We kindly invite you to a Tuesday Meeting lecture by dr. Deniz Erkmen, titled »A Curveball and a Glimmer of Hope? Reflecting on 2024 Local Elections and Democratic Resilience in Turkey«, which will be held on Wednesday, 15 May, at 11.00 at the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana.
»In this talk I will first present the results of the 2024 local elections that took place on March 31, 2024 in Turkey, where the main opposition party CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – Republican People’s Party) won historical victories in many cities and municipalities, emerging as the victorious party, which was unexpected after the May 2023 national elections and its disheartening effects on the opposition. I will contextualize these results in order to underline why they were surprising, why they are important, and what they might imply for Turkish politics. I will use these unexpected turn of events to think about and have a discussion on what they might say about democratic resilience and its conditions in competitive authoritarian regimes.«
Dr. T. Deniz Erkmen is a researcher and lecturer, working as an Assistant Professor at the International Relations Department at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. After getting her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and before returning to Istanbul, Turkey, she has worked at Boise State University, ID, USA. She was a Mercator Fellow at Stiftung Wisseschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin between 2018-2019. She is currently based in Ljubljana as part of the SOS4Democracy (Social Sciences for Democracy) Project. Her teaching and research fields are comparative politics and political sociology, involving transnationalism, new middle classes, authoritarianism, autocratic legalism and protest repression. She has published academic articles in Territory, Politics, Governance; Sociology; Democratization; South European Politics and Society; Current Sociology and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, as well as other pieces in venues such as Democracy Now and Informed Comment.
