International Relations/ Jean Monnet Seminars
Gul Barkay "Imagining the Future and Rewriting the Past: Turkish Cypriots A New History and History Wars in Cyprus"
On 23rd of February 2009, Gul Barkay from Eastern Meditearranean University visited Koc University and presented her recent paper on Cyprus and Turkish Cypritos.
Kim Rygiel "Globalizing Citizenship: Governing Global Mobility and the Securitized Citizen"
On 12th of February 2009, Kim Rygiel from McMaster University, visited Koc University and presented her paper on governing global mobility and the idea of the securitized citizen. She discusses that: "Industrialized countries have used the “fight against terror” in order to implement new citizenship, immigration, asylum and detention laws as well as more policing and surveillance technologies. Yet, the implementation of such measures has not led simply to the re-entrenchment of the modern territorial state. The process of securitizing the state and its body politic has, paradoxically, facilitated the development of citizenship into a globalizing regime of government, where citizenship increasingly depends on the displacement of power traditionally located in agents of the state to other actors such as international organizations, private companies, and individuals themselves. Dr. Rygiel illustrates these shifts in governing through a discussion of technologies such as risk profiling, data mining and biometrics, arguing that they are producing a more exclusionary mobility regime that deepens inequality and recasts the meaning of what it means to be a citizen towards more technocratic and depoliticized definitions of the citizen."
Sener Akturk "Re-defining Ethnicity and Belonging: Persistence and Transformation in Regimes of Ethnicity in Germany and Turkey."
On 9th of February 2009, Sener Akturk from University of California Berkeley visited our university and presented a recent paper on ethnicity and belonging. In his he discusses the dynamics of persistence and change in policies related to ethnicity and nationality in Germany and Turkey since the 1950s. The argument rests on the existence of three political factors -a counter-elite, a new discourse, and a hegemonic majority- that are separately necessary and jointly sufficient for change. If counter-elites representing constituencies with ethnically specific grievances come to power, armed with a new discourse on ethnicity and nationality, and garner a hegemonic majority, then they can change state policies on ethnicity. If either one or more of these three factors is lacking, we observe persistence in the state policies and institutions regarding ethnicity. Findings are based on parliamentary proceedings, electoral data, biographical and autobiographical accounts, as well as over fifty interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, leaders of ethnic minority organizations, intellectuals, academics, and others involved in the politics of ethnicity in Berlin, Moscow, Ankara, and Istanbul.
Viatcheslav Morozov "Sovereign Democracy and Humanitarian Intervention: New World Order in Making?"
On 17 November 2008 Dr. Viatcheslav Morozov from St. Petersburg State University, visited our university and presented a recent paper on "Sovereign Democracy and Humanitarian Intervention: New World Order in Making?". In his talk he referred to the latest crisis between Georgia and Russia and discussed the growing influence of non-western powers and their undemocratic measures. He explicitly stated the increasing mistrust in following of international law and order. On the other hand he also added that even though this situation might seem like going back to nineteenth century type of power politics, the way that Russia used its forces was a move "forward" rather than "back". In his view the emergent powers are starting to use the terms, democracy and humanitarian intervention in a new way, which is different than the West's idea of democratization (Liberalization and Westernization). The way that they use these terms opens up a new discussion, democracy promotion, instead of being a tool of liberalization (and westernization), might be used by the emergent powers to justify their expansionism and interventionism. This raises a whole range of normative concerns focused around the notions of democracy and sovereignty, and demonstrates that in the liberal globalist discourse too much is taken for granted.
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