Browsing by Subject "Legitimation Crisis"

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Open Access
Identity" problematique in international relations theory
(2004) Gürbüz, Mustafa
This study aims to provide an assessment of ‘identity’ conceptualizations in International Relations theory generally, and in constructivism particularly. The underlying argument is that ‘identity’ takes different meanings and refers to divergent categorical realms in the IR theory literature. The notion of ‘identity’ has been taken in different senses among constructivists as well. Ironically, the same term, identity, is employed sometimes to defend two opposing views in the discipline of IR. Therefore, ‘identity’ is an ambiguous term in constructivism and in IR theory. Moreover, ‘identity’ is a vague term even in the literature of conventional constructivists, who are most frequent users of the term in the field. Although the conventional constructivists produce the same notion of ‘identity’ among themselves, their works suffer from the problem of ‘obscurity’ and ‘vagueness’. Thus, ‘identity’ among conventional constructivists is not ambiguous, because they refer to the same category. Yet, the term is left unexplained and vague. All these intellectual failures in the studies of ‘identity’ are troublesome for some IR theorists but fatal for constructivist scholars. Therefore, this work offers an alternative way to conceptualize identity by bringing in ‘identification’ theory and the Jürgen Habermas’ approaches. While identification theory can eliminate the ‘ambiguity’ problem in identity studies in the field, Habermasian theorizing may help to study ‘identity’ in constructivism in an analytically clear respect.
Open Access
Photography and politics in Iran in the Naseri period (1848-1896)
(2018-06) Sümbül, Kimya Oskay
This dissertation is written to address the history of photography of Iran during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah. The fundamental characteristic of this period is breaking new ground in social and political realms. During this period, Iran was introduced to the vast usages of photography employed both by the state and society, as well as a politicized society condemning the Shah as the illegitimate ruler. Consequently, nine years after the assassination of the Shah, usage of photography and politicization of society gained a decisive thrust. With the avail of the socio-politic dynamics of the era, this dissertation discusses the Legitimation Crisis of the Shah and utilization from photographs as political tools. We initiated this study to investigate the mutual effect between the political realm and the photographs of the era. Therefore, to see how the political realm of a past country, which adverted diversified photographic usages, can be reverberated through the photographs, exercising an interpretive strategy of reading outward from the photographic images coherent with the socio-politic parameters of the era is pursued.