Efe Can Gürcan
Biographic Data
| ID | 173480 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Efe Can Gürcan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Efe Can |
| FAMILY NAME | Gürcan |
| SIGNATURE | GÜRCAN E C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5415-3163 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Türkiye in China’s Wartime Geopolitical Imagination
From Xinjiang to Türkiye
How did İsa Yusuf Alptekin's political activities shape the Uyghur nationalism's development? What do his activism and interactions with Türkiye and other international actors reveal about the (geo)political complexities and international dimensions of Uyghur nationalism? This study examines Alptekin's central yet contested role in shaping twentieth-century Uyghur nationalism, from his early anti-Soviet activism in Xinjiang to his exile in Türkiy…
Reimagining Multipolarity
Against the backdrop of multipolarity regaining relevance amidst the decline of U.S. dominance, this study explores Hugo Chávez’s concept of pluripolarity as a distinctive Latin American contribution to geopolitical thought. Through interpretive conceptual analysis, it identifies four key themes in Chávez’s works: a radical re-imaginary of multipolarity, structural conditions of pluripolarity linked to the crises of capitalism, normative principl…
Revisiting Kemal Kaya in the Turmoil of 1930s Xinjiang
Kemal Kaya is an Ottoman-born Turkish nationalist who played a contested role in the tumultuous Xinjiang region during the 1930s. Despite his involvement, the literature on Uyghur nationalism and Xinjiang during this period has yet to address his role in any meaningful depth. Conducting an atheoretical idiographic case study and content analysis, this study seeks to bridge this significant gap through the following questions: How did Türkiye and …
Multipolarity in theory
Multipolarity has become a defining feature of international politics since the 2000s, yet scholarship remains fragmented with limited cross-perspective dialogue. This study offers an interpretive conceptual analysis that maps and connects key debates, advancing an integrated understanding of multipolarity. We iteratively identify three analytical orientations: integrationist, stressing interdependence and systemic cohesion amid shifting power ba…
Atatürk in Republican China
Atatürk’s influence on Asian liberation movements is well known, yet his reception in China is underexplored. How did Chinese intellectuals and the public engage with Atatürk’s example, and how did these perceptions intersect with China’s struggles for independence and reform? This study offers the first systematic, theme-driven content analysis of Chinese press coverage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish Revolution, showing how Shenbao (申报…
Echoes of a Revolution
This study analyzes Chinese press perceptions of the Turkish National Struggle (1919–23) and Atatürk's subsequent reforms until his death. Based on extensive analysis of Chinese newspapers and journals from 1923–39, it focuses on the 1930s, a period of intense national crisis in China that saw a surge in interest in Türkiye's successful anti-imperialist and modernization efforts. The research highlights the influence of Atatürk's leadership and r…
Philosophical and practical dimensions of Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis
Purpose This article employs interpretive conceptual analysis to provide a coherent research philosophy and practical insights for conjunctural analysis as a Marxist alternative to traditional case study methods. How can Gramsci’s writings inform our understanding of research philosophy? How does this philosophy shape his own method as applied to the case of the French Revolution? Design/methodology/approach Gramsci’s methodology is based on a dy…
Rethinking “World Wars” Through a World-Systems Lens
What are the key characteristics of the current instabilities of the capitalist world-system, and how does it compare to previous periods that led to world wars? What factors are driving the similarities and differences between the present systemic chaos and earlier transitions in the world-system? What potential trajectories might the unfolding period of systemic instabilities take, and what balance of forces could emerge as dominant in shaping …
Socialist China’s Ecological Civilization
International terrorism in the world-system
Turkish Cultural Diplomacy Toward China’s Turkic Communities (1933–1949)
Neoliberalism and the Global Migrant Crisis
What is the nexus between capitalism, agroecological change, and geopolitical conflicts, and how has it historically affected global migratory movements? In answering this question, the present article employs the method of incorporated comparison and world-ecology theory based on the cases of Latin America, specifically Mexico, Venezuela, and Central American countries, and the Broader Middle East, with a particular emphasis on Syria and Afghani…
Articulating Indigeneity and Class
Sociological Imagination
Conceptualizing the Turkish Revolution in the Longue Durée
Through a combination of the methods of theoretical review and historical-narrative analysis, this study seeks to unveil the main catalysts of the Turkish Revolution by addressing its structural and subjective dynamics in tandem. The literature lacks a theoretically-guided and systematic study of the Turkish Revolution, which marked its centenary in 2023—a significant gap that this paper seeks to fill. The article also contributes to the broader …
