The highlight of the Programme on Contemporary Turkey at SEESOX in 2016-2017 academic year was the workshop titled Turkey’s turmoil and the West’s conundrum: How should Europe and the US approach post-coup Turkey? The daylong workshop hosted eminent academics and experts on Turkey and the region.
On 2 November, four senior members of SEESOX at St Antony’s College, Ezgi Başaran, Mehmet Karlı, Deniz Ülke Arıboğan and Yaprak Gürsoy, spoke on the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. The director of SEESOX, Othon Anastasakis, chaired the seminar, which mostly focused on the events of the coup, but also touched upon the political, economic and social aspects of Turkey before and after the botched putsch.
SEESOX’s Programme on Contemporary Turkey had produced many intriguing seminars and a highly essential workshop, which matched the current turmoil in the country during the 2016-17 academic year. There were several themes to the events that the Programme held. The first one was the EU-Turkey deal on Syrian refugees.
Thursday, 20 October, 2016 – 12:30
Lecture Theatre 2, Blavatnik School of Government, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford OX2 6GG
Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist and Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government, will chair a series of Thursday discussions with students, faculty and experts about hot topics in current affairs.
What is worse than an ever-more-authoritarian regime that constantly aims to crush a robust civil society? The answer emerged bluntly in Turkey on Friday night: to have your army pointing its guns at you. To have your army bombing the parliament building. To have a military takeover.
Since its founding, the Turkish Republic has endured its share of military intervention in politics, and seen four coups – two of them forced a change of government without taking over.
They have all had grave consequences, and shattered many lives. But nothing compares to what we witnessed on the night of 15 July 2016.
South East European Studies at Oxford hosted an engaging panel discussion on the pressing issue of the current state of free speech in Turkey on May 11, 2016. The event was organised in association with Free Speech Debate, Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Ezgi Başaran, award-winning Turkish journalist and former editor of Radikal, the liberal daily closed down in March 2016, has now moved to St Antony’s College. While at Oxford she is preparing a book on what really lay behind the failure of the Kurdish peace process. On 4 May she gave us a comprehensive presentation.
A colleague of mine put it this way: “It’s like we lost our house.” Friends are extending their condolences through phone calls, emails and text messages filled with crying emoticons. No, we have not actually been evicted from our house, nor did we lose a family member. But we, as journalists in Turkey, have lost something that was very dear to us and are experiencing a feeling as agonising as the loss of a loved one.
