This episode explores the far-reaching implications of the recent Turkish elections. In a closely contested election, President Erdoğan has won a third term in office, dashing hopes of a return to a liberal, secular, pro-European government in Turkey. What led to this result especially after the impact of the devastating earthquake and plummeting value of the Turkish lira? And what aspects of soft authoritarianism play a role in the country’s current political conditions?
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Glossary
Ukraine Grain Deal (Black Sea Grain Initiative)
(04:50 or p.2 in the transcript)
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian exports of grain have been severely disrupted. For over four months, Russian military vessels blocked Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea. On 22 July 2022, an agreement was brokered by the United Nations and Türkiye to open a safe maritime humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea (the Black Sea Grain Initiative). Since then, over 1 080 ships full of grain and other foodstuffs have left three Ukrainian ports: Chornomorsk, Odesa and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi. As of May 2023, over30 million tonnes of grain and other foodstuffs have been exported via the Black Sea Grain Initiative. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP – the largest humanitarian organisation in the world) is also shipping wheat from Black Sea ports. Before the war, the programme bought half of its grain stock from Ukraine. Since the start of the initiative in August 2022 over 625 000 tonnes of wheat have left Ukrainian ports to Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti. source
Syrian refugee population in Turkey
(14:30 or p.4 in the transcript)
Just over 3.5 million UNHCR-registered Syrian refugees currently live in Turkey, comprising the largest registered refugee population in the world. Hundreds of thousands of unregistered Syrian refugees are also estimated to live in Turkey, although the exact number is highly uncertain due to their legal status and heightened risk of deportation. Refugees began fleeing to Turkey in small numbers at the outset of the civil war in 2011, but the largest waves arrived in 2015 and 2016, when a series of brutal offensives by the Syrian regime – backed by the Russian air force and Iranian-funded militias – retook the largest rebel-held cities in northern and central Syria. Although the number of registered Syrian refugees in Turkey has remained relatively static since 2018, there has been significant change under the surface. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have continued to arrive since 2018, displaced by the regime’s airstrikes in rebel-held Idlib and its offensives to retake the country’s south. These arrivals have been offset by the roughly half a million refugees who have returned to Syria from Turkey since the war started.source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. This is the first episode of season seven, and it opens with a discussion of the recent Turkish election that has entrenched soft authoritarian rule further.
I'm really pleased to welcome Ulrike Flader, lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bremen. She's also a postdoctoral researcher in the research group on soft authoritarianism that I've initiated and lead at the University of Bremen. Ulrike earned her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester and has worked on, but also worked in Turkey for many years. She lost her position at a private university in Istanbul in early 2016 due to the repression towards the academics for peace.
Her research interests are in political anthropology, focusing specifically on the anthropology of the state, governmentality, citizenship, political subjectivity, social movements and the everyday. Her main area of expertise is Turkish politics and society, and among her publications, let me mention two: "Knowing the State and Countering Assimilation" which is in print, and "Building Alternative Communities Within the State: The Kurdish Movement, Local Municipalities, and Democratic Autonomy"[1] which came out in 2019 together with Çetin Gürer.
Her current research focuses on the specific state practices of managing and thereby dismantling opposition in Turkey today. It takes the production of affects as its lens to examine these state practices. Today I'll discuss with Ulrike the far-reaching implications of the recent Turkish elections. In a closely contested election, President Erdoğan has won 52 percent of the vote in the second round, which gives him a third term in office, dashing all hopes of ending his rule and a return to a pro-European democratic government in Turkey.
According to Reporters Without Borders, 90 percent of the media is in the hands of his party, the AKP, the electoral field was anything but level with the AKP regime basically having the state apparatus completely at its disposal. The ruling coalition lowered the parliamentary threshold from 10 percent to 7 percent last year partly to counter the dwindling popular support for the AKP's far-right coalition partner. So, the rules of the game were changed effectively to skew the results. Yet a majority of Turkish citizens in the country and an overwhelming majority of Turks living abroad in Europe have rallied around an ultranationalist autocratic leader who claims to provide security and stability against so-called terrorist threats. An experienced demagogue and autocrat has won over an untested soft-spoken leader backed by almost all opposition parties together. Erdoğan's supporters have backed a conservative Islamist agenda, along with the nostalgic call to make Turkey great again and to revive Ottoman glory.
