Conversion of a ‘Country’ into a ‘Fatherland’: The Case of Turkification Examined, 1923–1934

Humbling Turkishness: Undoing the Strategies of Exclusion and Inclusion of Turkish Modernity

“…As several historians, sociologists and theorists of modernity, westernization and nationalism have argued, the Kemalist Turkish nation‐building project and its associated aspirations for modernity and westernization aimed to construct a centralized, secular, and homogenized nation‐state (e.g. Aktar ; Houston ; Yeğen ; Özkırımlı and Spyros ; Zeydanlıoğlu ; Bozarslan ; White , Yeğen , ; Cagaptay ; Yeğen ; Ahıska ; Deringil ; Kahraman ; Yeğen ; Bora ; Soğuk ). Multi‐ethnicity and multi‐religiosity were seen as major threats to this modernization.…”

“…These were carried out via the Settlement Laws of 1926 and 1934, continuing with the Ottoman resettlement programmes. For the Turkish modernization, population engineering and related interventions were presented as necessary acts of “civilizing”, put in place to eradicate disloyal groups and backward tribal attitudes, and to ensure that the separatist threats could be dealt with (Aktar ; Cagaptay ; Dündar ). Such measures not only found justification through official state ideology and actions, but also via the work of one of the leading sociologists of Turkish modernity and Turkishness, Ziya Gökalp, in the early republican period.…”

Shedding an ethnic identity in diaspora: de-Turkification and the transnational discursive struggles of the Kurdish diaspora

“…As has been discussed elsewhere (e.g. Aktar, 2010;Bozarslan, 2007;Cagaptay, 2006;Demir, 2014;Deringil, 2003;Houston, 2009;White, 1999;Yeğen, 2007;Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008), central to Turkification was the creation and incitement of a dominant, dignified and noble Turkish identity and state out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The latter's fall was associated with its heterogeneous ethnic and religious character.…”