On 5 February 2025, two weeks after Donald Trump assumed the function of US president, Argonotlar (“Argonauts”), a queer artwork publication in Turkey, issued an pressing letter to its readers.
“Last week, we were going to apply for a fund from the United States Embassy, which aims to develop cultural co-operation between Turkey and the United States,” the letter started. “We drafted our software on Monday, made revisions, and whereas we had been engaged on the price range on Wednesday night, we got here throughout a press release by US President Donald Trump on the fund’s official web site, stating that the funds overseas had been annulled.
Worldwide funds and help mechanisms have lengthy been a lifeline for progressive publications in Turkey comparable to Argonotlar. They’ve been notably very important since 2014, the yr Recep Tayyip Erdoğan grew to become president and his authorities started waging a tradition warfare on anybody it deemed marginal and deviant. Leftist activists, LGBTQ+ teams, feminists, secularist Kurds, journalists and students are among the many focused teams.
By means of scholarships, endowments and funds from overseas, journalistic and publishing initiatives and establishments might retain some type of independence.
Columbia College, 22 April 2024. Picture: SWinxy / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Of their letter, Argonotlar’s editors warned that US monetary help for Turkey’s marginalised sectors was “shrinking one by one”. It went on to say: “This situation is crushing on civil society and niche publications like Argonotlar, which rely on financial support.”
Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, the publication’s founding editor, advised Index that Turkey’s impartial media and NGO sectors entered “a new era” after the coup try on 15 July 2016, which Erdoğan used to criminalise numerous sectors of society that opposed his regime. Trump’s second time period, in line with Akbulut, will provoke a equally devastating period for these establishments, with solely these which are financially supported by subscriptions or their readers capable of climate the storm.
“Now we’re entering a completely different phase, one that we’re completely unfamiliar with,” he stated. “Independent media outlets and NGOs that rely on their readers, their circles and their [own work] will survive while others will, unfortunately, bid farewell to readers.”
Just a few weeks after Argonotlar issued its plea, Gazete Duvar (“The Wall Newspaper”), which was launched in 2016, ceased publication, citing monetary difficulties. Turkey’s government-controlled media was jubilant. Takvim, a newspaper owned by a pro-government enterprise group, wrote: “The decision to close down Gazete Duvar came in the wake of the abolition of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This structure, which stirred social fault lines and fed internal conflicts in various countries, is also known in Turkey for the media organisations it has been funding.”
Takvim claimed it was “the CIA’s field operational tool for many years”, cheered how “the Wall is taken down!” and famous how Trump’s former political adviser, Elon Musk, described USAID as a “criminal organisation”.
Whereas Trump’s actions, comparable to his choice to formally shutter USAID in March, have obtained related acclaim amongst Erdoğan’s community, his makes an attempt to deport worldwide college students who’ve voiced pro-Palestinian views have been met with relative silence in Ankara.
On 25 March, after six masked plainclothes brokers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 30-year-old Tufts College pupil Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish authorities spokesperson stated it was “an open regression for American democracy”; however Erdoğan, who beneath regular circumstances could be infuriated by such a transfer, didn’t remark.
“In general, Erdoğan is enraged with [the] repression of pro-Palestinian speech in the West – that is his meat and potatoes,” stated Howard Eissenstat, chair of the historical past division at St Lawrence College in New York and a scholar at Stockholm College’s Institute for Turkish Research.
“These are the sorts of issues Erdoğan loves to talk about: the perfidy and the hypocrisy of the West. ‘Whenever they criticise us, they are being hypocritical!’ That’s part of his brand. [But] he has manifestly not done that,” he stated.
Eissenstat analysed the protection by Anadolu, the state information company, the place such tales would often be entrance and centre. This time, he stated, “they have been very delicate”.
“I think that boils down to geopolitics. The government doesn’t want to pick a fight with Trump. They’re thinking, ‘We are hoping for better deals; we are hoping to buy F35s; we are not going to bite that apple’.”
In March, Eissenstat and two different Turkey specialists – Lisel Hintz and Nick Danforth – printed an essay in The Atlantic headlined “We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See it Here”. They warned readers: “As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.”
Amid Trump intensifying his assaults on US faculties for alleged antisemitic bias, Harvard College dismissed Cemal Kafadar, the Turkish director of its Centre for Center Japanese Research, in March after the centre confronted criticism that a few of its programming had did not signify Israeli views. Following this, a Turkish authorities spokesperson accused Harvard of “openly assaulting scientific thought”.
However the assault on Harvard carried echoes of the assault on educational freedom in Turkey. Since 2021, Istanbul’s Boğaziçi College, one of many nation’s most prestigious faculties, has witnessed widespread protests in opposition to its government-appointed rector, who shut down its progressive LGBTQ+ membership, fired students who had been crucial of Erdoğan, and allowed a police presence on the campus to detain any pupil he deemed a menace to security. College students say even kissing on campus has turn into problematic.
In a 2021 convention, Kafadar famous how his colleagues at Boğaziçi had been struggling beneath these circumstances and outlined the occasions as a “constant state of oppression, a state of torment that is gradually increasing in dose with a sense of revenge”. He recounted how his colleagues at Harvard had advised him that Trump was “currently studying Erdoğan, Modi and Orbán on the issue of how to deal with universities and the media, trying to learn what he can swiftly [do to] tackle them if he wins the 2024 election”.
