İstanbul Roundable: Trust in Democratic Societies
The theme of our first roundtable, held on Thursday, May 23 at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul was “Trust in Democratic Societies“.
Prof. Dr. Nader El-Bizri (Department of Philosophy, American University in Beirut) and Assoc. Prof. Edward Alam (Department of Philosophy and Theology, Notre Dame University, Lebanon) gave two brief yet stimulating presentations on the notion of trust that prompted a lively conversation among the participants.
Nader El-Bizri touched upon epistemic and affective considerations revolving around the notion of trust, while Edward Alam shared some thoughts on the relationship between trust, faith, morality, and personhood. The roundtable participants reflected on the issues raised by the speakers from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical standpoints and engaged in a highly thought-provoking interdisciplinary exercise that we hope to give rise to a sustained, longer-term dialogue and collaboration.
Report: Dimensions of Polarization in Turkey
by Emre Erdoğan
The recently published “Dimensions of Polarization in Turkey” survey presented a picture of Turkish society where political polarization is very high.
A comparison with earlier surveys indicates that the problem in Turkey is structural and not conjectural. The survey, conducted by the Istanbul Bilgi University Center for Migration Research with contributions from GMF’s Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, was completed with field studies in November–December 2017. Respondents in the survey were asked to identify a party whose supporters they feel close to (own party) and a party whose supporters they feel most distant from (other party). Then, these two points of reference were used to measure dimensions of polarization such as social distance, perceived moral superiority, and political intolerance.
Indications of high social distance were present in the survey, as 78 percent of the respondents did not approve of their daughter marrying a supporter of the “other party,” and only 29 percent said they would like to be neighbors with such a person. There were also signs of perceived moral superiority such as 91 percent of the respondents thinking supporters of “their political party” are “honorable” while 80 percent claiming that “other party’s” supporters are “arrogant.”
A disturbing level of political intolerance emerged from the survey: About half of the respondents supported wiretapping the phones of supporters of the “other party,” and 37 percent said they are against participation of the members of this group in elections. Unsurprisingly the three dimensions of polarization — social distance, perceived moral superiority, and political intolerance — were found to be correlated.
Publication on polarization in Turkey
by Spyros A. Sofos
“A momentary lapse of reason? Gezi in social-historical perspective” written by project Mosaic researcher Spyros A. Sofos and published in the Journal of Historical Sociology, attempts to situate the Gezi events and their legacy in the context of the polarisation of Turkish society.
Through the social-historical contextualization of Gezi protests and drawing on the works of Badiou and Turner this article conceptualises the protests as a ‘happening’ or ‘event’ characterized by rupture and liminality. Without underestimating their importance as a meaning creation process, it is argued that the visions inspiring Gezi have been/are in sharp contrast to the version of democracy shaped by the fears and aspirations of at least a plurality of the country’s citizenry and enacted by the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
At the same time, these visions remain largely incomprehensible to the Kemalist and nationalist opposition. The paper therefore suggests that Gezi should be located outside the linear time and conventional topography of Turkish politics and interpreted as a brief, powerful moment of rupture in a political system where both the incumbent political forces and the opposition and their constituencies are resisting change and consider extra-institutional ‘antipolitics’ as a threat.
Project Mosaic report now out
Our first report outlining our project objectives and our activities to date, including a summary of the first of our Istanbul Roundtables is out!
Download the report here
Project Mosaic 