Esra Mungan | |
---|---|
Born | Turkey |
Nationality | Turkish |
Occupation | Academic |
Esra Mungan is a Turkish academic and associate professor of psychology at Boğaziçi University [1] who was arrested in 2016 [2] for signing the Academics for Peace petition "We won’t be a party to this crime!" demanding a peaceful solution to the conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in South-East Turkey. [3] Mungan was among the 1128 signatories of a January 2016 petition calling for an end to violence in the region. In March 2016 she was arrested for a month. Her university was supportive of her during the period of her arrest.
Mungan, along with other members of Academics for Peace faced up to seven years in prison under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code which penalises 'denigrating Turkishness'. On the first day of her trial for 'terror propaganda', she was freed by a Turkish court “pending permission from the justice ministry” to reduce the severity of the charge. [4]
Mungan studied for her undergraduate degree at Bogazici University before achieving an MA and PhD from American University in Washington, DC. [5]
The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement which historically operated throughout Kurdistan but is now primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Since 1984, the PKK has utilized asymmetric warfare in the Kurdish–Turkish conflict. Although the PKK initially sought an independent Kurdish state, in the 1990s its goals changed to seeking autonomy and increased political and cultural rights for Kurds within Turkey.
Kurds have had a long history of discrimination perpetrated against them by the Turkish government. Massacres have periodically occurred against the Kurds since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Among the most significant is the massacre that happened during the Dersim rebellion, when 13,160 civilians were killed by the Turkish Army and 11,818 people were sent into exile. According to McDowall, 40,000 people were killed. The Zilan massacre of 1930 was a massacre of Kurdish residents of Turkey during the Ararat rebellion, in which 5,000 to 47,000 were killed.
Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 of the Constitution of Turkey.
Critical terrorism studies (CTS) applies a critical theory approach rooted in counter-hegemonic and politically progressive critical theory to the study of terrorism. With links to the Frankfurt School of critical theory and the Aberystwyth School of critical security studies, CTS seeks to understand terrorism as a social construction, or a label, that is applied to certain violent acts through a range of political, legal and academic processes. It also seeks to understand and critique dominant forms of counter-terrorism.
Gültan Kışanak is a Kurdish journalist, author and politician from Turkey. Kışanak was born in Elazığ in 1961. Her family is originally from Dersim. She is a former member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and Mayor of Diyarbakır. She has been imprisoned since October 2016.
Aslı Erdoğan is a prize-winning Turkish writer, author, human rights activist, and columnist for Özgür Gündem and formerly for Radikal, ex political prisoner, particle physicist. Her second novel has been published in English, and eight books translated into twenty languages.
"I Apologize" is an online campaign launched in December 2008 in Turkey by numerous journalists, politicians, and professors, calling for a collective apology for the Armenian genocide, which the campaign calls "the Great Catastrophe that Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915." The campaign was launched by Prof. Ahmet İnsel, politician Baskın Oran, Dr. Cengiz Aktar, and journalist Ali Bayramoğlu. The campaign emphasizes regret on behalf of Turkey that Armenian requests for recognition of the 1915 genocide has been actively suppressed within Turkey. The campaign was signed by 5,000 people within the first 24 hours, and had collected over 30,000 signatories by January 2009. The campaign created widespread outrage in Turkish society.
OdaTV(also known as Odatv.com, Odatv or odaTV), an online news portal based in Turkey, was founded in 2007. It is one of the most followed news portals in Turkey and according to the Alexa statistics, it is the 119th most visited website in the country.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a pan-Islamist and fundamentalist group seeking to re-establish "the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate)" as an Islamic "superstate" where Muslim-majority countries are unified and ruled under Islamic Shariah law, and which eventually expands globally to include non-Muslim states. In Central Asia, the party has expanded since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s from a small group to "one of the most powerful organizations" operating in Central Asia. The region itself has been called "the primary battleground" for the party. Uzbekistan is "the hub" of Hizb ut-Tahrir's activities in Central Asia, while its "headquarters" is now reportedly in Kyrgyzstan.
The 2016–present purges in Turkey are a series of purges by the Government of Turkey enabled by a state of emergency in reaction to the 15 July failed coup d'état. The purges began with the arrest of Turkish Armed Forces personnel reportedly linked to the coup attempt but arrests were expanded to include other elements of the Turkish military, as well as civil servants and private citizens. These later actions reflected a power struggle between secularist and Islamist political elites in Turkey, affected people who were not active in nor aware of the coup, but who the government claimed were connected with the Gülen movement, an opposition group which the government blamed for the coup. Possession of books authored by Gülen was considered valid evidence of such a connection and cause for arrest.
Academic freedom in the Middle East is a contested and debated issue, which has caught regional and international attention. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, in general, the authoritarian regimes have all showed a certain degree of opposition to every sort of freedom, academic one not excluded, regardless of the type of regime basis they had. Freedom for academicians to inquiry, research, teach and communicate ideas or report facts without being threatened or persecuted or with the possibility of losing their position, being censored or repressed is threatened. What contributes to academic freedom violations is also that they are essential elements for the regimes to maintain their power and in addition to this issue, interstate and civil wars as well as internal disorders and external intervention can damage educational structures and institutions. Additionally, as far as the regime is concerned, a security or national threat can be a pretest for suffocate or suspend academic research and debate. Restrictions on academic freedom also regards the topics of research, which are under significant constraints, although these might be highly interesting and worth researching.
Bakırköy Women's Prison, or officially Bakırköy Women's Closed Penitentiary, is a state women's correctional institution in Istanbul, Turkey. It was established in 2008.
Tuna Altınel is a Turkish mathematician, born February 12, 1966 in Istanbul, who has worked at the University Lyon 1 in France since 1996. He is a specialist in group theory and mathematical logic. With Alexandre Borovik and Gregory Cherlin, he proved a major case of the Cherlin–Zilber conjecture.
The Academics for Peace refers to an association of academics who support a peaceful solution to the Kurdish Turkish conflict. They were established in November 2012 and their first public appearance was in support of hunger strikers in Turkish prisons.
Hrant Dink Foundation is an organization established following the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist, in order to "carry on Hrant’s dreams, Hrant’s struggle, Hrant’s language and Hrant’s heart". Among the organization's specific goals are to monitor hate speech in Turkey, to study history from a non-nationalist perspective especially using oral history, build relationships between Turkey, Armenia and Europe, and improve democratization and human rights in Turkey.
Ayşe Gül Altınay is a Turkish academic working in the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies, focusing especially on militarism, violence, and memory. She is a professor of anthropology at Sabancı University and director of the university's Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence. Altınay stated that "the main question that shapes my work and my life" is "Are we going to turn our pain into more violence, hate, pain and injustice, or into steps that multiply life, beauty, love, peace and justice?" She is a signatory of the Academics for Peace petition "We will not be party to this crime!" and advocates a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict.
Alican Önlü is a politician of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) and a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Throughout his political career he was a politician in a variety of parties such as the Democracy Party (DEP) and the Democratic Society Party (DTP).
Şebnem Korur Fincancı is a Turkish medic, former professor, and current president of the Turkish Medical Association (TBB). She is an internationally renowned expert on human rights and a member of the Turkish Human Rights Association (TİHV).
Sevilay Çelenk Özen is an academic and politician, an Academic for Peace and a member of the Green Left Party (YSP). Since June 2023, she is a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey representing Diyarbakir for the YSP. Before she was a staff member of the Ankara University.
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