Istanbul ― Living With Difference in a Global City

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows. 

Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.

NORA FISHER-ONAR is an assistant professor of global politics at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina; research associate of the Centre for International Studies of Oxford University, United Kingdom; and a non-residential fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

SUSAN C. PEARCE is an associate professor of sociology at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She is the coauthor and coeditor of several books including Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience. 

E. FUAT KEYMAN is a professor of international relations at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. Keyman has published extensively in English and Turkish, including Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracies.

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Contributors:

Feyzi Baban is a professor of Political Studies and International Development at Trent University. His research interests include international relations theory, critical theory, cosmopolitanism, citizenship studies, Turkish politics, and Turkey-EU relations. His recent publications include: “Cosmopolitanism from the Margins: Redefining the Idea of Europe through Postcoloniality” in Postcolonial Transitions in Europe. ed. by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani (2016); “Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Pathways to Precarity, Differential Inclusion and Negotiated Citizenship Rights,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, with Kim Rygiel and Suzan Ilcan; “Secular Spaces and Religious Representations: reading the Headscarf Debate in Turkey as Citizenship Politics,” Citizenship Studies; “Snapshots from the Margins: Transgressive Cosmopolitanisms in Europe” with Kim Rygiel European Journal of Social Theory, 1–18, 2014; and “Cosmopolitan Europe: Border Crossings and Transnationalism in Europe” Global Society, February 2013.

Anna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at NC State University. She received her MA from Columbia University (1995) and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara (2004) with a focus on South Asian Islam. Her book, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community. Bigelow speaks and writes frequently on religious extremism, religion and conflict, and the role of Islam in the world today. Her current research involves further study of contested yet shared sacred sites in South Asia and the Middle East. She

Kristen Sarah Biehl is an anthropologist specialized in migration research in Turkey. For the past decade she has been involved in both academic and policy research on migration and asylum in Turkey, working with a number of different migrant and refugee communities, NGO’s and public institutions. Such work includes the EU’s comprehensive needs assessment on the situation of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Her research interests range from exploring the everyday lived experiences of asylum seekers in Turkey to understanding how urban society and space are transformed through migration and diversification processes. Kristen is currently completing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research entailed ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul’s Kumkapi district via which she examines how differences are socially and spatially experienced which she theorizes through the notion of dwelling. Most recently Kristen joined Istanbul Policy Center of Sabanci University as a Mercator-IPC Fellow (2016–2017).

Nora Fisher-Onar is Assistant Professor in Global Politics at Coastal Carolina University. She also serves as research associate of the Centre for International Studies (CIS) at Oxford University, and as a non-residential fellow of the German Marshall Fund (GMF). Her research interests include IR and social theory, comparative area studies, political ideologies, gender, history/memory, and foreign policy analysis. She received her doctorate from Oxford and holds masters and undergraduate degrees from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively. She lived in Istanbul for over a decade and speaks five languages including fluent Turkish. Fisher-Onar has published extensively in academic journals like Theory and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Conflict and Cooperation. She also regularly speaks at policy fora like the GMF, Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment, and writes for platforms like Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, and OpenDemocracy.

E. Fuat Keyman is professor of International Relations at Sabanci University. He is also the director of Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) at Sabanci University. He works on democratization, globalization, international relations, civil society, Turkish politics and foreign policy, and Turkey-EU relations. Keyman is a member of the Turkish Science academy, as well as of respected international academic and journal boards. He served as a member of the Wise People Commission as part of the peace process with the Kurdish movement. Keyman’s many publications in English and Turkish include 10 edited and single-authored books such as: Democracy, Identity, and Foreign Policy in Turkey: Hegemony Through Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, February 2014, with Sebnem Gümüscü); Symbiotic Antagonisms: Contending Discourses of Nationalism in Turkey (University of Utah Pres, 2011, with Ayse Kadioglu); and Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democracies (Lanham, 2008).

