Most commentary on Turkish politics has focused on the government’s increasing authoritarian nature at the national level. Despite their limited authority, however, local governments are important sites for understanding the limits of state power and mobilizing new political alliances, as seen in the unexpected victory of opposition candidates in the 2019 municipal elections and the prominent role of the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul in the general elections of 2023. The main opposition party won the 2024 local elections in most provinces, leading to the worst electoral defeat for the government of Erdogan in over two decades. This talk will examine the significance of local politics as spaces for contesting democratic backsliding in Turkey.
About the Speaker
Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu, a Remote Visiting Researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University and an IPC-Mercator Fellow at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, is a political scientist interested in political ecology, decentralization, local governments, civil society organizations, and citizenship. She worked as a faculty member at the Department of Political Science and International Relations (Boğaziçi University) and was the Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University during the academic year 2023-24. She is a member of Turkey’s interdisciplinary political ecology working group and the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice based in the UK. She is the country expert (Turkey) for the European University Institute Global Citizenship Observatory. She received her PhD from McGill University and her MPhil from the University of Cambridge.
