Kerem Öktem
Biographic Data
| ID | 339001 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kerem Öktem |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kerem |
| FAMILY NAME | Öktem |
| SIGNATURE | ÖKTEM K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8372-1772 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The autocratization of memory: Spectacle, contestation, and convergence in Turkey’s centennial exhibitions
This article investigates how autocratizing regimes instrumentalize the cultural domain to manufacture consent, assert societal dominance, and socialize oppositional actors into authoritarian logics. In contexts of competitive authoritarianism, memory politics becomes central not only to the incumbent’s efforts to legitimize power and construct hegemonic narratives of citizenship, identity, and history, but also to the opposition’s attempts to pr…
Limits of autocratisation: Actors and Institutions of Democratic Resistance and Opposition
As autocratisation gains global momentum, research on democratic resistance has expanded significantly. This introductory article to Limits of Autocratisation examines the actors, institutions, and practices that challenge, resist, or inadvertently enable autocratisation. It develops a framework for understanding opposition(s) across political, civic, and transnational dimensions. Rather than viewing autocratisation as linear, we conceptualise it…
The Elections that Unmade Turkey’s Democracy
Elections under authoritarian regimes rarely deliver democratic outcomes. Still, most observers and pollsters expected Turkey’s May 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections to be different. A deepening economic crisis, a botched rescue effort after a devastating earthquake, and discontent with a ruling party in power for more than two decades seemed to fuel the rise of a united opposition. But the return to democracy did not happen, and this…
Turkey’s Queer Times
Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual…
Dilemmas of Subnational Democracy under Authoritarianism: Istanbul's Metropolitan Municipality
CAN SUBNATIONAL DEMOCRACY SURVIVE OR EVEN FLOURISH UNDER THE conditions of an autocratic national government? This is the key challenge confronting the opposition mayors voted into office in Turkey's local elections of June 2019. It is also the central question of this paper, which examines the case of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, IBB). The IBB was won in 2019 by a broad coalition of parties centered aro…
Introduction - A State of Diasporas: The Transnationalisation of Turkey and its Communities Abroad
This special collection aims to investigate Turkey's state diaspora policies and the so-called new wave of migration from Turkey-new in as much as it partly consists of what were previously considered the privileged secular middle classes of western Turkey--in the context of autocratization particularly since the Gezi protests in June 2013 and the military coup attempt of 15 July 2016. We are particularly interested in the movement of these new m…
Exit from Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond
Turkey: Descent into dictatorship
Die Türkei im Spannungsfeld von Kollektivismus und Diversität
Die Türkei im Spannungsfeld von Kollektivismus und Diversität: Junge Perspektiven der Türkeiforschung in Deutschland
Exit from democracy: Illiberal governance in Turkey and beyond
Democratic government is facing unprecedented challenges at a global scale. Yet, Turkey's descent into conflict, crisis and autocracy is exceptional. Only a few years ago, the country was praised as a successful Muslim-majority democracy and a promising example of sustainable growth. In Turkey’s Exit from Democracy, the contributors argue that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party government have now effectively aba…
Existential insecurity and the making of a weak authoritarian regime in Turkey
This paper seeks to explain Turkey’s rapid de-democratization from the conceptual perspective of existential insecurity, which accounts for the unwillingness of incumbents to share or relinquish power. The Kemalist era, the multi-party period and the early AKP era have all shown elements of the radicalizing effects of political insecurity and the weak institutions which stem from them. The concurrence of a revisionist Islamist project and geopoli…
An Islamist Power Grab Derails Democracy in Turkey
[W]hat sort of country is going to emerge from this revolutionary reshaping of society
The rise and fall of Turkey's soft power discourse: Discourse in foreign policy under Davutoğlu and Erdoğan
Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Tur…
The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher
Journal Article The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher Get access The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010; pp. 358. £17.99). Kerem Öktem Kerem Öktem 1St Antony’s College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume…
Armenians, Turks and Kurds beyond denial: An introduction
First paragraph: Where are we beyond denial? This was the key question of a workshop that we organized at the University of Lancaster in March 2012. The question seemed as appropriate at the time as it is now. After almost a century of a Turkish nation-building project rooted in the denial of the mass violence perpetrated in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and an Armenian diaspora caught in another project of national boundary-making, the s…
