Can fear explain the loathing that the victims of this ‘academic cleansing’ are exposed to, often by their own colleagues? Could insecurity justify the complicity?
If anyone has doubts about the predominance of a strain of political Islam in Turkey, this week they should be watching Turkey’s mosques. Part two of three.
We need to go beyond the dichotomy between radical and moderate Islam to see how Islamist movements impose hegemony at local, national and international levels.
"This hatred overdose and systematic lynch campaign is something that none of us were prepared for. We are civilian citizens whose only 'crime' is to demand peace." An open letter.
Following in the footstep of the rating agencies, investment banks were busy building up a self-fulfilling prophecy before and after the Turkish referendum of 16 April, 2017.
The secondary position to which women were relegated was endorsed, not silently and privately, but publicly and vocally, by high-profile dignitaries of the AKP, including Erdogan himself. This helped violence.
“Our principles remind us that not justice, but oppression will inevitably result from an unrestrained one-man rule that is unaccountable, unchecked and unstoppable…”.
This obsession with personalities can fuel the very passions and tensions that such individuals feed on, and obscure the underlying factors that explain their rise in the first place.
The political success of the Kurds – the colonized – has intimidated not just the authoritarian AKP and ultranationalist MHP but also the nationalist, secularist, so-called social democratic CHP.
Erdogan may require a more pragmatic approach to the US and Russia, hence indirectly with the PYD and Assad, to open up space for himself in the region’s politics.
A country as heteregenous as Turkey can't be held together by an autocrat, so what to do?