Revisiting Prince Abdulkerim's Case Through Declassified Archives
Collective Empowerment in Latin America
This book develops a theory of collective empowerment that looks for change both from the bottom up, in civil society, and from the top down, from state interventions responding to such pressure. Reflecting on the advancement of Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s, the book outlines a path for progressive social action in which bottom-up pressure by social movements can hel…
The economic and institutional dynamics of China’s growing financial influence
What are the economic and institutional dynamics behind China’s growing aspirations to expand its financial influence? Drawing on Susan Strange’s notion of “structural power”, this article examines China’s quest for superiority within the financial realm since the early 2000s. Our findings suggest that China’s financial rise is mainly driven by its efforts at increasing its “international monetary power” and developing its ability to control inte…
Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index
A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distributio…
Social movements and the state in the post-neoliberal era
The purpose of this chapter is to critically engage the Latin American social movements literature regarding two main strands of political practice since the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. These two main strands are the autonomists or the ‘social left’ that has taken form primarily as a complex of NGOs that make up ‘civil society’, and a ‘political left’ fundamentally concerned with electoral politics. The central focus of the chapter is on the ca…
Emerging Forms of Social-Union Organizing Under the New Conditions of Turkish Capitalism
How has Turkey’s working-class movement adapted to the new conditions of capitalism? What alternative forms of struggle have emerged to address precarization under neoliberalism? Providing a bottom-up account of social-union activism based on interviews with union activists, we argue that neoliberal capitalism structurally incapacitates working-class organizing in Turkey through a process of precarization, strongly expressed in the flexibilizatio…
The construction of “post-hegemonic multipolarity” in Eurasia
The 2000s witnessed tectonic changes in the pattern of international relations. Central to these changes is the crisis of global governance and the multipolarization of world politics. Against this backdrop, Eurasian regionalism led by China and Russia is rising as a major force in geopolitical multipolarization. Recent research in international relations attests to growing interest in Eurasian regionalism, with case studies focusing on individua…
The combined and uneven development of working-class capacities in Turkey, 1960–2016
How have Turkey’s working-class capacities been evolving since the 1960s? What have been the peculiarities of Turkey’s import-substitutionalist model and later integration into the neoliberal economic landscape, as they pertain to the transformation of the Turkish working class? Our aim here is two-fold: (i) to contribute to a systematic understanding of the historical development of Turkey’s working class; and (ii) to develop a new conceptual le…
Multipolarization South-South Cooperation and the Rise of Regionalism
The Political Economy of 'Food Security' and Trade
This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like theUnitedNationsFood andAgricultureOrganization, theWorldBank, and theWorldTradeOrganization. We use and refine the food-regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than 'mutual dependency' in food between 'North' and 'South,' as argued byPhilipMcMichael, however, we show that food dependency has b…
Turkey's Gezi Park Demonstrations of 2013
On 31 May 2013, a localized demonstration against the destruction of a public park at the heart of Istanbul (Gezi Park) spiraled into a nationwide anti-government protest cycle of unprecedented for
The neoliberal diet and inequality in the United States
Food security, obesity, and inequality
In reviewing the so-called obesity "epidemic", we critique the individual-focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the r…
Cuban Agriculture and Food Sovereignty
Civil-society-centric and globalist conceptions of food sovereignty neglect the fact that food sovereignty depends not only on the counterhegemonic conquest of civil society but also on (international) political society. A comprehensive analysis of the restructuring of Cuban agriculture shows that food sovereignty policies in Cuba are built on a fourfold strategy emerging out of a state/civil-society partnership at the local, national, and region…
Extractivism, Neoliberalism, and the Environment
The ongoing Syrian conflict has triggered one of the worst humanitarian emergencies and the largest refugee crisis of the post-World War II era. What are the political-ecological factors leading to the emergence and spread of this conflict? To what extent have ecological injustices played a triggering or accelerating role in the Syrian conflict? The main argument of this article is that one of the most important causes of the Syrian tragedy relat…
Political geography of Turkey’s intervention in Syria
