By Jernej Letnar Černič. For decades, pluralism, the rule of law, and human rights have been the backbone of constitutional democracies. Those ideals have been embraced by academia, at least in constitutional democracies.
By Alihan Mestci. Culture is a battle that “has not yet been won” – this has been iterated on numerous occasions by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ever since late 2016, the year of the July 15th coup attempt. The state of emergency has given a legal blank check for thousands of dismissals in the civil service as well as for the criminalization and marginalization of dissenting voices from the media and civil society.
By David Armitage. Threats to academic freedom are now proliferating and accelerating in almost every part of the world. What could once be detected and resisted within specific local or national settings now increasingly appears to be part of a global movement to constrain, abridge, or abolish one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring positive freedoms.
By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.
By Sari Hanafi. By academic freedoms, I mean the freedom of thought and of creating new ideas and the freedom of expression through teaching, conferences, research, and publications.
By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.
By Noémi Lévy-Aksu. Since the mid-2010s, the authoritarian turn of the Turkish regime has resulted in multiple violations of human rights and freedoms. Universities have been particularly affected by the process, with mass dismissals of academics, repeated attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and repression of students’ initiatives and protests.
By Amr Hamzawy. On September 28, 2020, a half-century had passed since the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The legacy of the “July 1952 Republic”, whose legal and political pillars he built between 1952 and 1954 and that he ruled until his death in 1970, is still omnipresent in today’s Egypt.
By Balázs Trencsényi. The attacks on the autonomy of universities and the attempts to curb the independence of research institutes, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have been central features of authoritarian political projects.
Libora Oates-Indruchová. Communist regimes recognized the political importance, and therefore danger, of the social sciences and the humanities. That is why they elevated them to the order of utmost societal importance, but chained them to the ruling ideology.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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