Book launch: Frontline Turkey

Book launch: Frontline Turkey

Wednesday, 1 November 2017 - 5:00pm
Venue: 
Seminar Room, European Studies Centre, 70 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HR
Speaker(s): 
Ezgi Basaran (St Antony’s College, Oxford)
Chair: 
Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford)
Convenor: 
Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford)
Discussant: 
Chris Morris (BBC)
Series: 
SEESOX

In 2011 Turkey’s President Erdogan promised to make a deal with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), but the talks marked a descent into assassinations, suicide bombings and the killing of civilians on both sides. The Kurdish peace process finally collapsed in 2015 with the spillover of the Syrian civil war. With ISIS moving through northern Iraq, Turkey has declared war on Western allies such as the Kurdish YPG (People s Protection Unit) the military who rescued the Yezidis and fought with US backing in Kobane. Frontline Turkey tracks the sequence of events from the emergence of the AKP to that of the Turkish–Kurdish peace process. It also reveals a very little-known aspect of the unrest – the feud in the AKP–Gülen movement – which revolves around the Kurdish issue. It also shows how the Kurds' relationship with Turkey is at the very heart of the Middle Eastern crisis, and documents, through interviews, how Erdogan's failure to bring peace is the key to understanding current events in Middle East.

Ezgi Başaran is a Turkish journalist who made her name covering the Kurdish conflict. After accepting an offer to write a daily column on Turkish foreign affairs, she became the youngest ever editor of Radikal, the biggest centre-left news outlet in Turkey, and the first woman to hold the role. After facing government censorship when covering the breakdown of the Kurdish talks, she resigned. Radikal was shut down subsequently. Ezgi is now coordinator of the Programme on Contemporary Turkey at the South East European Centre (SEESOX) at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, where she explores the bridge between journalism and academia. In 2017 she was awarded a prestigious Dulverton Scholarship for her MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University. She has written on Turkish domestic politics and her comments have appeared in major international media, including the BBC, the Financial Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Chris Morris is a British broadcast journalist who regularly contributes to BBC News, Today and From Our Own Correspondent, and is the author of the 2005 Granta publication The New Turkey. Morris joined the BBC World Service in 1988 and was BBC Sri Lanka Correspondent from 1990-92 based in Colombo covering the Sri Lankan civil war and other South Asian stories including the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the rise of Hindu nationalism.