By Oguz Alyanak and Funda Ustek-Spilda. “Our people made a choice and approved the constitutional changes. The debate is over. So are days of post-election uncertainty. It is time to move on,” argued the Turkish President Erdoğan in his post-Referendum address…

By Deniz Yonucu. It has been three weeks since Turkey’s controversial referendum and the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the founding party of Turkey and the second biggest party in Parliament, has already started discussing potential candidates for a “no” block…

By William Garriott. The essays in this final installment on the Turkish referendum address the question: what now? Both essays eschew a narrow focus on the referendum’s immediate implications in favor of a broader consideration of time, emotion, and the political imagination Deniz Yonucu emphasizes …

By Ayşe Parla. It is by now common knowledge that the April 2017 referendum in Turkey to move from a parliamentary to a presidential system is likely to grant sweeping executive powers to the country’s president. What may have escaped the outside gaze, however, is the extent to which the landscape of dissent was steeped in hope…

By Elektra Kostopoulou. More than ten days after the contentious constitutional Turkish referendum of April 16th, developments in Turkey seem to confirm that the country is moving from bad to worse: human rights abuses, violent censorship, massive retaliations against any form of opposition…

By Aimilia Voulvouli. It was during a visit to a private hospital in Kayseri, a central Anatolian city in Turkey considered to represent the so-called New Turkey (Yeni Türkiye) — that I saw a headscarved woman wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. To me, that was very unusual…

By Jennifer Curtis. One apocryphal account says that, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a very good idea.”[1] In the present, the political form so closely associated with Western civilization—democracy—appears aspirational as well…

By Bilge Firat. “In democratic states, no single man can shape social life according to his thinking. The new era of restoration will help our society to make peace with itself, to stand on its own intellectual formation, cultural values…”

By Serra Hakyemez. On April 16, 2017 at around 5pm, an hour before voting for Turkey’s landmark constitutional referendum was completed, the eleven member Supreme Board of Elections (YSK) decided that ballot envelopes lacking YSK’s…

By Valeria Verdolini. My dear friend Gabriele del Grande, journalist, documentarian, and war correspondent was stopped by Turkish authorities in Hatay Province in Southern Turkey on April, 9th 2017. He was there doing research for his new…

By Francesco Vacchiano. Gabriele Del Grande is an Italian activist, free-lance journalist and writer who has published extensively on migration and borders in the Mediterranean. He is the author of the blog Fortress Europe, the first independent initiative aimed at documenting…

By Heath Cabot. In response to Turkey’s constitutional referendum on April 16, 2017, which replaces the parliamentary system with an executive presidency, PoLAR and APLA commissioned a series of responses from scholars and activists focused on democracy…