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"Turam, Berna"
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Gaining freedoms : claiming space in Istanbul and Berlin
Gaining Freedoms reveals a new locus for global political change: everyday urban contestation. Cities are often assumed hotbeds of socio-economic division, but this assessment overlooks the importance of urban space and the everyday activities of urban life for empowerment, emancipation, and democratization. Through proximity, neighborhoods, streets, and squares can create unconventional power contestations over lifestyle and consumption. And through struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, competing claims across groups can become platforms to defend freedom and rights from government encroachments.
Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork in three contested urban sites—a downtown neighborhood and a university campus in Istanbul, and a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin—Berna Turam shows how democratic contestation echoes through urban space. Countering common assumptions that Turkey is strongly polarized between Islamists and secularists, she illustrates how contested urban space encourages creative politics, the kind of politics that advance rights, expression, and representation shared between pious and secular groups. Exceptional moments of protest, like the recent Gezi protests which bookend this study, offer clear external signs of upheaval and disruption, but it is the everyday contestation and interaction that forge alliances and inspire change. Ultimately, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of conflict.
eBook
Turkey's Final Exam on Freedom: Boğaziçi University Fights the Authoritarian Regime
In September 2010, several years before serving as the prime minister of Turkey (2014–16), Ahmet Davutoğlu visited Boston. At that time, he was Turkey’s minister of foreign affairs and a member of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP). Upon his arrival, he invited a small group of professors from major universities in the city to a formal breakfast discussion. While we, the invitees, were all citizens of Turkey, the group represented a range of academic disciplines, ethnicities, genders, ages, and religious orientations. When he asked each of us to introduce ourselves, he realized that I was the only person in the room specializing in political Islam. His first and last words to me during the breakfast were, “So, you are objectifying us.” Davutoğlu was a professor of political science, with an MA and a PhD from Boğaziçi University (BU), a top-ranked Turkish university. Aiming for academic connections, he asked for ideas and suggestions for future research collaborations between Boston and Istanbul. One of the guests, a globally renowned scholar of his field, snapped: My advice to you and the government is to leave us alone. Science demands freedom, and academics need autonomy. In fact, most of us live and work here because of how the government in Turkey fails to respect the independence of academic inquiry. The professor’s comments were right to the point. The following decade witnessed an increasingly taxing and repressive political rule that bluntly targeted the intelligentsia, the academics and journalists, of the country. Indications of this dark period were already apparent in Davutoglu’s keynote address at Harvard University, as he emphasized the importance of “a balance between security and freedom” as one of Turkey’s goals (Harvard Gazette 2010). A few years later, Turkey’s rapid erosion of freedoms was justified by the excuse of maintaining order and security.
Journal Article
ARE RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES SAFE?
On the one hand, Turkey is often seen as offering the larger Muslim world a model for how to integrate a potent Islamist movement into the framework of a secular constitutional democracy-and indeed one that has been undertaking significant political reforms in connection with a drive for full European Union membership and the achievement of general improvements in democratic quality. With the exception of a few amendments-recognition of affirmative action for women, children, the elderly, and the disabled; a ban on secret state surveillance of personal data; and higher barriers to the Constitutional Court's ability to dissolve parties-most of the changes were concerned with structures and procedures rather than matters of individual liberties and civil rights.
Journal Article
Split city versus divided state in Turkey: contrasting patterns of political opposition to AKP's authoritarianism
The main goal of this article is to scrutinize and analyze two new formations of political opposition to the increasingly authoritarian pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government; from within urban space and from within the branches of the state. This article investigates the context, varying agendas and future implications of these two relatively new formations of opposition, both of which have been severely attacked by the increasingly authoritarian AKP.
Journal Article
Turkey Under the AKP: Are Rights and Liberties Safe?
In the West, Turkey is considered a model for a secular democracy in the Muslim world, yet the country finds itself mired in a crisis of civil rights and liberties under a third term of the pro-Islamic AKP government. Ironically, while the government maintains a discourse on political reform—including constitutional amendments—the country is bitterly divided over issues of minority and human rights, freedom of speech, and autonomy of media and academia.
Journal Article
Ordinary Muslims: Power and Space in Everyday Life
Like other area studies, Middle East studies has an interdisciplinary scope, which enriches scholarly debates on Islamist movements, groups, and actors. However, while Middle East studies brings scholars from a wide range of academic backgrounds together, it is still predominantly represented by two major disciplines: political science and history. Relatively less attention is paid to what other disciplines, particularly geography, sociology, and the humanities, contribute to the understanding and theorization of Islamist movements.
Journal Article