They've chosen to overlook the looming economic crises, the galloping inflation peaking at 80 percent, and the currency depreciation. The Turkish lira, let's not forget, has lost over 30 percent in value. Erdoğan personally appointed no less than four central bank presidents in four years, and his own son-in-law is finance minister dictating disastrous interest rate policies. And the Turkish electorate has also turned a blind eye to blatant corruption and the abysmal human rights record of the regime with thousands of activists, journalists, political opponents in jail since years. Politics in Turkey will also have a large impact on the region as a whole, for Turkey has emerged as an important regional power, not only in the political dynamics in neighboring Iraq and Syria but also in brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine more recently allowing Ukraine to ship grain out of the country. Ulrike, welcome to the podcast, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Ulrike Flader (UF): Thank you so much for your invitation, Shalini.
SR: Ulrike, let's begin with a quick analysis of the electoral results before we turn to some of the more fundamental questions that your research deals with about the past and future of democracy in Turkey. How does one explain the unwavering support of a bit more than half of the electorate for President Erdoğan after 20 years in power with a rather checkered record, and a few months ago, polls were projecting an opposition victory, and yet here we are with a new term for him and the AKP?
UF: Yes, you are absolutely right. The polls had predicted the opposition to win. Interestingly, over the past years, polls have been extremely bad in predicting the outcomes of the elections, and this has aroused questions as to, why are the polling institutions too partisan? What has caused their inability to predict the outcomes? And it nurtures speculations about election fraud. But besides some cases in the counting of parliamentary votes in the east of Turkey, in the Kurdish region, there was no severe scale of election fraud that could be detected and decisively affected the outcome. I think we just have to face the fact that 50 percent of the electorate is actually behind Erdoğan despite all odds and the opposition couldn't actually break this.
SR: But do you have a good explanation for this support? Because what seems at first sight surprising is that despite a lot of popular discontent about the way in which the earthquake was managed, despite the fact that the Turkish lira has fallen, despite the rising inflation, so that everyday lives of ordinary people have been negatively affected, he was able to garner the support of half the population and the more than 80 percent of support from Turks living abroad.
UF: I think there are a couple of reasons why this is the case. Obviously, the conservative and ideological background of AKP voters, is a crucial reason why they do not vote for the oppositional parties. But Erdoğan is also seen as the strong man, the only one that actually can face and solve the issues that Turkey is confronted with at the moment.
There are obviously a couple of reasons why the AKP still gains support. And one, as we said, is very clearly the conservative and ideological background of these voters. But I think it's important to note that in fact, the AKP vote has dropped by seven percent from the last election and is now at 35.6 or something percent. Which is actually the level of what it had when it first came to power. So it's not that there is a fixed or stable portion of the voters, they do shift. The attacks on women's rights, and the harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric, this is nothing new, but I think it hasn't in fact increased the vote. So I think what we see now, and this was really shocking after this election, that Erdoğan used the discussion, especially around LGBTQ people, to discredit the whole opposition. So he identified both Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the HDP, and Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the CHP, with being pro-LGBT movement.
And so in a way, we can argue that non-binary, non-heterosexual population has become sort of the new terrorists, and this is extremely dangerous. It has already triggered violence throughout Turkey, and it can do that again.
I think the AKP has managed over the past years to establish a system of clientelism, of patronage, and this binds the population, the voters actually, directly to the party and means that the fate of the voters themselves is directly tied to the fate of the party. And I think this is something that we often neglect.
SR: We did see photographs of Erdoğan personally handing out cash to people just before the elections to his supporters, especially in the regions devastated by the recent earthquake. And that was something which came as a surprise. But what kind of a role does the very tightly controlled state media play in his electoral victory?
UF: This was an election that was kind of David against Goliath situation. I mean, the AKP has all the possibilities of the state in its hands. We remember just shortly before the first round of elections, he had all the media, I think 24 channels, presenting his own interview. This is important to understand the conditions in which the opposition is obviously struggling to win this election. But nevertheless, it doesn't fully explain why despite all the aspects that you mentioned already, the deteriorating economy, the deflation of the lira, the overt corruption and cronyism and the dismantling of the independent judiciary, how in spite of all this, the opposition was not able to actually manage to break the support.