Çaglar Keyder is Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University. Author of State and Class in Turkey and editor of Istanbul: Between the local and the global, most of his work has been on Turkey: historical sociology and political economy of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, urbanization and globalization of Istanbul, and agrarian transformations in Anatolia. 

Charles King is Professor of International Affairs and Government, chair of the Department of Government, and former faculty chair of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (2014), which was awarded the French “Prix de Voyage Urbain Le Figaro-Peninsula Paris;” Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2011), which received the National Jewish Book Award; The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (2008); and other books.

Amy Mills (M.A. Middle East Studies; Ph.D. Geography, University of Texas at Austin) is an Associate Professor in Geography at the University of South Carolina. Her research engages with conversations in critical human geography, urban studies, and interdisciplinary Middle Eastern studies. Her first book, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul (University of Georgia Press, 2010) explored cultural memories of Istanbul’s non-Muslim minority pasts. Dr. Mills’s current research examines the cultural geopolitics of urbanism in Istanbul after World War I. Her work has been published in venues including Comparative Studies of South Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; Cultural Geographies; the International Journal of Middle East Studies; and Gender, Place and Culture. Dr. Mills serves on the international advisory boards of fe dergisi/fe journal, the Turkish Journal of Human Geography, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. She has held leadership positions in the Turkish Studies Association and in the Association of American Geographers, and supports interdisciplinary scholarship in Geography and Middle East studies.

Ilay Romain Örs is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and a faculty member at Istanbul Bilgi University. She completed her PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, following her master’s studies at University College London and her two BA degrees in Sociology and Political Science at Bogaziçi University Istanbul. A Turkish citizen born in Istanbul, Ors is competent in English, German and Modern Greek. She recently revised her dissertation fieldwork on the Rum Polites into a book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan under the title Diaspora of the City: Stories of Cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens. Her further research and publications are concentrated on topics including migration, mobility, minorities, political movements, and urban studies in Greece, Turkey and the Mediterranean.

Hande Paker, a political sociologist, works on civil society, state, the transformation of citizenship, and political ecology. She has carried out research and published on modes of civil society-state relations, politics of the environment at the local-global nexus, and grounded cosmopolitan citizenship, with a particular focus on environmental struggles and women’s rights. Her articles have appeared in Environmental Politics, Theory and Society, and Middle Eastern Studies. Her latest research as a 2015/16 Mercator-IPC Fellow focuses on local and transnational environmental spaces of action to analyze how environmental civil society actors engage the issue of climate change to mobilize publics. Paker holds a PhD and an MA from McGill University, and a BA from Bogaziçi University. She is based at the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Bahçesehir University.

Susan C. Pearce Pearce is Associate Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University, in North Carolina, United States. She conducts research on the cultural contexts of politics, particularly concerning ethnicity, migration, gender, and social movements. She is co-author of the monograph Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience (2011) with Elizabeth Clifford and Reena Tandon; and co-editor of Reformulations: Markets, Policy, and Identities in Central and Eastern Europe (2000) with Slawomir Kapralski; and co-editor of Mosaics of Change: The First Decade of Life in the New Eastern Europe (2000) with Eugenia Sojka. Her PhD in Sociology is from the New School for Social Research in New York. She has also served on the sociology faculties of Gettysburg College, West Virginia University, University of Gdansk (Poland), and Central European University (Poland).

Sami Zubaida is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of Birkbeck College, Research Associate of the London Middle East Institute, and Professorial Research Associate of the Food Studies Centre, both at SOAS. He has held visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Berkley CA and NYU, written and lectured widely on themes of religion, culture, law and politics in the Middle East, with particular attention to Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. His other work is on food history and culture. Zubaida’s books include Islam, the People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (3rd edition 2009; translated in Arabic, Hebrew, Italian and Turkish); A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (edited, with R Tapper, 2nd edition 2000; translated in Arabic and Turkish); Law and Power in the Islamic World (2003; translated in Arabic, Danish and Turkish); Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East (2011); and the forthcoming book: Food, Politics and Society (with A Colas, J Edwards and J Levi), California UP 2017.