Social classes are fading away. They are fading away as forms of identity with which groups associate themselves; they are fading away as anchors of social movements; and they are fading away as objects of study from social scientists' agenda. This was the shared opinion of one of our Editorial Board meetings in 2009. Not having much power to intervene on the first two accounts, we decided that we still could do something about bringing social class back onto the agenda of social scientists. We could organize a conference and invite scholars to share their work on social classes or to rethink their work through the prism of social class. Hence a conference entitled “Urban Classes and Politics in the Neoliberal Era: Turkey in Comparison” was held in October 2010. The objective was to instigate a scholarly debate on social classes in urban Turkey, in comparison to other regions such as South Asia and Latin America.

This article investigates the contemporary Turkish business environment as shaped by the economic, political and cultural transformations of the past 30 years. The changes in the forms and mechanisms of government intervention in the economy, the spatial relocation of industry, the rise of “Anatolian capital,” and the cleavages within the business community generated by the increasing salience of Islam in society and politics are some of the interrelated themes that will be pursued in the article. To understand the current context and the configurations of interest in the business community it is necessary to have a closer look at the manifestations of politics in business life. Political factors are important at the level of government-business relations where the political authority continues to mobilize a series of legislative and administrative mechanisms for the privileged treatment of those businesspeople with the right political and sectarian affiliations. Politics also enters the business environment through the role played by different business associations. These associations not only represent the interests of different segments of the business community, but they also shape the ways in which economic interests are defined, presented in policy terms and pursued through different strategies. In this context, the article also draws attention to the political cleavages that are manifested at the local level where they are managed and kept under control with different degrees of success.

Some of the literature on neoliberal subjectivity tends to attribute omnipotence and impeccable consistency to neoliberalism. Other recent literature, by contrast, has emphasized how actually existing neoliberal subjectivity combines liberal and non-liberal elements, some of the latter emanating from local culture. However, even this revisionist scholarship holds that the non-liberal elements only lead to a smoother functioning of neoliberalism. A focus on informal workers and small merchants in a squatter district in İstanbul reveals that neoliberal subjectivity harbors contradictory orientations that might actually undermine some aspects of neoliberalism. The mixture of self-reliance, individual responsibility (condensed in an emphasis on hard work and pious patience), and entrepreneurial spirit with extra-market survival techniques, as well as non-liberal orientations toward legal property, land and money, and desire of redistribution (as well as state protection against big capital) all exhibit how marketization is restricted, twisted, and perhaps endangered, even within the process of neoliberalization.

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people's waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.

This article provides an overview of the way in which post-liberalization urban restructuring is determined by middle class imaginations and lifestyles in Kolkata, India. It charts how the conjunction between planning, politics and private investment made middle class hegemony in the new urban politics possible, and how the processes that have been set in motion create new spatializations according to class through exclusions and reformulate citizenship as social relationships are redefined in the language of markets.

This study uncovers the neo-conservative “style of thought” informing the ideology of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP). The AKP's politico-cultural strategy in pursuing Turkey's goal of full membership to the EU is constituted on this ideological ground. Based on critical constructivism, this article argues that the AKP constitutes a domestic-foreign policy nexus of change characterized by a neo-conservative “style of thought” that aims to redefine the identity of Turkey. Along this line of politics, Europe appears as a politico-cultural space, as an ideational structure, enabling and limiting the AKP to act as a political and cultural agent. While the AKP adopts and sublimates the position of the “other” in the ideational structure of Europe, it reconstitutes the identity and interests of Turkey through neo-conservative ideas. Both are mutually reinforcing.

The Ottoman encounter with European colonialism over their African territories during the nineteenth century contributed to a renewed interest in Africa and its inhabitants. This resulted in several official and non-official travels to this continent at the end of which the travelers published their memoirs. This article intends to analyze Ottoman perceptions of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by drawing upon Ottoman travelogues. It concludes that the travelers established paradoxical accounts regarding the implications of European colonialism for Africa and the ethnic taxonomy of the African people. They perceived European colonialism as a civilizing mechanism on the one hand, and treated it as the most significant reason of African “backwardness” on the other. Similarly, while they criticized the European colonial discourse based on the superiority of the white race over others, they established similar ethnic taxonomies establishing hierarchies among African tribes.

The issue of regional connections and cooperation among the rural population in different parts of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century has thus far not received adequate attention. This article presents case-studies of several villages in the sub-district of Gaza, which submitted joint petitions about common concerns to the Grand Vizier in İstanbul. It examines the significance of these petitions and discusses their characteristics, uniqueness, and historical context. It then moves on to discuss other forms of regional cooperation and nuclei of regional identification among the rural population, which in part had previous roots, and explores their repercussions for the development of regional identity alongside more commonly known identities concomitantly held by Palestine's population at the time. The submission of joint petitions to İstanbul, it is argued, was one of the key manifestations of a tendency toward greater regionalism in some regions of Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, an occurrence which was less likely to happen prior to the Tanzimat reforms. While the literature has primarily focused on the activity of the urban educated circles in the process of regionalization, this article presents a unique bottom-up perspective that underscores the everyday experiences, practices and mechanisms of cooperation in a rural region which is rarely investigated.