Changing Turkey in a Changing World

Securing the New Middle East: A Critical Appraisal

Eds. J. Peter Burgess & Costas M. Constantinou

The recent uprisings in the Middle East have highlighted – once again and in dramatic fashion – the confluence of understandings of security, representations of danger, and legitimations of authority, violence and intervention. The political landscape of the Middle East is changing and with it many of the certainties about how things are done or ought to be done in and with the region. Local regimes of power can no longer justify to their national constituencies and international audiences the necessity of states of emergency and autocratic rule. The West confronts the hypocrisies and moral discounts of its own foreign policy objectives and choices, including how its definition of regional security supported the kind of regimes, policies and human rights violations that western states traditionally define themselves against.

Blogging and social networking have bypassed official and centrally organized forms of mass communication and representation and shown the limitations of state propaganda and public diplomacy. Protest movements and the visualization of dissent and violence have necessitated action beyond traditional crisis management processes and brought about unexpected transformations on the ground. Locally ‘elected’ or ‘accepted’ regimes, internationally recognized and often presented as models of stability and progress, are no longer credible and have been locally and internationally criminalized. All these major changes in a sensitive geopolitical region require sustained reflection and critical examination.

Newly voiced experiences of the political trigger new conceptualisations of security and insecurity, and reveal a new calculus of risk and uncertainty, new negotiations of values once imposed as universal, confronting conventional readings of liberalism and modernity, subjectivity, gender, the individual, the self, etc.

Security Dialogue invites theoretically advanced and empirically grounded articles that address these and neighbouring issues from any number of perspectives. Analyses utilizing methodologies of gender, identity, religion, media studies, human geography, economics, political sociology, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics will be particularly welcome.

Potential research questions include:

·     In what ways has the security discourse of the major regional and global powers shifted in the face of the New Middle East?

·     What is the role of diplomatic hermeneutics and UN resolution drafting in reframing what is legally and politically feasible in the New Middle East?

·     To what extent have specific dangers and risks been redefined or amplified to legitimate specific forms of intervention or non-interference?

·     How do the valorisation of violence and aestheticisation of freedom and protest invariably support security action or political inaction?

·     How do masculinized notions of security reveal themselves through micro- and macro-level political processes?

·     Which psycho-social structures emerge through the re-shuffling of discourse of freedom and individuality?

·     To what degree does the liberalisation impulse put into question modernity and post-modernity in terms of their ethical, aesthetical, or gendered premises?

·     How are actors responding to the ‘risks’ and ‘unpredictability’ of social networking and the electronic dissemination of threats and social problems?

Deadline Abstracts: 1 March 2012

In the event of the abstract being accepted, the deadline for submitting a complete, near publishable level, first draft is: 1 June 2012

All abstract submissions to sd@prio.no

All manuscript submissions to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/security-dialogue

Please also consult our notes for authors available at www.prio.no/sd

The Round table on EU Foreign Policy: The View from the Mediterranean

Over the course of the 2011-12 academic year, the European Foreign Policy Unit at the LSE is hosting a series of ten roundtables on ‘EU Foreign Policy after Lisbon’. The series is funded by the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme, and will explore a number of different issues with respect to EU foreign policy, including the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on particular policy areas, the role of parliaments and NGOs in policy-making, and the views of outsiders of the post-Lisbon EU.

Speakers

Professor Atila Eralp (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)

Professor Richard Gillespie (University of Liverpool)

Dr Sharon Pardo (Ben Gurion University)

Date: Thursday, 19 January 2012

Time: 18.30 to 20.00

Venue: New Academic Building, room NAB 2.04

For maps and directions see: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/mapsAndDirections/Home.aspx).

You are warmly invited to attend, and there is no need to register for the event. To enter the New Academic Building, you will need to tell the security personnel that you are attending this roundtable.

For further information on the roundtable series, see http://www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalRelations/centresandunits/EFPU/EUFPafterLisbon.aspx.

Border monuments are often designed to celebrate mobility and interconnectedness. According to the architect Cecil Balmond, “A border offers identity but one that is enriched by neighbours, so that it’s not so much a line of separation as a local set of interconnected values.”

We are seeking short essays (max. 1,500 words) on any European border monument.

Extended Closing date: 1 February 2012

Well-known examples of border monuments include: the Statue of Humanity in Kars,‘The Star of Caledonia’ monument (yet to be built) on the Scottish/English border at Gretna,The Welcome (‘Cradle of History’) Monument on Gibraltar, the Schengen monument to a “borderless Europe”, the ‘Bridge of Europe’ over the Rhine River between Strasbourg (France) & Kehl (Germany), and the museumization of the Berlin Wall (e.g. the Checkpoint Charlie museum).

Entries are invited on these or any other border monuments located in Europe. We are particularly interested in learning why those monuments were built in the first place and how they contribute to the connection between two separate communities.

Extended Closing date: 1 February 2012

Entries to be sent to: ChangingTurkey@gmail.com

The winner will receive “Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory”

Sakip Sabanci International Research Award

Submit your paper for the 2012 Awards, on the theme of Performance of the Turkish Economy during Global Crises.

Prizes
_$20,000 for the first prize,
_$10,000 for the second;
_$5,000 for the third.

Deadline: March 31st, 2012.

All entries must be new and original works, not published previously in any form.
Essays must be approximately 13.000 words, including title, citations, and endnotes. (References should be shown in the form of endnotes.)
An abstract of 500 words embedded to the original essay and a short c.v. of the applicant are required.
Entries must be submitted in English, in the form of an attached Word document to the following address:

http://award.sabanciuniv.edu/submityourentryform

WORKSHOP BY NETWORK TURKEY

“Turkish Studies in Germany II – Employment Opportunities and Perspectives”

Date: 2^nd and 3^rd March 2012

Place: Hamburg University, Asien-Afrika-Institut

Turkey is among the 20 biggest industrial nations and an important partner for Germany in many aspects. Yet scholarly research on contemporary Turkey is lacking in many respects.

