Browsing by Author "Metinsoy, Murat."

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    Everyday politics of ordinary people : public opinion, dissent, and resistance in early Republican Turkey 1925-1939
    (Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, 2010., 2010.) Metinsoy, Murat.; Karaömerlioğlu, M. Asım.
    This study examines the everyday and mostly informal forms of peasant and working class politics during the first two decades of the Turkish Republic by scrutinizing the daily protests and resistance of these groups to the social and economic policies of the single-party state and adverse economic conditions. Furthermore, this study explores the influence of the everyday politics of these groups on the political decision-making process of the state. The Turkish single-party period was by all means an extraordinary era marked by profound changes. Historical scholarship has conventionally focused on high and formal politics, and state policies. Due to the barriers before the formal and organizational participation of peasants and workers in legal politics, both these groups have been regarded to be fully excluded from the policy-making. Accordingly, the single-party state has generally been assumed to be based on solely coercive and rigid polity isolated from society. Scholars have barely touched upon the popular discontent and the daily ways in which ordinary people reacted against the state policies, power holders, and adverse economic conditions, and consequently influenced the state decisions. This dissertation takes on this challenging task and depicts an alternative picture in which the ordinary people participated in politics in everyday life, by uncovering the ordinary people’s dissenting opinions, demanding voices, everyday struggles, diverse patterns of protest and resistance strategies. On the basis of new archival sources giving information about daily contacts between the state and society and of a re-reading “against-the-grain” of conventional sources and theoretically drawing on a broader conception of politics as an everyday struggle over the allocation of scarce economic sources, emphasizing non-institutional and mostly informal patterns of the peasant and working class politics, this study delves into the popular dynamics of the political life during the early Republican era. Addressing wider debates about the relations between the state, society and class by focusing on the everyday and mostly informal contestation and negotiation process between the lower classes and state that compelled the state to modify its decisions, this dissertation suggests to see the relations between the state and ordinary people not as dichotomous, but as an interactive process. In this respect, the findings of this work propose a redefinition of the single-party state as “flexible authoritarian,” exposed and responsive to social inputs.
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    Wars outside the war: social impact of the second World War on Turkey
    (Thesis (M.A.)-Bogazici University. Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, 2004., 2004.) Metinsoy, Murat.; Karaömerlioğlu, M. Asım.
    The social impact of Second World War on Turkey has not attracted the attention of scholars because of the politico-historical approach in Turkish historiography, which holds the state, elites, macro-economic developments. and diplomatic events as its focal point. However, although Turkey did not participate in the war, the people were affected by it profoundly. This thesis describes the effects of the war on the small peasants, working class, poor people, children and women. Because the domain of high politics was stable, the state has been regarded as the main actor of the period and in the developments of the post-war era and the people have been regarded as the passive and silent objects of the socio-economic conditions and the state policies. This thesis shows that the people were not passive objects, that they resisted the state policies and socio-economic conditions created by the war. It is argued that their everyday life experiences and resistance should be taken into account in the interpretation of the post-war liberal-turn and institutionalization of the social policy. As for the state, which was called a strong state, the war revealed its weakness in the face of the problems in the social field and social resistance in everyday life. In a nutshell, this thesis opens to question the orientalist conceptualization of the Turkish people as passive objects and the state as strong.