Subversive friendships: Turkish and Armenian encounters in transnational space
Kasbarian and Öktem explore the extent to which ‘political friendships’ between Armenians, Turks and Kurds—members of communities antagonized by the traumatic experience of genocide—can subvert hegemonic power arrangements of denial and nationalist mobilization. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a group of Armenians and Turks in London, their paper explores how the members of this group experienced a transformation of …
Global Diyanet and Multiple Networks: Turkey’s New Presence in the Balkans
Turkey’s relations with the Muslim communities of Southeast Europe have changed significantly since the early 2000s, when Turkish actors largely replaced Wahhabi and Salafi missionaries. This paper discusses four domains of the new Turkish presence: The intellectual and political networks in the Balkans around Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu; non-conventional foreign policy actors of the Turkish state such as the Turkish Development Agency (TIKA…
Between emigration, de-Islamization and the nation-state: Muslim communities in the Balkans today
Based on interviews and a series of fieldwork visits to Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey, this paper provides a synopsis of the main Muslim communities in Southeast Europe, their ethno-linguistic differentiation and their community organisations. It argues that in the last decade, an often-exaggerated concern with Islamist terrorism in the region has obfuscated the much more important processes of de-Islamization and emigra…
The state and the subaltern. Modernization, society and state in Turkey and Iran
The Ambivalent Sea: Regionalizing the Mediterranean Differently
The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe
‘The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe’ seeks to contextualise the case studies on Islamist media responses to natural disasters, as they are examined by Ergul et al. in their study ‘The Wrath of Allah’. The authors expose significant differences in reaction to natural disasters between the Islamist and secular press in Turkey, and show that journalists and columnists in the Islamist press often employ deistic …
The Nation's Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey
This paper discusses demographic engineering and the renaming of places as closely interrelated policies of nationalising states seeking to increase their hold over contested territories. Such policies comprise destructive –deportation, ethnic cleansing, population exchange– as well as constructive aspects, such as the establishment of national institutions, and the creation of narratives, foundational myths and toponymes. It argues that emerging…
(Trans)Nationalism in Southeast Europe: Constructing, Transcending and Reinforcing Borders
This article serves as a brief introduction to a special focus section in this issue dedicated to transnationalism in Southeast Europe. In this focus section, identities transcending borders or resulting from migration experiences are explored against the background of nationalism, and what is frequently presented as its antidote, transnationalism in the Balkans, Cyprus and Turkey
Faces of the city: Poetic, mediagenic and traumatic images of a multi-cultural city in Southeast Turkey
Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic ‘other: Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
This paper aims to develop a model for the ethno‐nationalist incorporation of the space and time – that is of the geography and history – of ethnies considered as ‘others’ by the ethno‐nationalist core of an emerging nation‐state. It contends that one of the reasons for the recurring power and emotive force of nationalist discourse and practice stems from the disjunction between the complex history of a locality – exemplified in its material cult…
Turkey’s Queer Times
Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual…
The Nation's Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey
This paper discusses demographic engineering and the renaming of places as closely interrelated policies of nationalising states seeking to increase their hold over contested territories. Such policies comprise destructive –deportation, ethnic cleansing, population exchange– as well as constructive aspects, such as the establishment of national institutions, and the creation of narratives, foundational myths and toponymes. It argues that emerging…
Global Diyanet and Multiple Networks: Turkey’s New Presence in the Balkans
Turkey’s relations with the Muslim communities of Southeast Europe have changed significantly since the early 2000s, when Turkish actors largely replaced Wahhabi and Salafi missionaries. This paper discusses four domains of the new Turkish presence: The intellectual and political networks in the Balkans around Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu; non-conventional foreign policy actors of the Turkish state such as the Turkish Development Agency (TIKA…
Dilemmas of Subnational Democracy under Authoritarianism: Istanbul's Metropolitan Municipality
CAN SUBNATIONAL DEMOCRACY SURVIVE OR EVEN FLOURISH UNDER THE conditions of an autocratic national government? This is the key challenge confronting the opposition mayors voted into office in Turkey's local elections of June 2019. It is also the central question of this paper, which examines the case of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, IBB). The IBB was won in 2019 by a broad coalition of parties centered aro…
