Power, knowledge, and universities: Turkey’s dismissed ‘academics for peace’

ABSTRACT

This article questions the role of universities in the power/knowledge relation by examining the case of Turkey’s ‘Academics for Peace.’ It is based on six in-depth interviews conducted with dismissed peace petitioners. Facing both the market pressures and the state oppression, the intellectual institutions in many countries are in a precarious position. Even though it is true that knowledge can be oppressive, it is also true that it can help constructing resistance. However, this requires new, and relatively autonomous, spaces of intellectual activity. Deriving from the example of Turkey’s ‘solidarity academies,’ this paper shows that the attempts to construct alternative institutions face numerous hardships, many of them deriving from lack of funding. It calls for contemplation on ways of dealing with the neoliberalization of intellectual institutions and the authoritarian political wave that numerous countries face while scrutinizing the relationship between scientific knowledge and power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Academics for Peace
• Turkish-Kurdish conflict
• power/knowledge relation
• neoliberalization
• authoritarianism
• universities
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Peker is a mafia boss who has been ‘involved in state-sanctioned human rights abuses of Kurds and leftist dissidents in the 1990s’ (Akkoyunlu & Öktem, 2016, p. 522).

2.. ‘Ada’ means ‘island’ in Turkish.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Serhat Tutkal

Serhat Tutkal is a PhD candidate in Human and Social Sciences at the National University of Colombia. He holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Ankara University. His research is concerned with political violence and the ways in which it is legitimized or delegitimized. He is especially interested in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Colombian conflict.