Academic Freedom Under Attack in Turkey: 2019 Presidential Address, International Society of Political Psychology

Abstract

This paper addresses the ongoing challenges to academic freedom in Turkey, site of the 2011 ISPP meeting and a then‐burgeoning cadre of political psychologists working to build the discipline in Turkey. In January 2016, the Academics for Peace signed a petition challenging the government's policies towards the Kurds, following which the government began to purge both signatories and other academics. The purge gained traction after the July 2016 attempted coup, which the government put down. Academics and others were dismissed by decree (KHK) and barred from working in any occupation. This paper, a revised version of the 2019 ISPP Presidential Address, discusses the scope of the attack on academic freedom in Turkey and reports on a survey of both dismissed and nondismissed academics in Turkey to discuss the implications of being unexpectedly torn from a position that is as much a calling as it is a job.

The sword or the plowshare: Conflict and third‐party groups' reaction to violent versus nonviolent resistance

“…This study was planned before the coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, but the authors decided to wait to collect data because of the sensitive security situation in Turkey, and therefore the data collection started 7 months after the coup attempt. However, despite the delay following the coup attempt, the situation in Turkey remained unstable as many people were fired from their jobs, arrested, or imprisoned, amidst heightened suspicion towards anything that could be seen as questioning the government (see e.g., Redlawsk, 2021). Therefore, we had to cut data collection in Turkey short, only collecting data from 60 Kurdish and 40 Turkish participants.…”