The past decade has seen Turkey veer from the path of a democratizing Muslim nation to authoritarian consolidations of power under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Beginning with the police crackdown on protests over the razing of Gezi Park in 2013 and, mostly, recently followed by the jailing of thousands of academics, judges and journalists after a failed coup attempt in July of 2016, concerns continue to mount about Turkey’s move to autocracy and the subsequent ramifications for free speech and academic freedom. Turkey now surpasses China as the country with the most journalists in prison and more than half of all the content removal requests received by Twitter during the second half of 2016 came from Turkey.
Join us, the Cleveland Council on World Affairs, Global Cleveland, International Partners in Mission, and the Northeast Ohio Consortium for Middle Eastern Studies (NOCMES) for a free conversation on the experiences of academics, government officials and journalists under the Erdoğan regime in Turkey.