Subversive friendships: Turkish and Armenian encounters in transnational space
Kasbarian and Öktem explore the extent to which ‘political friendships’ between Armenians, Turks and Kurds—members of communities antagonized by the traumatic experience of genocide—can subvert hegemonic power arrangements of denial and nationalist mobilization. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a group of Armenians and Turks in London, their paper explores how the members of this group experienced a transformation of …
The rise and fall of Turkey's soft power discourse: Discourse in foreign policy under Davutoğlu and Erdoğan
Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Tur…
Faces of the city: Poetic, mediagenic and traumatic images of a multi-cultural city in Southeast Turkey
Limits of autocratisation: Actors and Institutions of Democratic Resistance and Opposition
As autocratisation gains global momentum, research on democratic resistance has expanded significantly. This introductory article to Limits of Autocratisation examines the actors, institutions, and practices that challenge, resist, or inadvertently enable autocratisation. It develops a framework for understanding opposition(s) across political, civic, and transnational dimensions. Rather than viewing autocratisation as linear, we conceptualise it…
Introduction - A State of Diasporas: The Transnationalisation of Turkey and its Communities Abroad
This special collection aims to investigate Turkey's state diaspora policies and the so-called new wave of migration from Turkey-new in as much as it partly consists of what were previously considered the privileged secular middle classes of western Turkey--in the context of autocratization particularly since the Gezi protests in June 2013 and the military coup attempt of 15 July 2016. We are particularly interested in the movement of these new m…
Armenians, Turks and Kurds beyond denial: An introduction
First paragraph: Where are we beyond denial? This was the key question of a workshop that we organized at the University of Lancaster in March 2012. The question seemed as appropriate at the time as it is now. After almost a century of a Turkish nation-building project rooted in the denial of the mass violence perpetrated in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and an Armenian diaspora caught in another project of national boundary-making, the s…
When dams are built on shaky grounds. Policy choice and social performance of hydro-project based developments in Turkey
Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic ‘other: Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
This paper aims to develop a model for the ethno‐nationalist incorporation of the space and time – that is of the geography and history – of ethnies considered as ‘others’ by the ethno‐nationalist core of an emerging nation‐state. It contends that one of the reasons for the recurring power and emotive force of nationalist discourse and practice stems from the disjunction between the complex history of a locality – exemplified in its material cult…
Faces of the city: Poetic, mediagenic and traumatic images of a multi-cultural city in Southeast Turkey
British Media Perspectives on Turkey's EU Accession Prospects: Euro-scepticism and Turco-philia
Article British Media Perspectives on Turkey's EU Accession Prospects: Euro-scepticism and Turco-philia was published on April 1, 2005 in the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies (volume 53, issue 4)
(Trans)Nationalism in Southeast Europe: Constructing, Transcending and Reinforcing Borders
This article serves as a brief introduction to a special focus section in this issue dedicated to transnationalism in Southeast Europe. In this focus section, identities transcending borders or resulting from migration experiences are explored against the background of nationalism, and what is frequently presented as its antidote, transnationalism in the Balkans, Cyprus and Turkey
The Nation's Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey
This paper discusses demographic engineering and the renaming of places as closely interrelated policies of nationalising states seeking to increase their hold over contested territories. Such policies comprise destructive –deportation, ethnic cleansing, population exchange– as well as constructive aspects, such as the establishment of national institutions, and the creation of narratives, foundational myths and toponymes. It argues that emerging…
The state and the subaltern. Modernization, society and state in Turkey and Iran
The Ambivalent Sea: Regionalizing the Mediterranean Differently
The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe
‘The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe’ seeks to contextualise the case studies on Islamist media responses to natural disasters, as they are examined by Ergul et al. in their study ‘The Wrath of Allah’. The authors expose significant differences in reaction to natural disasters between the Islamist and secular press in Turkey, and show that journalists and columnists in the Islamist press often employ deistic …
Between emigration, de-Islamization and the nation-state: Muslim communities in the Balkans today
