To take advantage of a better climate and enjoy the sunshine as one element of a healthier, happier lifestyle, it would seem that retired people from northern and western Europe are settling in increasing numbers along Turkey's Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. This paper reports the findings from a random sample of 504 EU citizens who had settled full‐time, or who had spent a large part of each year, in Turkey. The work focuses on the demographics of the sample, their reasons for settling in Turkey, their perceived problems in adjusting to life in a foreign country, and looks at their relationships with their fellow countrymen and local Turkish communities. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

To fulfill the requirements of European Union membership, Turkey promised to improve policing policies and practices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was hoped that the police would embrace the concept of being “citizens in uniform,” serving the whole community and not merely the privileged few or state interests. However, in early 2021, during the student protest against the controversial appointment of a staunch supporter of the ruling party as the rector of Bogazici University, police adopted a heavy-handed approach responding to the protests, including a widespread abuse of power. Using the “cyber-ethnographic” method and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s 28 years of professional lived experience at the Turkish Police Academy, this essay claims that there has been a move to an authoritarian stage in the politics of the police. The study explores why students are labeled as deviants and terrorists and encounter other forms of discrimination and exclusion. The essay argues that the promise of the police as ‘citizens in uniform’ has been ignored and the police have been reverting to ‘létat c’est moi.’ The responses of the authorities to the student protests have been brutal: categorizing, marginalizing, blaming, criminalizing, and demonizing the students based on their ideological, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities. The article concludes that assaults on academic freedom, on the right of peaceful assembly and LGBTQ rights aim at homogenizing and controlling all areas of Turkey.

This work proposes school safety be considered in terms of the wider perspective of urban safety in general, taking a totalitarian approach and presenting the basic problems and possible solutions inherent within the issue of safeguarding schools. School safety should not merely lie within the boundaries of any one school. School safety must be considered as one aspect of urban safety as a whole. Data presented in this article was collected by the International Strategic Research Organization (ISRO) as part of the four year, 2008-2012, Istanbul Urban Safety Project. The article does not consider threats to safety inside the school and its environs as matters to be dealt with by the police, but rather takes a holistic approach in the context of wider social problems to which the solutions lie in the implementation of comprehensive policies that include the school, the family, the social environment and policing in that order.

There is a direct relationship between urban safety in Istanbul and neoliberal urban planning policies that has led to the creation of a new wealthy class. Such a class has risen from profiteering from land deals and the construction of housing and offices, both of which were politically facilitated. The classification of areas of the city as being at risk from crime and earthquake, together with the legalisation of urban change projects, have resulted in whole sections of the community being declared at risk and moved to other areas with an attendant rise in social exclusion.

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