From Exit to Voice: Reflections on Exile through the Accounts of Turkey’s Intelligentsia

The authoritarian turn in Turkey compelled many citizens to change life trajectories which included extreme majors such as migration and exile. Thousands of people left Turkey in the last decade, this recent wave constituting one of the largest Turkish migrations to Europe and beyond. The profile of the migrants included those who were comfortable with and/or opposed the current regime’s political and social policies, members of oppressed minority groups, Gülen movement members who are accused of orchestrating the failed 2016 coup attempt as well as white collar and secular Turkish citizens who made lifestyle migration choices because of the political and economic developments in the country. The article focuses on the narratives of a specific group within this new wave, those whom we refer to as Turkey’s intelligentsia in exile, and who decided to leave Turkey following the Gezi protests in 2013. The findings are based on 25 interviews conducted in 2021 with former academics, activists, artists, journalists and politicians who migrated to a variety of locations as a result of pending trials or arrest warrants against them, dehumanization discourse that pro-regime politicians directed toward them, as well as lack of freedom of speech and assembly

The View from Next Door:Greek-Turkish Relations after the Coup Attempt in Turkey

Turkey’s recent slide into authoritarianism will have implications for its close neighbours in the West. Especially Greece cannot avoid negative spill-over effects. A coalition government comprising Syriza and Independent Greeks does not have an unconstrained set of policy choices in responding to this. Maintaining effective working relations is a paramount interest but achieving this is easier in principle than in practice especially considering the issues of asylum seekers and Turkish revisionism on the Lausanne Treaty. Unlike the two parties that dominated the Greek political scene after 1974, PASOK and New Democracy, the current government has little experience navigating choppy diplomatic seas with Turkey

Transnational conflicts, belongings, and social interactions

The present paper is an edited collection of manuscripts produced out of an online panel organized by the conveners on 1 December 2021 under the same title: Transnational conflicts, belongings, and social interactions. It was a part of the conference series promoting the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) at Bielefeld University. Our call to bring together scientific knowledge from allied disciplines sharing the view that transnational bonds influence identity expressions, intergroup relations and the sense of belonging displayed by Turkish postmigrants has been echoed in the thoughts of our esteemed contributors. Their expertise helped us to better explicate the in-between position of Turkish postmigrants and their understanding of social cohesion in Germany and beyond. The preface written by Andreas Zick invites us to think of the new global trend of 'ethnocentric transnationalism' that demands the populations living abroad to become ‘diasporas of the nation-states' instead of feeling at home in their unique transnational space above and beyond a single nation-state. Deriving from the history of conflict and violence research, he postulates that increased networking capacities of humans and organizations also pose a threat to the spread of nationalist and exclusionary ideologies which are on the rise and conveyed across many extreme groups. Bahar Baser and Ahmet Erdi Ozturk provides a brief history of recent diaspora currents originating from Turkey as a result of the democratic backsliding of the government in Turkey which is exclusively run by Justice and Development Party (acronymized AKP in Turkish) since 2002. Based on their ongoing study on 'the new wave' of migration after the Gezi protests, they show that official records fall short to capture the reality of the new wave since both legal and illegal ways of fleeing have been heavily exercised by dissidents of the government for a better life in Europe, eventually taking the form of a full-scale brain drain. Aydın Bayad, Elif Sandal-Önal, and N. Ekrem Düzen aims to capture the reflection of the diaspora governance policy of Turkey across media outlets, seemingly taken as a straightforward strategy by the Turkish government to influence postmigrants' everyday political stand. They show that, independent from the language of the media that formerly used to keep a division between migrants and non-migrants, the pursuit of political alliance takes priority in categorizing media sources as the location, language, and stakeholders of the nation-state have grown to be multi-branded due to transnationality. They propose three orientations among media sources that fuel political divergence between home and host states and depict transnational space in line with their political agenda rather than informed by postmigrants’ solicitations. Finally, Besim Can Zırh presents a detailed analysis of voting behaviors of postmigrants as an outcome of the diaspora governance policies of Turkey. He showed that Turkey's political and institutional activity to reach postmigrants in Europe is not a fruitless attempt; on the contrary, have a significant effect evident by an ever increasing turnout rate. All contributions bringing this issue forth have been pointing out that there is a tension between official policies of the nation-states and transnationality of corporeal people whose experiences, demands, priority of belongings and expressions of identity are forming and formed by the transnational space. It seems that scholars had better focus on their agency, rather than on the nation-states, in order to understand the current and future conflicts as well as possible resolutions