From the morality of living to the morality of sying: hunger strikes in Turkish prisons

Political hunger strikes have been part of the debates on human rights in many countries around the world. This paper explores the preconditions for and motives behind hunger strikes in Turkey by conceiving the hunger strikers as a part of citizenship politics through which strikers not only express their views against certain common issues, but also declare total opposition to an unjust condition within their political community. The paper focuses on the question of why some such “citizens” choose to participate in hunger strikes, which appears as an individual commitment to achieve a certain common objective. In doing so, the meaning of the experiences of hunger strikers and their universal right to live are elaborated in relation to their political and moral views. Hunger strikes are suggested to be seen as voluntary fasting, undertaken as a means of civil disobedience against an injustice within the context of citizenship. As examples of non-violent political acts, hunger strikes are not only part of citizenship politics but also expressions of commitment to achieving one’s goals through non-aggressive means for the common good of all citizens. Moreover, they can also be considered examples of martyrdom/heroism because hunger strikers altruistically risk their life for a public cause. As a particular altruistic act, hunger strikes can also be viewed as an effective form of communication directed toward fellow citizens. Moreover, they are expressions of self-determination for having control over and for one’s own life conditions. Finally, hunger strikes can be conceptualized as a struggle for transforming the configuration of structures and practices of citizenship about which one is passionately concerned. In this context, hunger strikes seem to be struggles for recognition in a relationship between two subjects, in which one subordinates the other

Citizen Alevi in Turkey: beyond confirmation and denial

Critics of the current national citizenship models argue that, although it rests on claims to be inclusionary and universal, it can never eliminate exclusionary and particularistic practices when challenged by those identities excluded from the historical trajectory of "nation building." Turkish citizenship has been a form of anomalous amalgamation since its conception. On the one hand, the state insisted on the pre-emptive exclusion of religion and various communal cultural identities from politics, while, on other hand, it promoted a particular religious identity primarily as a means of promoting cultural and social solidarity among its citizens. Contemporary Alevi movements, representing the interests of a large minority in Turkey, provide a new source of energy for the revision of concepts of citizenship. Alevis have suffered from prejudice, and their culture has been arrested and excluded from the nation building process. They were not able to integrate into the form of national identity based on the "secular" principles that the republican state has provided as a means of promoting solidarity among citizens. What Alevis seek is a revised citizenship model in terms of a system of rights assuring the condition of neutrality among culturally diverse individuals

Ethical divides within the environmentalist movement in Turkey: history, structures and actions

‘Environmentalism’ covers a range of social and political movements and ethical perspectives which share a concern for the protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. Almost twenty years after the 1960s when sizeable environmentalist mobilizations had first come to light and begun to shore up critical public debates and projects for radical social change in Western Europe and North America, the environment was still not a very substantial worry across a wide spectrum of social movements in Turkey. In the 1970s small mobilizations for the environment had surfaced here and there in connection with the tide of student and working class radicalism; yet these were only sporadic groupings. None of them succeeded in reaching a scale capable of developing the capacity to influence the political context in their own right. The situation had changed drastically with the military intervention in 1980. The junta banned almost all political activities, especially those that aimed to improve the political and economic conditions of the working class. With the brutal suppression of class politics, all forms of mobilization for radical social change had either receded or gone underground. Paradoxically it was in the post-junta period that environmentalism had become popular and influential not only among radical societal activists but also within the official political society. With the return to ‘democracy’, now forced to fit the limits drawn by the restrictive 1982 Constitution, public space was opened, for the first time, to several environmentalist movements which, in less than a decade, were to be momentous mobilizations. These “new social movements” made effective use of the opportunities provided by the new codes and regulations legislated and implemented by successive governments in response to an alarmingly deteriorating natural environment, in addition to the international obligations acceded by the Turkish state by signing bilateral or multilateral environmental accords. The majority of such mobilizations were initially local and focused in their horizons. A typical case was the contention between the concerned people of a locale, mobilized usually by the initiations of professional associations of lawyers, engineers and doctors or marginal and perhaps clandestine left wing groups, and a multi-national corporation operating without even minimal reverence for the natural riches of that locale. Needless to say, this was not only a typical case in Turkey but rather a common experience around the world, especially in the South, as a consequence of the insertion into the new global governance regime, later to be called Neoliberalism, which puts the demands of corporations before the environment and is prone to the “market solution”. It was within and through such local mobilizations that the environmentalist movement in Turkey not only proliferated but also expanded in its reach and broadened its horizon. Various environmentalist mobilizations since the 1980s, which have also increased their connections with transnational environmentalist currents and movements, can be grouped under five categories with respect to the issues that they have been concentrating on and struggling against: 1. Mobilizations against the adverse effects of fossil fuel plants - mostly coal-fired thermal power plants. 2. Mobilizations against the lack of regulations aiming to protect the commons 3. Mobilizations against the adverse effects of nuclear power plants 4. Mobilizations against gold mining 5. Mobilizations against hydro power plants built along rivers The objective of the chapter In this chapter, against the background of the emergence and consolidation of the environmentalist movement in Turkey in terms of the prevalent structural conditions of the global and local contexts at particular intervals of time over the period of our analysis, we analyze the ethical bases and principles guiding, governing and justifying the actions of the aforementioned mobilizations. Using a two dimensional taxonomy we aim to differentiate mobilizations according to their ethical premises. On one hand, we observe groups of mobilizations that share the assumptions, values and judgments of the anthropocentric perspective. On the other hand, we single out groups of mobilizations that move beyond the former and draw from the ecocentric perspective. The difference between these two is that while the former conceives present and future human beings as the only things that have intrinsic value, the latter sees all living organisms as things with equal significance in value terms. Our initial examination of the particular mobilizations within the environmentalist movement in Turkey leads us to recommend the following generalizations (which surely need to be further studied and elaborated by future research). 1. In terms of the historical trajectory, as a general trend, mobilizations move away from the anthropocentric perspective towards the ecocentric perspective. 2. The general trend that we observe is more salient in grassroots mobilizations than those sponsored by the corporations under the auspices of social responsibility projects. 3. The dividing line between the two sorts of ethical positioning is the position taken vis-à-vis the capitalist system. Those that take on a definitive anti-capitalist stance are almost completely inclined toward the ecocentric perspective. Unlike these, those that take on a reformist line of action and are associated with various corporate agendas remain very much anthropocentric, and thereby aim to rectify the wrongs of an otherwise well-functioning status quo

