Foreign Policy MAGAZINE
Turkey’s Government Uses Disaster for Profit
2023, with Arjin Taş
After the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, I co-authored an opinion essay in Foreign Policy, drawing on my research on how social mobilization affects the implementation of urban transformation policies (see “Implementing Authoritarian Policies” in the Research tab). This piece explains how the Turkish legal and organizational framework for post-disaster reconstruction puts Kurdish and Alevi communities at risk of further displacement and dispossession.
The Turkish government’s urban transformation framework, which has been gradually developed since 2002, was supposed to facilitate the evacuation and reconstruction of the very buildings that came crashing down. Instead, research shows, urban transformation projects became a tool for the ruling party to displace and dispossess minority communities for economic growth and political control.
6 Books to Understand Turkey
2023, A Review of Cihan Tugal’s The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism
Ahead of the Turkish national elections in 2023, I was invited by Foreign Policy to review a book of my choosing about the trajectory of authoritarian rule in Turkey to be featured in an essay collection.
Within its first year in power, in 2003, [Erdogan’s government] was already cherry-picking democratic institutions and values in the name of bringing together Islam and liberalism. The project was celebrated regionally and globally at the time, with Western observers hailing a “Turkish Model” that showed Islam and democracy could coexist.
Şehrazat G. Mart, Ph.D. 