State and Society in Turkey after the Earthquakes: Initial Reflections

In this two-part essay, Ülker Sözen lay out her initial observations and reflections about the state and society’s responses in the aftermath of the massive disaster in Turkey

Ülker Sözen

Ülker Sözen received her PhD in Sociology from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Turkey in 2017. Her dissertation explored the identity revival and the entanglement of culture and politics among the Dersimli people.

Making Russia Great Again?

How the Kremlin suppressed Russian nationalists, but ended up pursuing their greatest ambition

IRGAC

New Study: Independent Media in Myanmar Since the Military Coup

Nine months after the elected government was overthrown, free and independent media is almost non-existent

Nwet Kay Khine

Nwet Kay Khine, a former journalist and writer from Myanmar, is now affiliated to the Center for Social Development Studies under the Faculty of Political Science of Chulalongkorn University.

2001 as a Murmur, Looting as a Project, and New Promises for Social Change

The economic crisis and the pandemic tinge the 2021 election campaign in Argentina. 20 years after the events of December 2001 it is worth asking about their imprint, lessons, and projection for the future. Is a cycle coming to an end?

Mariano Féliz

Mariano Féliz is a social activist in Argentina. Currently, he mostly works on political education with and within social organizations, and is active in union struggles within the University and Research Center where he is employed. He is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and researcher at the CIG-IDIHCS of the CONICET/UNLP. There, he teaches political economy and conducts research on the transformations of dependent capitalism and its relationship to social struggles. He is mostly concerned about recovering the tradition of Marxian Dependency Theory, showing how it can be articulated with current debates within feminist economics and Marxist ecological debates.

How to Achieve Transnational Solidarity in the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism and Border Securitization?

In this essay, I want to address the complications stemming from the political economy of transnational solidarity networks and the power asymmetry in them, mainly through discussing the Turkish case. Neoliberal globalization and its political geography built upon colonial divisions have become the framework for cross-national solidarity as well as the recent authoritarian turn, while at the same time bringing in structural setbacks to the former. Furthermore, the recent migration “crises”, that are caused by imperialist interventions, have been met with heightened border securitization in the Global North, limiting the field for international human rights activism. This introduces a serious additional challenge to the conception and practice of transnational solidarity.

Ülker Sözen

The Alt-Right in Latin America

Following the collapse of left-wing populist movements in Latin America, neoliberal and authoritarian governments have spread all over the region. Clear examples of this resurgence are Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lenin Moreno in Ecuador, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, not to mention the authoritarian drift of Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. This authoritarian turn at the institutional-political level has been accompanied by ideological changes in public and ‘non-public’ opinion: hate speech, anti-egalitarian discourses, authoritarian values, and an individualistic common sense. Of course, these discourses existed in the past too, but their virulence and the new constellations in which they are inscribed represent an ideological novelty in the Latin American political landscape.

Gustavo Robles

Gustavo Robles studied contemporary history and philosophy, an area in which he received his Ph.D. degree. He has been an Associated Professor at the Department of Education at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), a Postdoc-Researcher at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (UNLP-CONICET, Argentina), and an Invited Lecturer at different Argentinian Universities. He also carried out doctoral and postdoctoral research stays at different German universities, such as the University of Frankfurt, the University of Jena, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. His areas of research interests are Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary political thought, and social philosophy, and his current project is focused on the connections between subjectivization processes and affective dimensions in current authoritarian neoliberalism. Furthermore, he is an activist in different political and cultural collectives in Argentina and Germany related to issues such as human rights and immigrant working conditions.

Last publications:
"Crisis de la experiencia y (pos)fascismos. Lecturas desde la Teoría Crítica". Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica. N° 13. 312-339. 2021

"La teoría del reconocimiento de Axel Honneth. Análisis crítico". In Comou, Antonio (ed.). Perspectivas en Teoría Social Contemporánea. La Plata: EDULP. 2021

"El fin de algunas ilusiones. Subjetividad y democracia en tiempos de regresión autoritaria". Resistencias. Revista de Filosofía de la Historia. 2(1). 14-27- 2020

"Sobre la dimensión política del resentimiento" (2020). Castalia. Revista de Psicología. 34. 5-23

Campuses in Action: Myanmar’s Academia Resisting against the Coup

“My decision was firm since I left my university in mid of February. My aunts are now giving me pressure to go back to my professor job. After seeing atrocities and mass killing of the junta, I no longer want to be part of the system they are ruling.”

Nwet Kay Khine

Nwet Kay Khine, a former journalist and writer from Myanmar, is now affiliated to the Center for Social Development Studies under the Faculty of Political Science of Chulalongkorn University.

Latin American Neoconservatisms and Antifeminism: Freedom, Family, and Life

In Latin America, the re-neoliberalization of political and economic systems has intensified an ongoing process of de-democratization, strengthening the onslaught by neoconservative religious and secular groups, which have been growing more powerful since around 2013. These two processes—re-neoliberalization and the growth of neoconservatisms—are connected.

Ailynn Torres

Ailynn Torres Santana is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (2019-2022), a visiting researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin (2021), an associate researcher at FLACSO Ecuador (2019-2022), and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University – Chicago (fall 2021). She has been an associate professor at Universidad de la Habana (2006-2012) and visiting professor at Freie Universität Berlin (2021), FLACSO Ecuador (2016-2018, 2020-2022), Universidad de Barcelona (2015, 2018, 2022), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2018). In 2019 she was a visiting researcher at Harvard University. Her research interests include feminist movements, inequality, and citizenship in Latin America. She is editor of the books "Derechos en riesgo en América Latina: 11 estudios sobre grupos neoconservadores" (Quito/ Bogotá: Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo/Desde Abajo, 2020) and "Los Cuidados: del centro de la vida al centro de la política" (Santiago: FES-ILDIS, 2021). She has written lots of academic papers about gender inequalities and feminist politics in Latin America and Cuba. She has a column on OnCuba News and has collaborated with a lot of press platforms such as Jacobin-Lat, NACLA, and Sidecar-New Left Review. She is a member of the editorial boards of Cuban Studies (Harvard University) and Sin Permiso (Barcelona).

“We don’t keep quiet, we are not afraid, we don’t obey”

Femicides stand out as one of the biggest social problems in Turkey today causing a widespread and pronounced public reaction. The femicide cases are frequently on the news exploited by mainstream media with graphic coverage. The names of murdered women and pleas for retribution regularly become trending topic on Twitter. The outrage against femicides is expressive of the liberalizing worldviews and gender ideology in Turkish society while also conveying the popular contention against the government’s overall authoritarian politics along with its efforts for the recomposition of patriarchy.

Ülker Sözen

Myanmar’s Election Under the Threat of Right-Wing Populism

Life under Myanmar’s military dictatorship, which has existed in various guises since 1962, has been harsh, which is why people wish to send the military back into the barracks as soon as possible. On 8 November 2020 they chose the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, as the winning party in the country’s general election held every five years. Voter turnout was high in both Burmese-dominated areas in Central Myanmar and the other seven states representing the seven major ethnic groups: Kachin, Kayar, Kayin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine, and the Shan from the frontier areas bordering China, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India.

Nwet Kay Khine

Nwet Kay Khine, a former journalist and writer from Myanmar, is now affiliated to the Center for Social Development Studies under the Faculty of Political Science of Chulalongkorn University.