SR: Do you think, and this is of course now speculation and too late, but do you think they would've done better had they had a candidate like for example, Istanbul's mayor as the oppositional candidate, someone better known and with a record?
UF: This is obviously the discussion that has been going on since the lost election. It's difficult to tell. It's a broad coalition where the far-right parties are included. But there was also an agreement with the Kurdish left-wing party for their voters to support this candidate. So it was a very difficult level, or a difficult situation to actually provide a good candidate in this situation. These other candidates that are further right-wing, the Kurdish voters would've never agreed to actually vote for them. The choice of the candidate was not necessarily the problem. The voters of the AKP are fundamentally tied into this system besides being conservative. Even before the elections, if you look at the calculations, the polls were far off to see this broad coalition in the 60% or something like that. I think even before the elections, you could tell that it was a very close struggle. I think the decision was actually right to go in with this candidate.
SR: Is one of the factors here a winning recipe, which we see in right-wing politics elsewhere as well, which is first, conjure up the threat of an externally-backed internal enemy who is going to destabilize the country and corrode its moral fiber, and then quell this anxiety, which you have raised yourself by advocating strong measures to protect and save the nation. So the whole discourse on fighting externally-backed internal terrorism and to provide security and stability in the face of this kind of growing threat, is that one of the major factors behind people wishing for political stability and taking economic instability in count as a result?
UF: I think to answer this question, we have to go back to the past a little. So if we look at how the AKP government actually shifted to a more authoritarian style of politics, we have to see that what you are hinting at, this conjuring up of a threat, was used precisely to strengthen the AKP's government. If we think of the elections in 2015, that was precisely the case. Prior to the elections in 2015, the AKP had actually promoted a politics that was promoting liberal rights, stood for an opening of democracy, and as soon as the AKP realized that this more democratic politics was actually not benefiting its own party, was actually benefiting the left-wing Kurdish party, which had then gained 13 percent of the vote, and the AKP had lost its majority due to that, that's the moment when the AKP actually decides to divert from its more democratic politics and leans into this authoritarian and violent politics at the time. So, yes, this conjuring up is not something that happened right now in this election but has been there since at least 2015 when it chose this path, the more authoritarian path of politics.
SR: And to what extent do you think the foreign policy stance which Erdoğan has taken contribute to his success? So the perception that he didn't give in to Western pressure to support Ukraine, did that bolster his strongman image because he maintained an independent foreign policy and a pro-Putin position despite Turkey's NATO membership, which came as a surprise to many. And he supplied arms to Ukraine but also got cheap oil from Russia. And managed to broker, or at least get the credit for being the prime mover and shaker behind the deal, which allowed Ukrainian ships to deliver grain to countries, especially in the Global South, who were dependent on it. And that gave him, at least in other parts of the world, quite a positive image. Did that play a role in the domestic politics in Turkey?
UF: Absolutely. The Turkish current government has often been referred to as a kind of mafia state. It takes hostage, and pressurizes its counterparts, right? And the war in Ukraine has done exactly that, gave him this bargaining power, right? And the voters see that, they acknowledge his power to as a global player. And not even just his voters, even the opposition can credit him for this in some regard. This is a very typical characteristic for soft authoritarian strategies, it's extremely flexible. It shows how you use this strategy, you build up the power, you can withdraw if you want, and you can try and pick up this strategy again later on.
SR: So Ulrike, one thing which came as a surprise to me as someone who's been watching Turkish politics from the outside, of course, is the fact that in this election, anti-migrant rhetoric took center stage on all sides especially also from the opposition who raised this first. Turkey has taken in hundreds and thousands of Syrian migrants. They have been living in Turkey, working in Turkey, and suddenly this became a major electoral issue although it was Erdoğan who had also made a deal with Brussels, with EU to police EU borders by keeping migrants away and getting millions to do so for them to settle in Turkey instead of these migrants reaching European shores in Greece, for example. So, there's been a large presence of migrants in Turkish cities for many years. And my feeling was that compared to a lot of European anti-migrant rhetoric, this had never been a major political issue in Turkey until it was made into one in this election, and surprisingly, from the oppositional candidate who was the liberal pro-European one.
