Heritage Diplomacy, Neo-Ottomanism, and a Local Quest for a New Place of Worship: The Politics of Mosque Building in Batumi, Georgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few decades, Turkey has funded numerous construction and building rehabilitation initiatives in foreign countries. Amidst such efforts, this article scrutinises the implications of Turkey’s heritage diplomacy tied to Ottoman architecture and how it has the potential to overshadow the desires of local populations. It points to one such case in Batumi, Georgia, where a replica of the 1868 Aziziye Mosque was proposed as a part of Georgia-Turkey cross-border heritage exchanges in the 2010s. Here, Turkey’s fostering of the project exacerbated local Muslim Georgian efforts to construct a mosque of their own in the city. The case demonstrates how heritage diplomacy can land poorly, shining light on a range of broader domestic impacts to urban planning and national identity, electoral politics and community social cohesion. Instead of seeing local Muslims as passive bystanders, the article demonstrates how they asserted their rights, building a temporary open-air mosque and redirecting the focus back towards their particular needs. The findings are based on a long-term study of the politics of urban development in Batumi using qualitative methods. They contribute to a growing body of scholarship in critical heritage studies, highlighting connections to public policy, diplomatic relations, and religious activism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".