Based on interviews and a series of fieldwork visits to Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey, this paper provides a synopsis of the main Muslim communities in Southeast Europe, their ethno-linguistic differentiation and their community organisations. It argues that in the last decade, an often-exaggerated concern with Islamist terrorism in the region has obfuscated the much more important processes of de-Islamization and emigra…
Global Diyanet and Multiple Networks: Turkey’s New Presence in the Balkans
Turkey’s relations with the Muslim communities of Southeast Europe have changed significantly since the early 2000s, when Turkish actors largely replaced Wahhabi and Salafi missionaries. This paper discusses four domains of the new Turkish presence: The intellectual and political networks in the Balkans around Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu; non-conventional foreign policy actors of the Turkish state such as the Turkish Development Agency (TIKA…
The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher
Journal Article The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher Get access The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, by Erik Jan Zürcher (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010; pp. 358. £17.99). Kerem Öktem Kerem Öktem 1St Antony’s College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume…
Armenians, Turks and Kurds beyond denial: An introduction
First paragraph: Where are we beyond denial? This was the key question of a workshop that we organized at the University of Lancaster in March 2012. The question seemed as appropriate at the time as it is now. After almost a century of a Turkish nation-building project rooted in the denial of the mass violence perpetrated in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and an Armenian diaspora caught in another project of national boundary-making, the s…
Subversive friendships: Turkish and Armenian encounters in transnational space
Kasbarian and Öktem explore the extent to which ‘political friendships’ between Armenians, Turks and Kurds—members of communities antagonized by the traumatic experience of genocide—can subvert hegemonic power arrangements of denial and nationalist mobilization. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a group of Armenians and Turks in London, their paper explores how the members of this group experienced a transformation of …
The rise and fall of Turkey's soft power discourse: Discourse in foreign policy under Davutoğlu and Erdoğan
Since the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP] in 2002, Turkish foreign policy has witnessed significant changes. After the euphoric years of foreign policy pro-activism geared towards the global expansion of Turkey’s influence, domestic and regional developments have raised questions concerning Ankara’s capacity to achieve its ambitious foreign policy goals. Parallel to the “rise and fall” of Tur…
Die Türkei im Spannungsfeld von Kollektivismus und Diversität
Die Türkei im Spannungsfeld von Kollektivismus und Diversität: Junge Perspektiven der Türkeiforschung in Deutschland
Exit from democracy: Illiberal governance in Turkey and beyond
Democratic government is facing unprecedented challenges at a global scale. Yet, Turkey's descent into conflict, crisis and autocracy is exceptional. Only a few years ago, the country was praised as a successful Muslim-majority democracy and a promising example of sustainable growth. In Turkey’s Exit from Democracy, the contributors argue that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party government have now effectively aba…
Existential insecurity and the making of a weak authoritarian regime in Turkey
This paper seeks to explain Turkey’s rapid de-democratization from the conceptual perspective of existential insecurity, which accounts for the unwillingness of incumbents to share or relinquish power. The Kemalist era, the multi-party period and the early AKP era have all shown elements of the radicalizing effects of political insecurity and the weak institutions which stem from them. The concurrence of a revisionist Islamist project and geopoli…
An Islamist Power Grab Derails Democracy in Turkey
[W]hat sort of country is going to emerge from this revolutionary reshaping of society
Turkey: Descent into dictatorship
Exit from Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond
Turkey’s Queer Times
Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual…
Dilemmas of Subnational Democracy under Authoritarianism: Istanbul's Metropolitan Municipality
CAN SUBNATIONAL DEMOCRACY SURVIVE OR EVEN FLOURISH UNDER THE conditions of an autocratic national government? This is the key challenge confronting the opposition mayors voted into office in Turkey's local elections of June 2019. It is also the central question of this paper, which examines the case of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, IBB). The IBB was won in 2019 by a broad coalition of parties centered aro…
Introduction - A State of Diasporas: The Transnationalisation of Turkey and its Communities Abroad
This special collection aims to investigate Turkey's state diaspora policies and the so-called new wave of migration from Turkey-new in as much as it partly consists of what were previously considered the privileged secular middle classes of western Turkey--in the context of autocratization particularly since the Gezi protests in June 2013 and the military coup attempt of 15 July 2016. We are particularly interested in the movement of these new m…
Political science (24 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works)