Rejuvenating citizenship in the context of diversity

In this paper, we take up notions of "citizenship", "democracy", "political community" and "social movements" within the context of diversity. We emphasize that people are moral beings, and for citizens who are members of a political community, their membership articulates their moral values as they appeal to unity in terms of the common good or interest. To this background we reconstruct social movements, first and foremost, as friendship groupings, and then as political forces for expanding the span of citizenship

Contribution of Tore Supra in preparation of ITER

Tore Supra routinely addresses the physics and technology of very long-duration plasma discharges, thus bringing precious information on critical issues of long pulse operation of ITER. A new ITER relevant lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) launcher has allowed coupling to the plasma a power level of 2.7 MW for 78 s, corresponding to a power density close to the design value foreseen for an ITER LHCD system. In accordance with the expectations, long distance (10 cm) power coupling has been obtained. Successive stationary states of the plasma current profile have been controlled in real-time featuring (i) control of sawteeth with varying plasma parameters, (ii) obtaining and sustaining a 'hot core' plasma regime, (iii) recovery from a voluntarily triggered deleterious magnetohydrodynamic regime. The scrape-off layer (SOL) parameters and power deposition have been documented during L-mode ramp-up phase, a crucial point for ITER before the X-point formation. Disruption mitigation studies have been conducted with massive gas injection, evidencing the difference between He and Ar and the possible role of the q = 2 surface in limiting the gas penetration. ICRF assisted wall conditioning in the presence of magnetic field has been investigated, culminating in the demonstration that this conditioning scheme allows one to recover normal operation after disruptions. The effect of the magnetic field ripple on the intrinsic plasma rotation has been studied, showing the competition between turbulent transport processes and ripple toroidal friction. During dedicated dimensionless experiments, the effect of varying the collisionality on turbulence wavenumber spectra has been documented, giving new insight into the turbulence mechanism. Turbulence measurements have also allowed quantitatively comparing experimental results with predictions by 5D gyrokinetic codes: numerical results simultaneously match the magnitude of effective heat diffusivity, rms values of density fluctuations and wavenumber spectra. A clear correlation between electron temperature gradient and impurity transport in the very core of the plasma has been observed, strongly suggesting the existence of a threshold above which transport is dominated by turbulent electron modes. Dynamics of edge turbulent fluctuations has been studied by correlating data from fast imaging cameras and Langmuir probes, yielding a coherent picture of transport processes involved in the SOL. Corrections were made to this article on 6 January 2012. Some of the letters in the text were missing