UF: Yes, it definitely seems ironic in a way that Erdoğan then seemed as the more liberal candidate in the end of this debate around migration. You are right, we have to know that Erdoğan, precisely as you described, has been identified with the one who has let these migrants into the country, he is the one who has obviously signed these treaties and these deals with the European Union, and it meant for the Turkish society an influx of migrants, and the Kemalist, CHP, has for actually quite some time brought up these sentiments against migrants, has identified them with a deteriorating economic situation, with the increase in rents. So they have played into this logic of that Erdoğan is providing these Arab-Syrian refugees with citizenships, and that these people would actually then vote for Erdoğan himself. So, in this constellation, obviously, these migrants are pro-AKP, that's a fact.So it wasn't surprising the reaction to see in this debate, what was important was that it wasn't the topic from the beginning. And that it got sort of pushed in the moment between those two rounds of election where the far-right candidate, the third candidate that was still in the first round, Sinan Oğan, when he then actually sort of tried to play his trump in that situation. And so what happened between those two rounds of elections was that the public debate was totally dominated by these far-right discourses.
Two aspects were key there; one was migration or sending back the migrants to Syria. The second one was anti-terrorism. So these two aspects were totally dominant, and the whole program of the broad opposition coalition just disappeared in a way. So this whole debate around we want change, we're anti-corruption, we are anti-cronyism, maybe we're also against hatred and bigotry, that all then disappeared, right? This idea of sort of something new will come with a new government then sort of disappeared in light of this debate. And obviously, for Kurdish voters that were asked for the first time probably in history to then vote for a Kemalist candidate, this is obviously a very, very difficult decision to make. And nevertheless, they went and cast their vote.
I think maybe what is also interesting in that context is that Erdoğan himself, as you said, he also highlighted that he has a solution for these refugees to go back. In an interview just before the election, he pointed out that he has a deal with Qatar, that they will reconstruct housing, I'm assuming in the north of Syria, and that these refugees will then in time actually be able to voluntarily return to their country. What this means, and I think you have another question on sort of the more broader scale and effect of Erdoğan’s government for the region, is that this definitely means that Erdoğan has clear intentions in the north of Syria not just to destruct or destroy the Kurdish self-government that has been built up in this region, but also to bring back the refugees in this area. So in fact, he's solving two problems with one stone. He is both trying to re-Arabize this predominantly Kurdish region in the north of Syria, but at the same time, he's then solving this question of migration, or at least sort of hinting at that there will be a solution in the future. It is absolutely ironic that Erdoğan in this debate, seemed like the more liberal candidate there.
SR: Ulrike, let's turn quickly to the large and influential Turkish diaspora vote all over Europe where there was overwhelming support for Erdoğan in Austria, in France, and most of all, in Germany, among the very large Turkish population, which actually had potentially at least access to a very different media landscape had they chosen to use it beside the Turkish state-controlled media being consumed within Turkey. So many commentators in Germany and Austria were dismayed by the 60 to 70 percent vote for an autocrat by the Turkish diaspora. And they read this as a sign of the inadequate integration of diaspora communities living in their respective countries. Whereas for me, the interesting question here was the generational divide. Because it seemed it seemed as if that younger Turkish voters living abroad, and especially those who immigrated more recently, and we see that in other countries, not Germany or Austria, they were strongly supporting the oppositional candidate. So can you say something about this entire complex of the diaspora vote, and its generational ramifications?
UF: In light of precisely these discourses that we find very often in the media in Germany and also in Austria, I think it's really important to emphasize that the voter turnout in Europe is obviously massively lower than in Turkey itself, it's only 50 percent. So any kind of conclusions that we draw about the Turkish voting population in Europe has to be seen in this light. So it's not so much a question of integration, I would say, but it's rather the question, who felt the urge to actually go and cast this vote? And I think this has absolutely changed with this election. It means still the AKP, as you mentioned, manages to get high votes in Europe. And I think it is important to understand that even here in Europe, the AKP is able to strongly mobilize through all the facilities that it has, the state and religious institutions that it is able to use to mobilize these populations. I think that is something that we shouldn't neglect. And the opposition has none of this, not the slightest. So I think this is also important when we interpret the outcomes in Europe.
