93 research outputs found
International Interventions and Turkish Foreign Policy Discourses Regarding Libya and Syria
No full textIn her chapter, Birsen Erdoğan analyses Turkish elites’ discourses regarding the situations in Libya in 2011 and in Syria after 2011. Utilising tools provided by post-structuralist discourse theory and the Essex School, she argues that the political elite’s interpretation of changes and events in the region is constituted by and constitutes their perceptions of Self and Other. She agrees that political subjects interpret changes (or crisis) in their social environment as threats (dislocation) or as opportunities. Discourses of crisis perceived as threat usually require policies aimed at more securitisation and even militarisation. They re-enforce the sense of nation, create enemies, and reconstitute borders. However, these changes can also be positive in elite`s interpretations. In such situations of crisis perceived as opportunity, the elite seeks possibilities to expand its influence and the sense of “us”. Thus, how a crisis is articulated may tell us how the elite will respond to it: either with more nationalist and aggressive policies or with welcoming discourses. In short, support for military interventions usually depends on the articulation of the situation by the political elite
Introduction: Why Critical Approaches in Foreign Policy Analysis?
No full textThis volume titled Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy has both theoretical and empirical ambitions. First, by bringing together different authors and their research, the volume asks overall whether we can study foreign policy-making in a meaningful academic way by using critical constructivist, discursive, post-colonial, post-structuralist, and gender approaches. Secondly, each chapter analyses certain actors and events by developing an empirically informed research agenda. With these efforts, the volume investigates what foreign policy means and addresses particular cases while asking how we can broaden such a critical research agenda to study foreign policy in general. The authors agree that we can study actors by looking into their internal and external worlds, which condition them and are also conditioned by them. The authors in this volume assume that actors are products of their complex environments. Chapters accordingly shed light on the social-cultural—political-economic context, power relations, boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, by inspecting identity constructions and political articulations. In chapters, discourses on new and old geographies, borders, emerging security and insecurities (usually insecurities), and the confirming or contesting of orders embedded in power relations and exterior structures are investigated in acritical manner. Methodologically, this volume asks important empirical questions, such as what tools are available for researchers to understand the complex social realities and identities of actors and how we can utilise them in meaningful ways. In this process, the authors investigate several creative ways to make more sense of their research topics and subjects. Particularly in studying a subject that has not always been stable and that has multiple identities and belongings, the authors employ diverse methods while maintaining a spirit of continuous curiosity and academic exploration
Conclusions Drawn from Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy
No full textAcknowledging the necessity of making critical analyses and research in foreign policy, the authors who contributed to this volume titled Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy have all attempted to leave their trace by asking timely questions to understand the ruptures, insecurities, temporalities, and identity crises in Turkey’s foreign policy. In this way, this book not only examines a number of selected and significant issues in Turkey’s contemporary foreign policy but also elaborates on the ideas, discourses, actors, processes, and structures in foreign policy-making and the temporal and inconsistent character of the foreign policy ecosystem. Showing the multi-layered, split, and complicated character of the social entity called “state”, this volume understands foreign policy not as an interest and result oriented pre-determined endeavour but as a social terrain where discourses, power hierarchies, transforming identities, norms, representations, and negotiations take place. In this way, this volume does not only contribute to the critical analyses of Turkey’s foreign policy and but also to the Foreign Policy Analysis as an academic field
Prediction of bankruptcy using support vector machines: an application to bank bankruptcy
Full text linkThe purpose of this study was to apply support vector machines (SVMs) to bank bankruptcy analysis using practical steps. Although the prediction of the financial distress of companies is done using several statistical and machine learning techniques, bank classification and bankruptcy prediction still need to be investigated because few investigations have been conducted in this field of banking. In this study, SVMs were implemented to analyse financial ratios. Data sets from Turkish commercial banks were used. This study shows that SVMs with the Gaussian kernel are capable of extracting useful information from financial data and can be used as part of an early warning system
Liu-Type Logistic Estimator
No full textIt is known that multicollinearity inflates the variance of the maximum likelihood estimator in logistic regression. Especially, if the primary interest is in the coefficients, the impact of collinearity can be very serious. To deal with collinearity, a ridge estimator was proposed by Schaefer et al. The primary interest of this article is to introduce a Liu-type estimator that had a smaller total mean squared error (MSE) than the Schaefer's ridge estimator under certain conditions. Simulation studies were conducted that evaluated the performance of this estimator. Furthermore, the proposed estimator was applied to a real-life dataset
Survey into the Characteristics, Working Conditions and Deficiencies of Turkish Seafood Processing Firms
No full textSince Turkey is an important seafood supplier to the world market, working conditions and deficiencies of Turkish seafood processing firms were surveyed. Inadequacy of employee education was the main barrier of HACCP implementation. Unpredictable raw material availability, price of raw material, defective audit policy of the government, lack of information transfer from the universities, excessive bureaucracy, difficulty of employee education, excessive use of glazing and additives by rivals, tax rates, ignorance of the inspectors, difficulty to getting credits were the factors, complicating productivity. The domestic trade barriers were the unbounded seafood imports, antipathy of Turkish consumers against seafoods, price of seafood, inadequacy of cold chain conditions. Instability of foreign exchange, undersell of seafoods in the global market, instability of raw material quality, uninformative attitude of the government about foreign supports, communication problem with the buyers, excessive bureaucracy, obscurity of Turkish seafoods products were the barriers, complicating foreign trade. As an important seafood supplier, improving working conditions and elimination of deficiencies are essential for Turkey. Turkish government has to inform processing firms about the available supports and opportunities of foreign trade. Making provisions for distortions in credit market and providing convenience to get credit might be the other tasks of the government
Factors Influencing the Consumption of Seafood in Istanbul, Turkey
No full textScientific data on the attitudes and knowledge of Turkish people regarding seafood consumption is very limited. Therefore, consumption habits and preferences of Turkish people for seafoods were evaluated, based on the example of Istanbul, which is the most crowded and cosmopolitan city of Turkey. Only 15.53% (151) of the 972 participants stated they never consume seafoods but none of them considered seafoods unhealthy. Their main reason for not consuming is odor and taste. A significant proportion of the participants (84.47%) were well aware of the nutrition value of seafoods. Former negative experiences didn't decrease consumption frequency. The rate of seafood consumers and the consumption frequency increases proportional to the age of the consumers. Most of the respondents (34.84%) consume seafood once a week and they believe that they should consume seafoods more often. If seafoods were more available, many participants (44.10%) stated that they would consume seafoods. The top three preferred fish were fatty species, while the most favorite seafood was mussel. Octopus was the most unfavorable seafood, and most of the participants were not familiar with surimi. Respondents mostly (96.59%) preferred to consume fresh seafoods, and canning was the favorite (37.64%) processing technology
A novel approach for panel data: An ensemble of weighted functional margin SVM models
No full textEnsemble machine learning methods are frequently used for classification problems and it is known that they may boost the prediction accuracy. Support Vector Machines are widely used as base classifiers during the construction of different types of ensembles. In this study, we have constructed a weighted functional margin classifier ensemble on panel financial ratios to discriminate between solid and unhealthy banks for Turkish commercial bank case. We proposed a novel ensemble generation method enhanced by a pruning strategy to increase the prediction performance and developed a novel aggregation approach for ensemble learning by using the idea of weighted sums. The prediction performances are compared with a panel logistic regression which is considered a benchmark method for panel data. The results show that the proposed ensemble method is more successful than the straight SVM and the classical generalized linear model approach. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
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