities with Islamism and contemporary Islamic thought, which can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century, both in terms of their sources and their methods and issues, this has not been sufficiently recognized. There are many reasons why this thought and style came to Turkey almost twenty years later, in the 1960s. In this article, this process is discussed as a problem of the history of religious political thought and the Muslim Brotherhood in the first place; and in parallel, its actors-carriers, transmission routes, translation policies, interlocutors, influences, forms of influence, national and international intersection points are discussed.
Keywords: Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey, translation.