Efe Murad Balıkçıoğlu, a analysis affiliate at Harvard’s Centre for Center Japanese Research, stated the state of affairs for arts departments basically is dire within the USA. Faculties have been reducing again on hiring and shutting or freezing jobs. Six jobs which Balıkçıoğlu utilized for have closed or been placed on maintain, together with tenure-track (which affords a path of development at a college), non-tenure-track, part-time and lecturer positions.
“It doesn’t look like there will be any tenure-track positions in the next few years,” he stated. “Middle Eastern studies is the one getting [hit the hardest]. From now on, international students will have to think twice about entering or leaving the country because the government is threatening to revoke visas. It’s also possible, even likely, that they’ll be blocked if they take part in political activities.”
Balıkçıoğlu predicted this might set off a migration of US-based lecturers to Europe. “Columbia’s history department, which has a student body of around 20 [PhD students] every year, accepted fewer than 10 for its doctoral programme this year,” he stated.
“Similarly, fewer international students were accepted this year [across US universities] due to visa problems, and the number of students, especially in the humanities, has decreased. It may be difficult for Turkish academics to find tenure-track jobs or research grants if their research focuses on the Middle East and if they do not glorify Israel.”
US-based artists from Turkey are additionally evaluating their conditions. The Kurdish artist Şener Özmen, who gained a grant in 2016 from the Institute of Worldwide Schooling’s Artist Safety Fund, an American initiative that gives grants to threatened artists, stated he was involved by how the USA “can and does deport you without question”.
Özmen, who now lives in Wilmette, Illinois, pointed to similarities between Erdoğan and Trump’s hostility towards the media. “Trump targeted the mainstream media through the discourse of ‘fake news’ while Erdoğan targeted the antigovernment media through the discourse of treason and hostility to religion.”
Nonetheless, he stated there was a distinction between the free speech landscapes in Turkey and the USA. Thus far, regardless of Trump’s pressures, the media within the USA has largely remained impartial, educational freedom has been broadly maintained, and universities have retained their autonomy (though Trump’s newest menace to take away federal funding from universities that don’t comply along with his calls for is eroding that independence).
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, in distinction, “a large portion of media outlets have been transferred to capital groups with ties to the government. Institutions like the Council of Higher Education [a government agency] have established direct political control over universities. More importantly, during Trump’s first presidential term, opposition journalists or academics were not subject to criminal prosecution or dismissed from their posts”.
The Turkish authorities has dismissed hundreds of lecturers by way of statutory decree investigations and had dozens of them arrested.
Fatma Göçek is amongst these persecuted Turkish students. A tenured professor on the College of Michigan, in January 2016 the esteemed sociologist signed a peace petition alongside 1,127 different students titled “We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime”, so as to draw the general public’s consideration to violence in Turkey.
Since then, Göçek has been unable to journey to the nation. “They said that there was a list of 40 people in the Ministry of Justice regarding scholars and that I was 14th on that list,” she advised Index. “I haven’t been coming to Turkey for the past decade. I have few opportunities to visit Turkey; I can only meet with Turks virtually.”
Over the previous decade, Göçek has labored with professor Kader Konuk, who based the Academy in Exile in 2017. The initiative affords fellowships to students from around the globe who’re at-risk in order that they’ll proceed their analysis in Germany. Göçek additionally contributes to Students at Threat, a US-based community of 530 increased schooling establishments throughout 42 nations.
“I’m working with all those scholars who are trying to come to the USA from Turkey,” Göçek stated. “Will they be able to stay here or not? I don’t know.”
Not too long ago, she invited a Fulbright Scholar who focuses on the political actions of Ottoman Kurds to conduct analysis at her college, however stated that he would possible not go to Michigan due to the bureaucratic hurdles and would as a substitute head to England to do his analysis at Oxford College.
Sarphan Uzunoğlu, an assistant professor at Izmir College of Economics, stated the present assault on educational freedoms within the USA was a litmus check for freedom of expression within the West. International locations that had been as soon as involved with Turkey’s trajectory in direction of authoritarianism at the moment are present process an identical transition.
“The fact that countries that said ‘We are concerned’ when these things were happening in Turkey are experiencing the same situation is directly related to the harsh turn in the global political climate,” he stated.
“As for how this makes me feel, as a former immigrant who later returned to his country, it is frightening even to imagine the fear Rümeysa Öztürk experienced,” he stated, referencing the just lately detained Tufts pupil. “Being detained in an immigration detention centre in another country is not an ordinary situation.”
Eissenstat, the professor at St. Lawrence College in New York, has taught three lessons on Palestine this yr. “I wouldn’t be teaching them if I were a green card holder,” he stated. “Not because I feel I am saying anything offensive or doing anything wrong, but rather because we don’t know why the people are selected for targeting, which is meant to intimidate all of us.”
He in contrast the state of affairs within the USA to Turkey’s personal educational disaster that intensified within the mid-2010s, when the purple strains about what one might say and write grew to become unclear.
“Arbitrary arrests – and the arbitrary punishment or targeting of one person, putting them in jail – is key to authoritarian rule,” he stated. “The authoritarian rule doesn’t try to punish everybody. It tries to create these singular cases that make everybody pause.”
The authoritarian ways of the Turkish and US governments are more and more resembling one another. As Erdoğan and Trump borrow from one another’s playbooks on a number of fronts, college students, students, journalists and any residents prepared to voice their views may very well be going through the ominous prospect of a fine-tuned, unified and globally accepted autocracy within the close to future.
