The gradual implementation of new pedagogical methods in Ottoman schools during the second half of the nineteenth century brought about significant changes in the organization of teaching time. The first part of this paper focuses on some of these changes and demonstrates that the adoption of time-tabled instruction facilitated increased levels of surveillance and centralization, and a more efficient pedagogical process. The same temporal constructs also served as an implicit curriculum, imbuing students with a keen time consciousness. The effect of the structure, I maintain in the second part of the article, was reinforced by time-related educational contents. Late Ottoman textbooks attached moral value to regularity, punctuality and efficiency and weaved such traits, now praised as virtues, into the ideological agendas of both the Hamidian and the Young Turk regimes. Thus, through the mutual reinforcing effect of form and content, the Ottoman education system contributed to the formation of new elites that identified temporal order with ideas of progress and patriotism, as well as authoritarianism. Similar time-related material was taught to female students in an attempt to mobilize them for the Ottoman project of modernization, while constantly reminding them of the limited roles they could actually play in that project.

The privatization of security services, which implies the dispersal of the legitimate right to use force, has been traditionally understood as operating at the expense of state sovereignty. The increasing privatization of security services around the world and the substantial growth of the private security sector in Turkey create the need to reassess the nature of this privatization. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and other scholars of governmentality, as well as our own field research, we try to make such an assessment, without falling back on the traditional state-market (state-society) duality. Research shows that the Turkish private security sector, reported as being tied to both the exigencies of the state and the rules of the market, has an amorphic nature marked by intricate relationships, formal and informal, with public law enforcement agencies. We argue that the sector's privatization, although defended by some as a way to grant accountability and transparency to security services, is neither a remedy for those gaps, nor does it imply a straightforward decline of the state; rather, it is proof that the idea of an autonomous, unitary “state” should be revised and a sign that a different and intricate network of state apparatus and private experts continue to govern our lives in ways unique to neoliberalism.

The years between 1968 and 1971 in Turkey were unprecedented in terms of rising social protests instigated by students, workers, peasants, teachers and white-collar workers. However, these social movements have received very limited scholarly attention, and the existing literature is marred by many flaws. The scarce literature has mainly provided an economic determinist framework for understanding the massive mobilizations of the period, by stressing the worsening economic conditions of the masses. However, these explanations cannot be verified by data. This article tries to provide an alternative, mainly political explanation for the protest cycle of 1968-71, relying on the “political process” model of social movement studies. It suggests that the change in the power balance of organized groups in politics, which was spearheaded by a prolonged elite conflict between the Kemalist bureaucracy and the political elite of the center-right, provided significant opportunities to under-represented groups to organize and raise their voices.

This study focuses on the mindset of a group of post-graduate cadets and academic cadres of the Turkish Military Academy and attempts to reveal, explore, and interpret this mindset regarding the normative structure of security sector reform, as well as the cultural and historical background of the Turkish context. While formal structures can be changed rather rapidly, changes in the underlying interpretive frameworks require more time and have no guarantee of institutionalization. Such changes entail the transformation of prevailing norms, perceptions, conceptions, and patterns of thought that underpin the role(s) of the military. If security sector reform aims to transform military culture and the civilian-military relationships in specific contexts, the traditional military mindset also must undergo a substantial transformation. How can we understand such a transformation? To answer this question, the methodological background of the study derives from linguistic-oriented phenomenology as a means for revealing and interpreting the mindset of post-graduate cadets and military academic cadres. The results of the research indicate that there are three dominant meaning clusters in the mindset of the sampled group, involving the parameters of paternalism, old security understanding, suspicion towards the civilian realm, and an understanding of state-society relationships that mark the pre-security sector reform era. The prevalence of these understandings might pose serious challenges to the internalization of the normative aspects of security sector reform and to the compliance to reforms.

The shift to a market economy is a more complex story than the standard “transition” narrative implies. Shopping tourism is a socio-cultural phenomenon that illuminates the shifting relationship between the state, its citizenry, and the market. Its existence is predetermined by a weak state and incorporation into a global economy. Shopping tourism offers a link between the socialist economy of shortage and the post-socialist informal economy. It has opened a survival niche for the unemployed and constitutes a school of entrepreneurship and consumer practices. The discourses surrounding shopping tourism have reflected anxieties about incorporation, social reordering, and blatant consumerism; recreational tourism mirrors their normalization. The Bulgarian suitcase trade to Turkey also elucidates the interplay between new consumerism and old nationalism and their insertion into the debates about Bulgaria's ideological reorientation. Bulgarian Europeanness in the 1990s was constructed against two principal foils—the socialist past and the Ottoman legacy. Ironically, the stereotypical East was constructed as the stereotypical West in a way in which market and ideological categories intermingle and foreshadow a Bulgarian consumerist “Return to Europe.” To elaborate these arguments, the article draws on an analysis of newspaper ads, statistical data, travel guides, internet travelogues, and interviews.