S10E05: Soli Özel on Turkey’s Polit­i­cal Protests 

This episode explores the broad impli­ca­tions of the large-scale protests across Turkey in response to Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s repres­sion of polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. What is the back­ground to the recent devel­op­ments that the Turk­ish regime faces? And what are the dilem­mas that have giv­en rise to this polit­i­cal storm? Lis­ten to hear why the cur­rent resis­tance in the streets to author­i­tar­i­an­ism is a sign that young peo­ple and ordi­nary cit­i­zens are will­ing to pro­tect democracy.

Guest fea­tured on this episode:

Soli Özel is a known Turk­ish polit­i­cal sci­en­tist and a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al. Özel teach­es in the Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions Depart­ment of Kadir Has Uni­ver­si­ty in Istan­bul since 2010 and has among oth­ers also taught at Johns Hop­kins School of Advanced Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty and at the Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty of Jerusalem.
Fur­ther­more, Özel wrote a dai­ly col­umn on inter­na­tion­al rela­tions in the news­pa­per Sabah until it was seized by the Turk­ish regime in 2007. He was then for­eign news direc­tor of Gaze­ta Habertürk dai­ly, launched in 2009. He fur­ther served as edi­tor-in-chief of the Turk­ish edi­tion of For­eign Pol­i­cy and has been con­tribut­ing to Project Syn­di­cate on Turk­ish pol­i­tics. Cur­rent­ly, Özel is a fel­low at the Insti­tute of Human Sci­ences, the IWM in Vien­na, work­ing on a project titled “Track­ing the Mak­ing of a New World Order and Europe’s Place in It”.