The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) presents itself as the principal security governance framework for Central Asia, mandated to address terrorism, separatism, extremism, and drug trafficking — collectively the "three evils" plus narcotics. Yet systematic, domain-by-domain assessments of its actual contribution remain scarce in the academic literature, with most studies either accepting self-reported institutional claims or dismissing the organisation as a "talking shop." This article applies a structured qualitative framework, drawing on primary SCO legal instruments, RATS operational reporting, and external UNODC evidence, to assess the organisation's security governance performance across four domains between 2001 and 2024. The findings demonstrate that SCO's contribution is strongest in counterterrorism, where the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) has generated routinised intelligence sharing and verifiable organisational outputs, though outcome attribution is constrained by reliance on self-reported data. Conversely, in the drug trafficking domain, outcome dynamics are overwhelmingly driven by Afghanistan's opium production cycles and trafficking market economics, limiting plausible attribution to SCO mechanisms. In the extremism and separatism domains, SCO outputs are primarily normative — institutionalising non-interference norms and territorial integrity commitments — rather than operational, and these outputs serve member states' regime-security interests as much as they address genuine population-level threats. The article contributes a replicable evidence-grading protocol applicable to assessments of regional organisations' security claims, and advances the theoretical debate between institutional effectiveness literature and authoritarian regionalism frameworks.

From the past to the present, aşık poets have served as leading figures in society, undertaking the mission of educating, instructing, and guiding people in their respective times and regions. In the Anatolian region, where literacy rates were low, aşık poets—whether literate or illiterate—influenced the emotional and intellectual world of the people, guiding them toward the truth and earning the respect of the community. Çıldırlı Âşık Şenlik, one of the representatives of the 19th-century tradition of aşık poetry, is a significant folk poet known for his own school of thought, both in the region where he lived and in other regions where the tradition is kept alive. Within the framework of this school, known as the “Şenlik School,” he trained many aşık poets, holding a significant place among the aşık community and in society. In the various types of poetry he composed, Aşık Şenlik created works not only on human emotions and thoughts—such as love, longing, pain, and sorrow—but also on social themes including nature, religion, heroism, bravery, advice, humor, and satire. This study focuses on the analysis of the advice-themed poems that the poet frequently addressed in his works. The advice-themed poems of Âşık Şenlik, which are the subject of this study, have been classified and analyzed into personal, social, religious, and satirical categories. In his advice-themed poems, it is emphasized that living a good and righteous life within the framework of moral rules—from personal, social, and religious perspectives—is important for humanity. Thus, Âşık Şenlik stands out as a significant historical figure who, through his poetry, guided the community in the Çıldır district and its surroundings, educating them with the aim of becoming good people.

As one of the representatives of 20th-century classical Turkish literature, Osman Hulûsî Ateş’s (1914–1990) work titled Dîvân-ı Hulûsî-i Dârendevî provides highly significant data worthy of investigation not only for its rich content and formal characteristics but also in terms of its linguistic features. In the work, whose first scholarly edition was published in 1986, it is observed that the orthographic traditions and archaic elements of Old Anatolian Turkish have been maintained. In this study, based on scans conducted using the Turkish Language Association’s (TDK) Türkçe Sözlük (Turkish Dictionary), Tarama Sözlüğü (Historical Dictionary of Turkish), and Derleme Sözlüğü (Compilation Dictionary of Turkish Dialects), 49 archaic lexical items and 7 archaic suffixes that have fallen out of use or undergone formal/semantic changes in today's written language were identified in the Divan. The poet’s preference for these suffixes provided the opportunity to resolve prosodic metrics (aruz) irregularities, clearly demonstrating his mastery of prosodic rules and his skill in employing the meter. Classifying these lexical elements on the basis of Zeynep Korkmaz’s theoretical views and taxonomy, they were analyzed under four main categories: pronouns and pronominal inflections (17 inflectional forms under 15 headings), nouns and adjectives (7 elements), adverbs, postpositions, and postpositional phrases (9 elements), and verbs and compound structures (18 elements). Hulûsi Efendi’s blending of historical suffixes and grammatical structures with elements nourished by vernacular speech demonstrates the linguistic stratification of the Divan and its strong connection with the historical processes of the Turkish language.

This study examines the unemployment experiences of university graduates who are classified within the NEET group, defined as young people who are neither in education, employment, nor training. The aim of the study is to understand how young university graduates perceive unemployment, what expectations they developed after graduation, and which barriers they encountered during their transition from higher education to employment. The research was conducted among graduates of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Kastamonu University. A qualitative research design was adopted, and participants were reached through the snowball sampling method. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview form. The interview data were analysed through content analysis and frequency analysis using the MAXQDA qualitative data analysis program. The findings were grouped under four main themes: barriers to accessing the targeted job, perception of unemployment, post-graduation expectations, and expectations regarding entry into employment. The results indicate that unemployment among university graduates in the NEET group should not be considered merely an individual labour-market problem, but also as a multidimensional social policy issue involving economic dependency, loss of human capital, social isolation, and psychological pressure.

This article aims to present a comparative analysis of the dragon motif in Slavic and Turkic folklore, identifying its functional, semantic, and archetypal characteristics. The research materials include the apocryphal tale “St. George and the Dragon”, which entered Old Russian literature through Byzantine tradition, and “The Slaying of the Seven-Headed Dragon by Salur Kazan”, a tale included in the recently discovered manuscripts of The Book of Dede Korkut. This Turkic narrative constitutes a previously unknown story that is absent from the copies known as Dresden and Vatican manuscripts. The study employs an integrated methodology combining the classification system of Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature with the archetypal theory of Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. The application of this approach reveals that, in the Russian tradition, the battle with the dragon symbolizes the struggle against paganism, whereas in the Turkic tradition it represents the confrontation with and overcoming of the “shadow self”, that is, the darker aspects of the human psyche. The analysis further demonstrates that, despite differences in their respective religious and cultural contexts, both narratives are structured around similar narrative patterns centered on the hero’s battle with the dragon. The findings indicate the existence of shared motifs that developed through long-standing cultural interaction and geographical proximity between the Slavic and Turkic peoples.