APLA / PoLAR Respond to the Constitutional Referendum

 

Editorial Introduction: Heath Cabot

On April 16, 2017, the referendum initiated by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was passed, further consolidating presidential authority and dismantling many of the safeguards that limit executive power. Despite the guise of democratic process, the referendum raises severe concerns regarding the—already fragile—future of democracy and human rights in Turkey. The violently dismantled coup in July 2016 appeared to many to be less a bona fide coup than

 

#FREEGABRIELE, RIGHT NOW!: 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 the deadly effects of the European policies of mobility restriction and control. For almost fifteen years, he has been following the routes of the migrants who head to Europe, narrating their longing for a better life and free movement…

 

ON THE FREEDOM OF BODIES: 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, 9^th 2017. He was there doing research for his new book project “A partisan told me,” about the grassroots narratives of the War in Syria and refugees stories. His work started more than 10 years agowith the blog “Fortress Europe,” in which he sought to count all the deaths in the Mediterranean. Tracking this number, which became enormous over the years…

 

THE SEALS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM IN TURKEY: SERRA HAKYEMEZ

On April 16, 2017 at about 5 p.m., an hour before the voting for Turkey’s landmark constitutional referendum was completed, the eleven member Supreme Board of Elections (YSK) decided that ballot envelopes lacking YSK’s official stamp should be considered valid unless they were proven to be forged. Holding ultimate authority over elections, YSK thereby abandoned the utility of its own seal against forgery and asked election officials not to weed out unvalidated envelopes from the ballot box…

 

DIVIDED BY DEMOCRACY?: 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, and history, not on those of this or that leader.” The recorder captured these words after a historic vote in Turkey. Contrary to the reader’s expectation, perhaps, the vote in question was not last week’s referendum where the peoples of Turkey voted on a set of constitutional amendments…

 

Disappearing Democracies, Editorial Introduction Part 2: 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.” In the present, the political form so closely associated with Western civilization—democracy—appears aspirational as well. Recent elections in countries conventionally considered part of the democratic west appear to threaten the democratic form itself. Across the globe, we have seen rhetorical and electoral assertions of ethnicized sovereignty against outsiders, particularly against…

 

The “Anatolian Revolution” and the “Spirit of Capitalism:” Aimilia Voulvouli

It was during a visit to a private hospital in Kayseri, a central Anatolian city in Turkey, hometown of Abdullah Gül (former President of the Republic and founding member of the ruling Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) — a city 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. As an outsider, it was my understanding that pious Muslim women…

 

Erdoğan Is (Partially) Right: 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. This is hardly a surprise. In the past decade or so, the regime of Tayyip Erdoğan has become synonymous with autocracy. Hence, the outcome of a referendum that inextricably links the fate of millions to the will of one man (and his cronies)…

 

The Complicity of Hope: 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 in the months leading up to the referendum, despite the fact that all the odds were stacked against a “No” outcome. For starters, the vote was held in a state of emergency…

 

Hope and Turkey’s Political Imagination, Editorial Introduction Part 3: 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 the importance of the past for understanding the present. She critiques the discourse of exceptionalism that surrounds the referendum by placing it within the context of the ongoing Kurdish political struggle…

 

Colonial Envy and the Unbearable Success of the Kurdish Political Struggle: 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 heterogeneous “no” block for the 2019 elections. Although the CHP, which represents itself as the main opposition party, objected to the election results on the basis of fraud and submitted an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, the party’s leader also stated his disapproval of the protests…

 

Is It Over? On the Melancholy of Lost Hope: 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 in the Turkish capital. But is the debate, really, over? Hours into the referendum, the Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey (YSK) allowed the inclusion of voting slips and envelopes without official stamps to the vote count, which was a violation of Article 98 of the Electoral Law…