Lefteast
LeftEast is grateful to Eylem Taylan and H. Deniz Sert who conducted this interview and to its subject, Cihan Tuğal for letting us translate the original Turkish text that they published at İlerihaber.org. The May 14 and 28 elections in Turkey resulted in the continuation of the Erdoğan regime even though almost half of the […]
Refugees, Racism, and the Turkish Ideology Villagers in the Turkish province of Konya murdered a whole family of Kurdish farmers on Friday, July 30. It was a premeditated massacre that announced itself well ahead of time to anyone willing to notice. Neighbors in the farming village of Hasanköy in central Anatolia had assaulted the Dedeoğulları family of […]
This year the Turkish government’s campaign to stamp out dissent has broken new ground, but a new spirit of resistance is there to meet it, particularly at one of the country’s landmark public universities. In what follows, two participants in the oppositional student movement at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul tell us about their struggle against […]
Note of the LeftEast editors: The present text, which we co-publish together with TSS is part of a series of publications and webinars on the topics of social reproduction, (women’s) labour and migration in East-Central Europe and beyond. The video from the first webinar Responses to Covid19 and (post)pandemic: social reproduction, migrants and women in Central/Eastern Europe and beyond, […]
‘If they have their dollars, we have our Allah’ – This is how the President of Turkey responded to the historic drop in the value of the lira in August this year before calling for boycotts of US products and discouraging the citizens from exchanging their liras into foreign currency in the name of defending […]
This article originally appeared on N+1mag and was penned by an anonymous author. SUAVE AND SYMPATHETIC, Beyazıt Öztürk is known for making even his most troublesome guests feel at home. The veteran comedian was in the middle of his call-in talk show, the most popular program on Turkish TV, when he received an unexpected call. […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: For the last several months in Turkish politics, the party-state’s agenda has been dominated by two interconnected operations: consolidation of power and elimination of opposition. The former will culminate in the constitutional referendum of April 16 this year, which will, if successful, transform Turkey from a parliamentary into a presidential […]
Turkey may hold a referendum on the transition to an authoritarian presidential system as soon as late March; however, Erdoğan’s Bonapartist shift does not herald stability for the ruling class, nor a solution to the crisis of neoliberalism. The argument that the contemporary world panorama resembles that of the 1930’s has almost become a cliché. […]
The rise and fall of the coup d’état in Turkey has disclosed a number of situational ironies, each of which indicates a difference between appearance and reality. A brief analysis of the two separate and contrasting levels of meaning embedded in at least six situations reveals some uncomfortable truths about Turkish politics and may also […]
The full version was published in Serbian on Masina. The attempted coup of July 15th caught me in Istanbul. What that night of adrenaline, shocking and confusing news, the sounds of machine-gun fire and low-flying military aircraft left me with was a desire to better understand what happened. Being so close to the Bosphorus bridges—a site of […]