If jihadism and dictatorships are the most treacherous obstacles to democratization of the Middle East, their resistance against both make the Kurdish movements one of the most important pro-democracy forces in the region. In this webinar, Saleh Moslem, Nazan Bedirhanoglu, and Utku Balaban will discuss the challenges and prospects for the Kurdish struggle for democracy within the context of Syria and Turkey. In both countries, authoritarian governments and jihadi groups destabilize the region in distinct ways. In response to the ensuing political, social and economic devastation, Kurdish movements develop alternative models of self-government and democratic opposition.
The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) as a multiethnic and multireligious polity is now a shining beacon of democracy and gender equality. The Rojava experiment teaches us valuable lessons about how we should envision the democracy of the 21st century. Despite not only the systematic oppression by the authoritarian government but also its disenfranchisement by other opposition parties, the Kurdish movement in Turkey poses the strongest challenge to the political status quo. As these movements prove themselves as the most agile pro-democracy forces in their countries, the steps to be taken by the international community in its relationship with Kurdish movements will not only frame the political future of the Kurdish people, the largest nation in the world without a nation-state, but also shape the political topography of the entire region.
Presented by Democracy Seminar and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
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Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
The Democracy Seminar is a project convened by publisher and founding editor Jeffrey Goldfarb and senior editors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Isaac. This world-wide discussion among pro-democracy intellectuals and activists addresses the political, social and cultural obstacles to democratic governance; investigates the rise and appeal of illiberal philosophies and practices; and explores ways for rolling back autocratic politics. Read here about the first international meeting of the DS project.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies hosts transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
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Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at L'École des hautes études and Sciences Po in Paris, as well as at the Central European University in Budapest. He had a Fulbright teaching grant to Montevideo in 1991, and was Distinguished Fulbright Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/M,Germany. Professor Arato has served as a consultant for the Hungarian Parliament on constitutional issues (1996-1997), and as U.S. State Department Democracy Lecturer and Consultant (on Constitutional issues) on Nepal (2007). He was re-appointed by the State Department in the same capacity for Zimbabwe (November of 2010), where he had discussions with civil society activists and political leaders in charge of the constitution-making process. He was invited Professor at the College de France (Spring 2012).
Professor Arato's scholarly research is widely recognized, and conferences and sessions have been organized around his work at University of Glasgow Law School (Spring 2009) and Koc University, Istanbul (December 2009), as well as at the Faculty of Law, Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa (August 2010). Arato was appointed Honorary Professor and Bram Fischer Visiting Scholar at the School of Law, University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg (June 2010-June 2011).
Saleh Moslem graduated in Chemical Engineering in 1977 from Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. He worked in Petromin of Saudi Arabia until 1990 and returned to Syria to work in a private Engineering office as a member of Syrian Engineering Association.
He was among the founders of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in 2003. Now he is a member of the co-presidency council of the Party. He resides in Qamishlo, Syria.
Nazan Bedirhanoglu is a Freedom Project Post-Doctoral fellow in Political Science Department at Wellesley College. She received her PhD in Sociology from Binghamton University and her MA in International Relations from Ankara University. Her research interests include political economy, intellectual property, cultural expressions, foreign policy, international organizations, the Middle East, and the Kurdish question. She teaches courses on international political economy and development at Wellesley College.
Bedirhanoglu is now expanding her dissertation on the global governance of intellectual property rights and the historical transformation of the global intellectual property regime into a book manuscript. She also conducts two interrelated research projects: The first one is about the comparison of the Kurdish diaspora in the United States to its counterpart in Europe. The second one is an investigation of the impact of the global intellectual property and cultural heritage regimes on the Kurdish traditional knowledge under the conditions of tangible and intangible destructions and appropriations.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
Daniel Tourinho Peres teaches undergraduate and graduates courses on Political Philosophy at the Philosophy Department, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is also a member of the Centre of Studies in Humanities (CRH-UFBA) and a research fellow at the Brazilian National Council of Scientific Research (CNPq). He works mostly on modern political thought.
Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science of the Philosophy and Human Science School at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), teacher of the Post-Graduation Program of Social Sciences (PPGCS/UFBA) and a researcher at the Center of Studies and Research on Humanities (CRH/FFCH/UFBA). Leads the research group “Ecos do Subsolo” (Echoes from Underground) on the thematic area of Brazilian Political Thought. He has prior trajectory of research on elite and political parties with emphasis on Brazilian and Bahian politics. He was a councilman in Salvador (1983-1988), state deputy in Bahia (1989) and Secretary of Education in Salvador (1994).
Utku Balaban is a visiting associate professor at Amherst College’s Anthropology and Sociology Department. He taught at Ankara University until 2017 when the government expelled and blacklisted him along with over thirty colleagues as signatories of the Peace Petition to protest the violence against the Kurdish civilian by government forces in 2015. He pursues his studies on urbanization and industrialization. His current work focuses on the relationship of the late urbanization and industrialization with the rise of Islamism in Turkey.
Alessandro Pinzani is professor for ethics and political philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis (Brazil) and since 2006 he is a fellow researcher of CNPq (Brazilian Research Council). He writes on Critical Theory, social philosophy, poverty, and democracy. He got his PhD and Habilitation in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Dresden (2013), Bochum (2016 and 2020) and Graz (2019) as well as at the Czech Academy of Sciences (2019), and a visiting scholar at Columbia University, NY (2001/02), at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2010) and at the University of Florence (2015/16). Among his books: Jürgen Habermas (München: Beck, 2007), An den Wurzeln moderner Demokratie (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), Money, Autonomy, and Citizenship with W. Leão Rego, Dordrecht: Springer, 2018).
