Klara Volarić

Precarious Hope by Ayşe Parla is the outcome of fieldwork that Parla conducted over years with post-1990s Turkish migrants from Bulgaria, who were/are working in Turkey. The author examines these Turkish migrants’ quest for Turkish citizenship within the theoretical, anthropological framework of emotion, specifically hope. In this context, hope is analyzed as a ‘structured expectation,’ which means that the author is not interested in hope as a personal experience, but rather as an emotion that pertains to a specific collective, in this case, Turkish migrants coming from Bulgaria.

This book is a result of collaboration between the two historians who deal with early-modern (Isom-Verhaaren) and modern (Schull) history. The book is aimed primarily at students and has two main goals: to trace development and transformation of Ottoman identity from the emergence of the Ottoman state until its demise and to provide a glimpse into Ottoman everyday life based on the lives and stories of certain personalities and places throughout the Ottoman history. The book has 22 chapters (articles written by different authors) that are placed into four chronological sections.

The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement of Y. Doğan Çetinkaya represents valuable insight into three boycott movements that took place during the Second constitutional period. The author places them in the mass politics context, which started with the CUP period when society, unlike previous periods, became more actively involved in politics.