The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul's mayor and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's most formidable rival, on March 19th sparked the largest demonstrations in Turkey in years. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets, expressing their discontent with the government and demanding the release of the city's imprisoned mayor, who is the Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for the 2028 Turkish presidential election. According to Reuters, nearly 1,900 people have been arrested.
İmamoğlu’s jailing marks another significant moment in Turkey’s shift toward authoritarianism—an ongoing process that arguably began in 2010 with a constitutional referendum that granted President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies control over the judiciary. In recent years, hundreds of activists, journalists, politicians, and municipal officials have been imprisoned. Shahram Aghamir spoke with UC Berkeley sociologist Cihan Tugal and started by asking him how this consolidation power took place in Turkey.
Jacobin: The Unlikely Resistance in Turkey
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The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul's mayor and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's most formidable rival, on March 19th sparked the largest demonstrations in Turkey in years. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets, expressing their discontent with the government and demanding the release of the city's imprisoned mayor, who is the Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for the 2028 Turkish presidential election. According to Reuters, nearly 1,900 people have been arrested.
İmamoğlu’s jailing marks another significant moment in Turkey’s shift toward authoritarianism—an ongoing process that arguably began in 2010 with a constitutional referendum that granted President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies control over the judiciary. In recent years, hundreds of activists, journalists, politicians, and municipal officials have been imprisoned. Shahram Aghamir spoke with UC Berkeley sociologist Cihan Tugal and started by asking him how this consolidation power took place in Turkey.
Jacobin: The Unlikely Resistance in Turkey
The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul's mayor and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's most formidable rival, on March 19th sparked the largest demonstrations in Turkey in years. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets, expressing their discontent with the government and demanding the release of the city's imprisoned mayor, who is the Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for the 2028 Turkish presidential election. According to Reuters, nearly 1,900 people have been arrested.
İmamoğlu’s jailing marks another significant moment in Turkey’s shift toward authoritarianism—an ongoing process that arguably began in 2010 with a constitutional referendum that granted President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies control over the judiciary. In recent years, hundreds of activists, journalists, politicians, and municipal officials have been imprisoned. Shahram Aghamir spoke with UC Berkeley sociologist Cihan Tugal and started by asking him how this consolidation power took place in Turkey.
Jacobin: The Unlikely Resistance in Turkey
Bassam Haddad is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and coeditor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021).
Haddad is cofounder/editor of Jadaliyya ezine and executive director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as founding editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is coproducer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism.
Sami Hermez, PhD, is director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism.
On this edition of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, we speak with Dr. Eli Cahan about why Arab and Muslim Americans face significantly higher rates of mental illness.
On this edition of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, we have a conversation with Jacobin staff writer BRANKO MARCETIC about his In These Times investigation, which reveals the individuals behind AIPAC’s election war chest: nearly 60% are CEOs and other top executives at the country’s largest corporations.
On this edition of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, we have a conversation with independent journalist Adnan Khan about his recent article in MERIP titled "A Deadly Trade—Refugee Labor in Turkey and Europe’s Plastic Waste."
He writes that China’s ban came at an ideal time for Turkey’s plastic recyclers. Less than two years before it was implemented, the European Union had signed a controversial migration deal with the Turkish government. Turkey was promised six billion euros, among other political guarantees, to keep refugees from crossing into Europe. At the same time, funding for Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency, had soared, swelling to over 754 million euros in 2022, an increase of nearly 300 percent since the deal was signed.
Much of the waste Turkey receives consists of low quality and contaminated plastics, dirty trash that often arrives in the country illegally.
The results were predictable: refugee numbers in Turkey spiked from nearly 2.8 million at the end of 2015 to nearly 3.8 million by the end of 2017. The availability of cheap refugee labor has been key to sustaining Turkey’s burgeoning recycling sector. Much of the waste Turkey receives consists of low quality and contaminated plastics, dirty trash that often arrives in the country illegally.
The Mediterranean Sea has become a huge cemetery for many thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have been risking their lives trying to cross it in search of a better future.
This week, we speak with Athens based independent journalist Moira Lavelle about the state of refugees and asylum seekers trying to reach Greece-
Later in the program, we remember Palestinian revolutionary and novelist Ghassan Kanafani- He was killed in Beirut by the Israeli Mossad spy agency on 8 July 1972. He was 36 years old.
Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are at all-time high. Israel and Lebenese Hezbollah have been exchanging fire since October 8 the, when Israel launched its devastating war on Gaza, but the conflict between the two archenemies escalated after one of Hezbollah's most senior commanders was killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon, on June 11the. Hezbollah retaliated by launching a large volley of rockets and attack drones at Israel. Concurrently, both sides have stepped up their rhetoric. Are Israel and Hezbollah on the brink of an all-out war? What will the implications of such a war be for Lebanon, Israel and the region? And what is the nexus between Israeli-Hezbollah conflict and Israel’s colonization of Palestine and its ongoing genocidal war in Gaza?
Shahram Aghamir put these questions to Karim Makdisi. He is an associate Professor of international politics and founding director of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut – Professor Makdisi is also the co-host of Makdisi Street podcast
The detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul's mayor and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's most formidable rival, on March 19th sparked the largest demonstrations in Turkey in years. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets, expressing their discontent with the government and demanding the release of the city's imprisoned mayor, who is the Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate for the 2028 Turkish presidential election. According to Reuters, nearly 1,900 people have been arrested.
İmamoğlu’s jailing marks another significant moment in Turkey’s shift toward authoritarianism—an ongoing process that arguably began in 2010 with a constitutional referendum that granted President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies control over the judiciary. In recent years, hundreds of activists, journalists, politicians, and municipal officials have been imprisoned. Shahram Aghamir spoke with UC Berkeley sociologist Cihan Tugal and started by asking him how this consolidation power took place in Turkey.
Jacobin: The Unlikely Resistance in Turkey