Purpose What are the causes and consequences of Turkey’s intervention in Syria? The purpose of this paper is to explore this question by focusing on the time frame from 2011 to 2016, i.e. prior to Turkey’s strategic U-turn from uncompromising enmity toward Russia and Iran. Design/methodology/approach Process tracing is used as the main methodological guideline. Findings Turkey’s intervention in Syria has been driven by a mutually reinforcing inte…
The Nonprofit-Corporate Complex
According to Michał Kalecki, the imperialist system of the Keynesian era rested on a triangular structure that was composed of (a) state-financed military production (i.e., the military-corporate complex, often called the "military-industrial complex"), (b) media propaganda (media-corporate complex), and (c) a putative full-employment/welfare-oriented superstructure (Keynesianism) underpinned by the war machine, serving to justify it. Building on…
A class analytic approach to the Gezi Park events
On 31 May 2013, what began as a localised demonstration against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul escalated into anti-government protests of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey's modern history. The class configuration of the Gezi Park events occupied the forefront of discussions within and outside the Turkish left. Mainstream accounts branded the events as an uprising of 'middle classes' concerned almost exclusively with secularism.…
Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index
A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distributio…
The combined and uneven development of working-class capacities in Turkey, 1960–2016
How have Turkey’s working-class capacities been evolving since the 1960s? What have been the peculiarities of Turkey’s import-substitutionalist model and later integration into the neoliberal economic landscape, as they pertain to the transformation of the Turkish working class? Our aim here is two-fold: (i) to contribute to a systematic understanding of the historical development of Turkey’s working class; and (ii) to develop a new conceptual le…
Hugo Chávez’s unwritten testament
Nato's “Globalized” Atlanticism and the Eurasian Alternative
The Political Economy of 'Food Security' and Trade
This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like theUnitedNationsFood andAgricultureOrganization, theWorldBank, and theWorldTradeOrganization. We use and refine the food-regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than 'mutual dependency' in food between 'North' and 'South,' as argued byPhilipMcMichael, however, we show that food dependency has b…
Turkey's Gezi Park Demonstrations of 2013
On 31 May 2013, a localized demonstration against the destruction of a public park at the heart of Istanbul (Gezi Park) spiraled into a nationwide anti-government protest cycle of unprecedented for
Cuban Agriculture and Food Sovereignty
Civil-society-centric and globalist conceptions of food sovereignty neglect the fact that food sovereignty depends not only on the counterhegemonic conquest of civil society but also on (international) political society. A comprehensive analysis of the restructuring of Cuban agriculture shows that food sovereignty policies in Cuba are built on a fourfold strategy emerging out of a state/civil-society partnership at the local, national, and region…
The Nonprofit-Corporate Complex
According to Michał Kalecki, the imperialist system of the Keynesian era rested on a triangular structure that was composed of (a) state-financed military production (i.e., the military-corporate complex, often called the "military-industrial complex"), (b) media propaganda (media-corporate complex), and (c) a putative full-employment/welfare-oriented superstructure (Keynesianism) underpinned by the war machine, serving to justify it. Building on…
The neoliberal diet and inequality in the United States
A class analytic approach to the Gezi Park events
On 31 May 2013, what began as a localised demonstration against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul escalated into anti-government protests of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey's modern history. The class configuration of the Gezi Park events occupied the forefront of discussions within and outside the Turkish left. Mainstream accounts branded the events as an uprising of 'middle classes' concerned almost exclusively with secularism.…
Political geography of Turkey’s intervention in Syria
Purpose What are the causes and consequences of Turkey’s intervention in Syria? The purpose of this paper is to explore this question by focusing on the time frame from 2011 to 2016, i.e. prior to Turkey’s strategic U-turn from uncompromising enmity toward Russia and Iran. Design/methodology/approach Process tracing is used as the main methodological guideline. Findings Turkey’s intervention in Syria has been driven by a mutually reinforcing inte…
Theorizing Food Sovereignty from a Class-Analytical Lens
Where do the conceptual ambiguities of food sovereignty lie and how can they be overcome? This article identifies a total of five challenges that underlie these ambiguities, namely the challenge of determining how food sovereignty as a research framework can address the tensions between: (a) state-movement relationships, (b) local-national interests, (c) rural-urban conflicts, (d) individual-collective choices and (e) political intermittence-orga…
