"Peace Academics" from Turkey: Solidarity until the Peace Comes

The politics in Turkey, after long-term unstable coalition governments, has been faced with a singleparty government under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).The party came to power after the general elections of 3 November 2002, following the 2001 economic crisis.During the electoral campaign, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the leader of the AKP and is the current president of Turkey, raised popular expectations but remained within framework of neo-liberal policies.The AKP created an authoritarian political climate in the name of stability and predictability, with the support of different sections of capital.This authoritarian tendency resulted in the repressive enlargement of official politics at the expense of the majority.There was a broad consensus for "democratisation" among different segments in society including the Kurds, Alevis, the secular middle class and international actors, which emerged after the 2008 crisis, the 2013 corruption scandal and the Gezi Revolt.The progressive and pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party's (HDP) managed to gain parliamentary representation in the 2015 election.However, instead of meeting the expectations of "democratisation", state authoritarianism was imposed by the government on both the state apparatuses and the different social segments.The political sphere has been polarised and homogenised through the discourses of nationalism, Islamism and conservatism.Leftists, Kurds and the Kurdish movement have always been defined as "internal enemies".Others have joined their ranks.The "Kemalist elites" (civil and military bureaucrats), journalists, academics and later on the Gülenist bureaucratic cadres were treated as enemies of the state.AKP rule was consolidated by mobilising its own mass of voters under the leadership of the Islamic bourgeoisie (Bekmen, Özden and Akça, 2017).The Academics for Peace (BAK) initiative was founded in November 2012 through a declaration supporting the hunger strike for peace by Kurdish prisoners.The academic and political turmoil that its signatories have experienced since the beginning of 2016 reflects the path Turkey has been following in recent years under AKP rule.We both worked as assistant professors at Mersin University in Turkey; we were dismissed from our positions because we were signatories of the "peace petition".In addition, we were dismissed from all public duties, as were many of our colleagues, by the decree issued by the AKP government on 29 April 2017. 1 The authors continue to conduct their academic studies at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) of the University of Kassel in Germany as "guest scholars".They are funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Phillip Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.They would like to express their appreciation to the University of Kassel, the ICDD family, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Phillip Schwartz Initiative of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation institutionally and to Prof. Christoph Scherrer personally for all their solidarity efforts.The authors would also like to

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