Turkish literature on Turkey’s administration problem is quite strong. Our accumulation can be considered as remarkable. Nonetheless, generations of scholars are so disconnected from each other that bringing generations and accumulated knowledge into interaction requires an effort of its own. One reason for this disconnection is that the tradition of research that has once broken away from the language of the people and relied on Persian-Arabic was replaced in the 19th century by the French language. French constituting itself as ground zero has been replaced about a century later with English, which led again to the disregard of the previous period. The ruptures marked by language were also deepened by sharp political shifts and coups. Perhaps for these reasons, knowledge production has been divided into the worlds of the “university with a roof” and the “university without a roof”. The ruptures over time and the spatial divisions within the same time span, have created formidable obstacles to the utilization of our remarkable accumulation. Memleket Politics and Administration is a product of the desire to overcome these obstacles. Memleket Politics and Administration is interested in studies that ask original questions about administrative reality and explore these questions in depth, no matter when and where they are. The journal will bring together researchers from roofed and unroofed universities and will try to heal intellectual ruptures by bringing the forgotten works of previous periods as result of the change in the language of research to the present.

The main problem of studies on the phenomenon of administration is the lack of relationship between theory and practice. This is a problem not only of the present but also of the past. On the one hand, there is a peculiar understanding that identifies theoretical work with reading and summarizing the works in the literature (especially from the English literature). This understanding is sometimes presented in the form of the need to thoroughly explore Weberian, Marxist or liberal literature. High intellectual constructs such as schools, theories and approaches can only be produced by advanced Western capitalism. Contributions from the rest of the world can be accepted if they can pass through the intellectual filter of the same center. Therefore, any statement produced in the intellectual world of the underdeveloped Turkey cannot be named with high level constructs such as school, theory, or approach. When the work of reviewing and summarizing a series of books is considered as a theoretical activity, the work of researching the administrative reality of the country is equated with the effort to make sense of the country’s phenomena in the feeble light of the theories/models that have already been put forward. This is an unexciting and colorless work of testing; in more general terms, it is a transfer process. However, theory and practice are integrated. Research moves from the abstract to the concrete; the concrete is put into abstract terms and the reality is explained. The exciting work is the work of explaining reality and thereby reaching generalizations that will give us the power to reconstruct life; in other words, it is the process of creation. This is a task that can be accomplished by “constructing” theory statements, not by “taking and using” theory statements that have already been produced. Other models, theories, schools, whether produced in the south or the north, whether from old or contemporary times, are very valuable as indispensable inputs for our theoretical explanatory capability. To claim that they limit our explanatory power is to deny their value. Memleket Politics and Administration is published with the aim of creating a space where researchers can work together as theorists rather than theory transferring theorists.

Research, in a way, means the method. In Turkey, administrative research is dominated by either positivist or phenomenological/hermeneutic approaches. On the other hand, the number of studies using the dialectical-historical materialist method is not negligible. However, very few of the studies have discussed the methodology that they have used. The number of studies that directly discuss the question of method is quite rare. How can the phenomenon of administration be researched? The journal is designed as a publication that invites researchers to discuss this fundamental question. Memleket Politics and Administration aims to analyze Turkey’s general and current problems through a dialectical-historical materialist research method.