The Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey as its successor have long occupied the geographic and imagined juncture of east and west, Europe and the Middle East, Occident and Orient. Nonetheless, the overly simplistic east/west binary unnecessarily limits the discursive space to explore the commonality of European and Turkish political and cultural trajectories. The […]
The Case for Women-led, Grassroots Organizations in Emergency Response
Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak Previous responses to public health crises such as the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16 have highlighted the importance of gender dynamics in designing communication and intervention strategies. Because such outbreaks exert unequal impacts across gender and socio-economic strata, it is critical for emergency response interventions to consult women-led, grassroots-level, civil society […]
The Shooting of Ali El Hemdan: Precarity and Anxiety for Turkey’s Refugees
Last week’s lethal shooting of 18-year-old Syrian refugee Ali El Hemdan could work to demoralize Turkey’s 3.6 million Syrian refugees as they grapple with increased hardship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. On the afternoon of April 27, Hemdan was shot and killed by a police officer after allegedly failing to stop for violating Turkey’s nationwide stay-at-home […]
How To Build Trust During a Pandemic
Drawing lessons from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak In a virtual event on Coronavirus and Conflict hosted by the United States Institute of Peace, Jeremy Konyndyk, Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development, talked about the importance of “building trust” during crisis response. He drew an example from the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the […]
A Decade of Protest
The 2010s are coming to end with a coda of protest. It is perhaps appropriate that a decade that began with the Arab Spring ends this way – what began as hope morphed into tragedy and betrayal only to end in renewed promise. Be it Chile, Bolivia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, or Hong Kong, those […]
Peace, Not War, Will Solve the “Kurdish Question”
Turkey’s incursion into Northeastern Syria, officially dubbed “Operation Peace Spring”, represents the lowest point so far in the already much-troubled saga of Turkish-Kurdish relations. While President Erdoğan has reasoned his military operation as a means to fight terrorism, the true intentions behind the operation are barely veiled – to divide Turks and Kurds and to […]
Conflict and Peace in Jammu and Kashmir
My topic, Conflict and Peace in Jammu and Kashmir looks at political developments, youth stone-pelting incidents, militancy, regional divide, and recommendations for peace. This project is particularly close to my heart as I am originally from Jammu city in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. I relied on interviews, books, newspaper, and scholarly articles for […]
Hate Speech and Polarization on the Internet
Hate speech is defined as an “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.” In recent years, the widespread access to the internet and the proliferation of social media websites have provided new platforms for people to express their views […]
Conversation with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad at the United States Institute of Peace
On June 28, 2019, United States Institute of Peace (USIP), in partnership with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, hosted Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad, a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence. At this event, Nadia Murad discussed the condition of Yazidi people and the reconstruction efforts in Sinjar, Iraq. […]
The struggle for LGBTQ rights in Turkey
During Pride month this year, the governorates of Izmir and Antalya banned all Pride-related events citing public safety and security concerns. One month earlier, the Pride march organized by the students of Middle East Technical University in Ankara was violently broken up by the police. Pride marches have been organized in Istanbul since 1993, but […]