This article deals with the trajectories of the headscarf issue in contemporary Turkey from the gender politics angle by exploring its counter-hegemonic potential in a historical perspective. In the spring of 2007, the process to elect the president in the parliament was blocked by the opposition party RPP (Republican People's Party) mobilizing the opposition of the secular masses in large street demonstrations. Only after the 22 June 2007 early elections where the JDP (Justice and Development Party) came to power with 47 per cent of the votes and 62 per cent of the seats in the parliament, was Mr. Gu¨l elected by the majority as the president, regardless of his wife's headscarf. The contemporary political scene in Turkey is shaped by the discussions regarding to whether the JDP should be banned from the political scene due to its anti-laic practices such as attempting the ending of the headscarf ban in universities through legislative changes to the constitution. A court appeal was accepted by the constitutional court and the case will be pursued in the coming months. Earlier in spring 2007, when the next President of the Republic of Turkey was to be elected, the then prime minister, Mr. Erdo gan, again encountered strong opposition to his own candidacy and that of Mr. Gu¨l, the minister of foreign affairs at the time. The opposition was clearly due to the fact that both of their wives were notorious for wearing headscarves. The question of whether Mrs. Erdo gan, the prime minister's wife, or Mrs. Gu¨l, the minister of foreign affairs' wife, are fit be the first lady of the Turkish Republic has received immense discussion in the political arena. They both wear the headscarf regularly and this seems to be the signifier of their religiosity and their husbands' lack of commitment to secularism. Their prospective existence in the presidential palace (Ç ankaya) was perceived as problematic for contemporary secular Turkish politics. Certainly, it is not only the headscarves that made the possible candidacy of Mr. Erdo gan or Mr. Gu¨l for the presidency open to intense discussion in Turkey, however this is the most critical point over which their candidacy has been contested by secularist elites in Turkey. Whether there can be a first lady with a headscarf in the presidential palace has been a significant component of the current discussion regarding the presidency. This discussion has brought Mrs. Erdo gan and Mrs. Gu¨l, who have otherwise been non-political figures, to the forefront of politics. This article deals with the impact of the rising opposition in and out of the parliament shaped around the headscarf issue by dwelling upon the prospects of gender and politics paradoxes in contemporary

In this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function of vakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses made vakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s, vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s, vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformed vakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—the vakıf. I refer to this process as the “local production of development,” a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

The study of civil society in the Middle East has generally been divided between culturalist and institutionalist explanations. First, often seeking to provide an answer to the question of why a "democracy deficit" 2 exists in the region, scholars have argued that Islamic religious beliefs, legal systems and institutional structures have prevented

By drawing from authors’ fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey, this article critically examines perceptions of project-think among civic organizations in the Middle East. As a managerial rationality, project-think has four key components: (a) a prioritization of discrete needs and discrete groups, (b) an orientation toward funding, (c) a focus on short-term and measurable results, and (d) the positioning of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as career ladders. Through unpacking these four components, we find that project-think is perceived to contribute to the fragmentation of civil society by fracturing social issues, dividing the NGO sector, isolating organizational energy, and complicating relations between groups. Simultaneously, we demonstrate that, civic actors use various strategies to circumvent the perceived impacts of fragmentation. By mapping these intertwined meanings and experiences of fragmentation and defragmentation, this study contributes to debates concerning the political effects of managerialism among civil society in the Global South.

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