Food security, obesity, and inequality
In reviewing the so-called obesity "epidemic", we critique the individual-focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the r…
The combined and uneven development of working-class capacities in Turkey, 1960–2016
How have Turkey’s working-class capacities been evolving since the 1960s? What have been the peculiarities of Turkey’s import-substitutionalist model and later integration into the neoliberal economic landscape, as they pertain to the transformation of the Turkish working class? Our aim here is two-fold: (i) to contribute to a systematic understanding of the historical development of Turkey’s working class; and (ii) to develop a new conceptual le…
Multipolarization South-South Cooperation and the Rise of Regionalism
Extractivism, Neoliberalism, and the Environment
The ongoing Syrian conflict has triggered one of the worst humanitarian emergencies and the largest refugee crisis of the post-World War II era. What are the political-ecological factors leading to the emergence and spread of this conflict? To what extent have ecological injustices played a triggering or accelerating role in the Syrian conflict? The main argument of this article is that one of the most important causes of the Syrian tragedy relat…
Social movements and the state in the post-neoliberal era
The purpose of this chapter is to critically engage the Latin American social movements literature regarding two main strands of political practice since the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. These two main strands are the autonomists or the ‘social left’ that has taken form primarily as a complex of NGOs that make up ‘civil society’, and a ‘political left’ fundamentally concerned with electoral politics. The central focus of the chapter is on the ca…
Emerging Forms of Social-Union Organizing Under the New Conditions of Turkish Capitalism
How has Turkey’s working-class movement adapted to the new conditions of capitalism? What alternative forms of struggle have emerged to address precarization under neoliberalism? Providing a bottom-up account of social-union activism based on interviews with union activists, we argue that neoliberal capitalism structurally incapacitates working-class organizing in Turkey through a process of precarization, strongly expressed in the flexibilizatio…
The construction of “post-hegemonic multipolarity” in Eurasia
The 2000s witnessed tectonic changes in the pattern of international relations. Central to these changes is the crisis of global governance and the multipolarization of world politics. Against this backdrop, Eurasian regionalism led by China and Russia is rising as a major force in geopolitical multipolarization. Recent research in international relations attests to growing interest in Eurasian regionalism, with case studies focusing on individua…
The economic and institutional dynamics of China’s growing financial influence
What are the economic and institutional dynamics behind China’s growing aspirations to expand its financial influence? Drawing on Susan Strange’s notion of “structural power”, this article examines China’s quest for superiority within the financial realm since the early 2000s. Our findings suggest that China’s financial rise is mainly driven by its efforts at increasing its “international monetary power” and developing its ability to control inte…
Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index
A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distributio…
Articulating Indigeneity and Class
Sociological Imagination
Conceptualizing the Turkish Revolution in the Longue Durée
Through a combination of the methods of theoretical review and historical-narrative analysis, this study seeks to unveil the main catalysts of the Turkish Revolution by addressing its structural and subjective dynamics in tandem. The literature lacks a theoretically-guided and systematic study of the Turkish Revolution, which marked its centenary in 2023—a significant gap that this paper seeks to fill. The article also contributes to the broader …
Revisiting Prince Abdulkerim's Case Through Declassified Archives
Collective Empowerment in Latin America
This book develops a theory of collective empowerment that looks for change both from the bottom up, in civil society, and from the top down, from state interventions responding to such pressure. Reflecting on the advancement of Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s, the book outlines a path for progressive social action in which bottom-up pressure by social movements can hel…
Philosophical and practical dimensions of Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis
Purpose This article employs interpretive conceptual analysis to provide a coherent research philosophy and practical insights for conjunctural analysis as a Marxist alternative to traditional case study methods. How can Gramsci’s writings inform our understanding of research philosophy? How does this philosophy shape his own method as applied to the case of the French Revolution? Design/methodology/approach Gramsci’s methodology is based on a dy…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Economics (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Geography (9 works) · Development economics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (7 works)