SR: One of the key questions is whether the elections have been free and fair. And during his two decades of rule, Erdoğan has transferred and hollowed out and captured state institutions, which of course he's used strategically to persecute, to prosecute, to imprison many of his political opponents. There's been a colonization of the key state apparatus, as we've just mentioned, from the military, and the judiciary, to the media. He has a hold over all arms of government. The concentration of executive power in his own hands has been strengthened because of the constitutional changes which he made.
He's seen as a paradigmatic exemplar of the contemporary resurgence of right-wing populism. I remember once his addressing the opposition several years ago saying, "We are the people, who are you?" So, he's the embodiment of a right-wing populist leader who not only represents the people but embodies them. And he's fighting this fight in his view against the urban secular cosmopolitan elite in the country.
Now, in the conceptualization of what we are calling soft authoritarianism in our research group, I wonder if you see Erdoğan as turning away from this kind of pseudo-democratic populism, and if you trace his trajectory over the last two decades, then what does this tell us about the contradictory nature of soft authoritarian rule today? Because after all, as long as elections are not abolished, that is, as long as the democratic facade is maintained, soft authoritarian rule remains vulnerable, even if it is able to largely erode democracy from within.
UF: Yes. I think that's actually a very, very interesting question because I do think that soft authoritarianism can coincide with populism or with a populist leader. And Erdoğan does have the ability to conjure up the masses, to address them precisely as you just described. However, it's very, very interesting to see over the past years, especially since 2015, how in fact the number of these large public events has actually diminished. So in fact, we see how he might actually not need this kind of populism at the moment. Since he's consolidated his power, we see that he seems to have other methods. It seems as if he doesn't need the same populism as previously. And I think this speaks a little bit to what Juan Linz once wrote on authoritarianism opposed to what he called totalitarianism, where he says, in fact, that authoritarianism doesn't actually need an animated mass or an animated population. It can in fact work with a form of apathy, a form of more passive population. But at the same time, we see how this election has played a specific role. For now, we have been arguing that elections play a role in sort of producing the legitimacy for the authoritarian regime. But I actually observed something very interesting in this election now. Because after this election, we were able to see how its voters were actually celebrating being on the right side or being on the side of power.
And I think actually, if we think about the role of elections in this context, we do see how there is a form of animation here. It's not totally the apathy that maybe Juan Linz was talking about, but it's not so much the populism, it's more the celebration of being on the powerful side. To your last point, that this election also demonstrated this contradictory notion that we emphasize that comes together in soft authoritarianism.
Erdoğan himself was the one who, between the elections, called out to the voters, all voters in fact, to go and cast their vote. And after the election, what he emphasized was that this was a celebration of democracy, that democracy had won, right? We see this authoritarian leader uses precisely the call for democracy to stabilize his regime. It is important to understand the cunningness behind these strategies, and the flexibility with which this back and forth is used within this soft authoritarian logic.
SR: Ulrike, let me press you a little further on Juan Linz's idea of a more apathetic population which authoritarian leaders and regimes can live with. What we see in Turkey, for example, is a combination of a formidable hegemony on the one hand, but also use and repeated use of instruments of domination, and of force by the government. So penal measures, punitive measures, repression, overt, covert, it's not surprising that that would lead to a politics of fear, which translates into relative indifference, apathy, into a retreat maybe for some individuals, groups from the civic arena of public engagement. And the question here for me would be how much of a retreat from public engagement has there been, which affects the chances of an oppositional victory? That is, you can get a temporary mobilization quickly around an election, but after decades of people having given up in a sense some hope of there really being a change, was it able to mobilize voters in very significant numbers?
UF: I would like to stress that when I speak of apathy or the way I understand the term maybe differing from Linz, is that I don’t think this is state-produced. This means produced through state practices. I don't argue that this is just a disinterested population, that there's no interest in politics. On the contrary, in fact, this apathy is a form of fatigue, exhaustion precisely through the arbitrariness of the state practices. In that sense, it's very interesting to see how these state practices, they don't just rely on repression and fear. Obviously, repression and fear, we've talked about it, has been massive over the past years. Think of the destruction of the Kurdish region, think of city centers, think of the imprisonment of all kinds of opposition of the Kurdish leaders, but also of activists of the Gülen movement too.
