2020-2022
Social Cohesion and Conflict in Turkey: From Democratization to Democratic Backsliding
For a long time, peace and conflict have been studied separately as if these two phenomena are disparate and disconnected from each other. This has led scholars to conceive the countries 'at war' in a sort of chaos in which institutions have collapsed and violence wreak havoc on everyday life. However, the new conflict studies point out the spatial and heterogeneous dynamics of conflict as multiple forms of violence may occur in countries with limited rates of spatial overlap. Moreover, there are also ongoing networks of cooperation and collaboration in society even for the countries ‘at war’. This failure to consider the dynamics of social coexistence had led to an underspecification of the causal mechanisms that drive peaceful forms of cohabitation, and an overstatement of political violence and societal conflict in the dominant literature. Borsuk’s work analyzes the dynamics of cohabitation and varieties of violence that change under the pressure of authoritarian resurgence through the prism of Turkey.
2019/ 2020
From Ethnic Mobilization into Communal Conflict: Turkey's Kurdish Problem
Scholars have recently devoted large amounts of attention to how and why ethnic conflicts start and spread over the contested terrains and among the population. However, less attention has been given to precisely how the dynamics of ethnic violence change in time and space. In this project, Imren Borsuk Eroglu investigates how the forms of ethnic violence change over time and space from ethnic insurgency into intercommunal violence and discuss the mechanisms that trigger the rise of communal conflict in a context of democratic transition in Turkey.
