Between 1945 and 1960, the birth of a multi-party democracy and NATO membership radically transformed Turkey's foreign relations and domestic politics. As Turkish politicians, intellectuals and voters rethought their country's relationship with its past and its future to facilitate democratization, a new alliance with the United States was formed. In this book, Nicholas L. Danforth demonstrates how these transformations helped consolidate a consensus on the nature of Turkish modernity that...

Beginning in Inner Asia two thousand years ago, the Turks have migrated and expanded to form today's Turkish Republic, five post-Soviet republics, other societies across Eurasia, and a global diaspora. For the first time in a single, accessible volume, this book traces the Turkic peoples' trajectory from steppe, to empire, to nation-state. Cultural, economic, social, and political history unite in these pages to illuminate the projection of Turkic identity across space and time and the pro...

In Forgotten Voices, Ali Abdullatif Ahmida employs archival research, oral interviews and comparative analysis to rethink the history of colonial and nationalist categories and analyses of modern Libya.

"The Origins of Alliances offers a different way of thinking about our security and thus about our diplomacy. It ought to be read by anyone with a serious interest in understanding why our foreign policy is so often self-defeating."―New RepublicHow are alliances made? In this book, Stephen M. Walt makes a significant contribution to this topic, surveying theories of the origins of international alliances and identifying the most important causes of ...

**A stunning exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach but may hold the key to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century“Engaging . . . Even those who resist Kaplan’s tragic sensibility have much to learn from his look at the emerging Middle East and its recent history.”—National ReviewFINALIST FOR THE OVERSEAS PRESS CLUB’S CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD**The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kapl...

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) is infamous for its violence. The struggle it has waged for Kurdish independence in southeastern Turkey has cost in excess of 40,000 lives since 1984. A less-known fact, however, is that the PKK now embraces a non-violent end to the conflict, with its leader Abdullah Öcalan having ordered a ceasefire and engaging in a negotiated peace with the Ankara government. Whether these tentative attempts at peacemaking mean an end to the bloodshed remains to be see...

This hugely successful, ground-breaking book is the first introductory textbook on the Modern Middle East to foreground the urban, rural, cultural and gender histories of the region over its political and economic history. Distancing himself from more traditional modernising approaches, Ilan Pappé is concerned with the ideological question of whom we investigate in the past rather than how we investigate the past. Pappé begins his narrative at the end of the First World War with the Ottoma...

This text is an attempt to study Turkey's national and secular identity in light of the challenges posed by Kurdish nationalism and political Islam.

How does a people move from tribal and religiously based understandings of society to a concept of the modern nation-state? This book examines the complex and pivotal case of Turkey. Tracing the shifting valences of vatan (Arabic for “birthplace” or “homeland”) from the Ottoman period—when it signified a certain territorial integrity and imperial ideology—through its acquisition of religious undertones and its evolution alongside the concept of millet (nation), Behlül Özkan e...

Colonial Effects analyzes the creation and definition of modern Jordanian identity. Massad studies two key institutions-- the law and the military--and uses them to create an original and precise analysis of the development of Jordanian national identity in the postcolonial period.Joseph A. Massad engages recent scholarly debates on nationalism and richly fulfills the analytical promise of Michel Foucault's insight that modern institutions and their power to have productive, not me...

Becoming Turkish deepens our understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post—Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Yilmaz asks how the reforms were mediated on the ground and how ordinary citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. She traces the experiences of the subaltern as well as the experiences of the elites and the mediators in the overall narrative...