So, repression obviously is clearly there, but it's targeted. In a way, it's measured. But we see a whole range of practices in which, in fact, the state tries to distract, or to preoccupy the population and civil society activists. This means that they are actually involved. Let's take the example of court cases. They're involved for years and years and years, they're involved in court cases or have to take different routes, I'm thinking of the emergency rule decrees, and how the people had to go through a specific institution to claim their right to go to courts, in fact. So they are diverted and preoccupied with different forms of state practices that produces this inability to act. So the strategy of the state is actually not so much the repression in itself, but actually deferring, or putting its citizens in a state of waiting, producing a kind of limbo, which makes it more difficult for these citizens to act.
That doesn't mean that people don't do it. There is protest. There are various forms of resistance, there are weekly pickets. There have been protests around Boğaziçi University, for example, very prominent in the media. And they can mobilize for the elections too. The problem is that precisely the elections are the place where all other forms of civil society have been sort of not just repressed, but have been deferred in some kind of way. And that's why different forms of engagement are extremely ineffective. I argue that the opposition has been managed in a way so that a real opposition is very difficult to achieve.
There are indications that the current government that Erdoğan has now constructed seems to be a little bit more liberal, there are Kurdish members in the current government. But I would like to caution, precisely for the reasons that I've just emphasized, I think the AKP has shown over time that it again and again can adapt its strategies.
SR: So thank you so much, Ulrike, for this analysis of the recent elections, situating it in a broader context of Turkish societal dynamics, and for also putting it into the context of your work on soft authoritarian rule more generally. So, thanks very much for this interview.
UF: Thank you, Shalini. Thank you for having me.
SR: Let me summarize some of the main points that came out of my conversation with Ulrike. President Erdoğan’s electoral victory gives him a third term in office ending any hope of a return to a liberal, secular, pro-European government in Turkey. His hold of the media, his use of the state apparatus for party purposes, the patronage networks of his party built over years and also the fact that he changed the rules of the game, skewed the results in his favor.
So, Turkey is what Yogendra Yadav in an earlier podcast on India has called ‘captured democracy’ yet we must also recognize that Turkish society is polarized, like many others in the world today. Half of the Turkish electorate did prefer a conservative religious nationalist demagogue who promised security and stability. A politics of fear that created a threat of internal terrorism and national disintegration due to pandering to minorities won the day. But the image that also paid dividends was of a strong man holding his own against pressures from Europe, from the United States and the NATO. Namely, the charting of an independent course for Turkey in the devastating war against Ukraine by positioning his country as a strong regional power able to broker deals with Russia. All of these factors played a role in garnering overwhelming support for Erdoğan from Turkish diaspora voters from older generations especially all over Western Europe. The Turkish case helps us recognize some important features of soft authoritarian rule that rulers like Orban in Hungary have also used to retain power. This new style of governing any kind of opposition is about managing it by a mix of ideological hegemony and creating fear through repression. So it is a mix of old-style tyranny and spin dictatorship, to use the dichotomy that I discussed with Sergei Guriev in an earlier episode. The flexible and cunning use of formerly democratic practices for authoritarian ends keeps civil society activists oscillating between hope and apathy. We need to understand soft authoritarianism as a specific logic of governing practices that is not a transitory phase, it's here to stay, even in formal democracies where elected leaders use their legitimate power to hollow out liberal democratic institutions from within.
Turkey is a paradigmatic case where constitutionalism is dismantled using constitutional rules and changes – a process that I discussed last season in my interview with Martin Krygier.
This was the first episode of season seven of "Democracy in Question." Thank you very much for listening to us. Join us again for the next episode in two weeks' time when I will talk with Kim Lane Scheppele on comparisons of soft authoritarian regimes, which are using legal means to illiberal lens, not only in Turkey and Hungary but also in the United States of America. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy, and with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu.
[1]Flader,Ulrike und Çetin Gürer. (2019). “Building Alternative Communities within the State: The Kurdish Movement, Local Municipalities and Democratic Autonomy” in: Niamh McCrea/Fergal Finnegan Funding, Power and Community Development, Policy Press