Therefore the workshop “Turkish Studies in Germany II – Employment Opportunities and Perspectives” as well as the publication “Young Researchers` Annual Journal of Turkish Studies in Germany” both organized by TürkeiEuropaZentrum and Network Turkey aim at fostering cooperation and research among young researchers working on contemporary Turkey. The interdisciplinary workshop takes place every two years at Hamburg University. Conference language is German. The main focus of the workshop is to foster discussion among the participants organized in the following groups:

·         EU and Foreign Politics,

·         Domestic Politics and Political Parties,

·         Culture, Literature and Media,

·         Migration,

·         Economics,

·         Law,

·         Religion,

·         History of the Republic,

·         Civil Society and Minorities.

An additional discussion group with well-known representatives from academic and political circles will discuss job perspectives of young researchers working on Turkey.

Call for Papers – Publication

The workshop will be accompanied by the publication of the “Young Researchers` Annual Journal of Turkish Studies in Germany”. It aims at showing the variety of Turkish Studies and presenting new, interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. The editors of the publication are renowned representatives concerned with Turkish Studies from a range of disciplines and will select among the sent-in abstracts.

If you have any questions regarding the workshop or the publication please do not hesitate to visit http://www.netzwerk-tuerkei.org/veranstaltungen/language/en/ or to contact us under WorkshopHamburg@hotmail.com.

11th GSA Conference 2012

Globalizing cultures and identities: Sport, lifestyle, heritage

Date: July 5th–7th 2012

Venue: Manchester Metropolitan University

The conference will be held at Manchester Metropolitan University – where the GSA was first established in 2000 – in conjunction with the Department of Sociology.

The association has invited three keynote speakers who have an internationally recognized expertise in fields relating to our main theme. All have agreed to come. These are as follows:

• Professor Richard Giulianotti, The University of Loughborough
• Professor David Inglis, The University of Aberdeen
• Professor Sharon MacDonald, The University of Manchester

We are also organizing panels led by other leading scholars in this area.

We invite scholars, postgraduates and other interested lay-persons to submit abstracts by March 31st 2012 at the latest. We are approaching a publisher with a view to producing at least one reader incorporating the most interesting papers from the conference.

Outline of themes.
Recent research and theory have expanded our understanding of global practices that increasingly shape the way we conduct our lives, construct our identities and affiliations and pursue our hopes and aspirations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fields of leisure and the construction of our everyday personas and lifestyles. Here, innumerable fragments of other people’s cultures flow into our lives through the Internet, films, music, art genres, travel and holidays, health and sport practices, heritage experiences, TV, magazines and newspapers, advertising, branding and consumerism, fashion, foods and gastronomic repertoires – among others. Sometimes they empower individuals to seek other worlds and identities. At others, they generate resources with which to construct our preferred life biographies or alter communities. The possibilities not just for personal but also for social transformation resulting from these experiences are endless. Through globalizing cultures, too, some find ways to break free from their original embeddedness within particular ethnic/national boundaries and form global allegiances and lifestyles for which there is no precedent.
In contrast, the circumstances that engender indifference and/or resistance to globalizing cultures are equally valid as themes. Thus, we also welcome papers that explore the limits to, and possibilities for, developing a global consciousness or varieties of cosmopolitanism as outcomes of global cultural and lifestyle experiences and/or which critique concepts in this field. Although the primary emphasis here is on cultural experiences linked to the construction of leisure and lifestyles, we also welcome papers which explore how exposure to globalizing work, religious or political practices are changing people’s identities.

Possible directions and themes: guidelines

• The migration and /or cross fertilization of sport practices, institutions and celebrities across cultural and national boundaries and their wider socio-cultural impact.
• The diffusion, role and take-up of globalizing health practices and the mechanisms through which this occurs;
• How different kinds of skilled transnational migrants – working in the arts, film, TV, theatre, popular entertainment and music etc – are influenced by and in turn shape the dominant cultural, political and other forms evident in the host society;
• How poor economic migrants, who retain strong ties to their societies and cultures of birth, nevertheless forge multiple identities through engagements with migrants from societies different from their own or with members of the host society via participation in leisure activities and lifestyle activities;
• The borrowing, mixing and/or hybridization of genres, styles or practices across ethnic/national borders in any field of the arts, film, music, literature, theatre, dance etc – and the origins, vehicles and outcomes of such cultural mobilities;
• Becoming or being cosmopolitan through engaging in globalizing leisure or lifestyle practices;
• The significance of the heritage and tourism industries as ways of encountering the cultural other and of exploring and substantiating past and current identities;
• Global or globalizing lifestyles and identities and their possible links to the expression of varying forms of political protest.

Please send your abstracts to Paul Kennedy: p.kennedy[at]mmu.ac.uk by March 31st 2012.

The conference will feature a number of panels which will address the conference themes:

 Cricket and Globalization — feat. Dominic Malcolm, Amit Gupta, Chris Rumford, John Horne, Russell Holden, Tom Fletcher (co-organized by the British Sociological Association)

 Cosmopolitanism — feat. Maria Rovisco, Nick Stevenson, Myria Georgiou

 Special panel convened by the ‘Changing Turkey in a Changing World’

The panel will comprise:  Erkan Saka, Akca Atac, Müge Kınacıoğlu, Chris Rumford (discussant).

The conference webpage is now up-and-running and registration will open shortly.

http://www.globalstudiesassociation.org/11th-gsa-conference-2012/