Academic Freedom under Authoritarian Rule in Post-2016 Turkey: Institutional Recomposition and Individual Trajectories

Elif Can; Sümbül Kaya

doi:10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23004

Authors

Elif Can French Institute for Anatolian Studies https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8547-6881

Elif Can holds a PhD in sociology from the École normale supérieure de Lyon. She is an associate member of the Centre Max Weber (UMR 5283) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA) in Istanbul (USR 3131 – CNRS). Her research focuses on political socialization, the sociology of education, youth sociology, and memory politics. Her doctoral dissertation, defended in 2022 at ENS de Lyon under the co-supervision of Cem Özatalay and Christine Détrez, examined the learning of national history and the school-based socialization of high school students from working-class backgrounds in Turkey. She subsequently participated in the ANR project The Consequences of Forced Loyalty (CALOT), which explored socializations of transformation in authoritarian contexts.
Sümbül Kaya Université de Lyon, ENTPE, UMR Environnement Ville Société https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8097-0554

Sümbül Kaya is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Université de Lyon and researcher at UMR Environnement Ville Société (EVS). Working at the intersection of political science and sociology, her research focuses on citizenship, political socialization, the military, armed conflicts, and discrimination in Turkey and France. She received the Mattei Dogan Prize for her PhD on military conscription in Turkey. She co-authored L’épreuve des discriminations dans les quartiers (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021) and has published in journals such as the Revue française de science politique and the European Journal of Turkish Studies.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23004

Keywords:

Academic freedom, Purge(s), Declassification, Resistance strategies, Turkey

Abstract

This article examines the transformations of academic freedom in Turkey under the authoritarian turn following the attempted coup of July 2016. Drawing on 38 biographical interviews with scholars of different statuses, we analyze how repression has reshaped both individual trajectories and the structure of the academic field. Far from being limited to dismissals or judicial sanctions, political repression operates as a mode of governance that combines the exclusion of dissenting voices with the construction of a loyal academic environment. We show how the loss of institutional autonomy has been reinforced by the centralization of recruitment, the appointment of rectors by the President, and the stigmatization of the Peace Petition signatories. At the biographical level, repression has led to processes of downward mobility, symbolic devaluation, and family ruptures, but also to strategies of resistance and conversion of cultural capital into political, civic, or international resources. By highlighting these heterogeneous trajectories, the article contributes to a broader reflection on the recomposition of knowledge and academic freedom in contexts of authoritarian constraint.

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Academic Freedom under Authoritarian Rule in Post-2016 Turkey: Institutional Recomposition and Individual Trajectories

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