The subject of my paper has to do with women's political engagement in the form of rights claiming against the state in Turkey.
In doing so, I propose a reconceptualize framework of political reconciliation.
And I should probably confess ahead of time that I will focus probably a bit more on my theoretical framework and the sort of questions I'm exploring,
rather than the than than the empirical findings, which I'm hoping maybe come out a bit more in the in the in the Q&A.
But essentially, I'm looking at developing a more robust theory of political reconciliation and what it actually entails.
And I approach this for more of a critical legal studies or philosophy of law approach.
So despite its rhetorical appeal, what political reconciliation actually entails in theory and practice is unclear.
Most of the literature on political reconciliation deals with issues of transitional justice in post-conflict contexts,
with individual forgiveness and mercy of perpetrators of violence and the experiences of the truth and reconciliation commissions.
So. Yet. So.
While there's a great deal of moral and rhetorical appeal to the notion of political reconciliation, it remains a noble but ambiguous agenda.
So what I try to do here is to alleviate this ambiguity by contemplating reconciliation is a contextual and transactional process which
aims to rupture relations of inequality and realign the terms of association and system of rights between the state and its citizens.
Now turning to the subject of today's conference, the women's rights situation in Turkey is demonstrative of a legal system which,
through recent reforms to the civil and criminal codes,
now offers a more robust model of formal equality to women than is available to most other women in neighbouring countries.
But despite having these laws and freedoms from the perspective of the law, women still struggle,
struggle and suffer to have them implemented in practice by administrative, judicial and security mechanisms.
And I argue that this pits women as rights clamours against the state in an often tacit but durable form of conflict,
which has roots in gender based and rights based inequalities.
And since the state's strategic response has been to co-opt, ignore or diffuse the conflicts to which is a party,
to whether it is over interference in a woman's right to decide how many children to have to wear or not wear the headscarf.
Or gain and gain legal protection. Genuine protection against domestic violence.
The conflictual nature of the relationship persists. I argue that as it is instrumental, if not urgent,
to acknowledge the unique and conflictual features of the state citizen relationship as it pertains to women as equal citizens.
And this constitutes the core of my understanding of a preconceived idea of political reconciliation.
A critical dimension then of the state citizen relationship that is corrupted by conflict.
Whether it's ideological, gender based or territorial is the protection and enforcement of human rights.
And the focus I adopt here is on rights claiming as an expression of women's democratic citizenship and is a process of legal,
political and social engagement between women and the state within the broader framework of political reconciliation.
Now, the answer to why rights may be a straightforward one, but the reasons, I think,
for why women activists choose to pursue the language of rights in their act.
Activism against the state deserves further exploration, the justifications they give for their struggle.
As some feminist critics have argued,
it has not been entirely clear that the language of rights is adequate to feminist objectives or how far legal rights improve the lives of women.
The righteousness of rights, then, has been called into question by scholars such as Wendy Brown and others.
And there's much philosophical debate over the question of whether women are then trapped in by rights as they seek to be free.
But for many evolved in the political struggle, including in Turkey, for women's rights.
Erasing away identities as women is not only counterintuitive, but counter-productive.
The continued reality of de facto inequalities should not distract from the fact that formal and codified equality of rights is a
mechanism for challenging conceptions of formal equality that undermine the ability of women to present themselves as equals of men.
I find that deeper reflection is necessary to understand how rights can be made more useful within the prevailing context of inequalities for women.
And although the new constitution making process in Turkey gained deliberate momentum last year after the June
general elections where the ruling AKP or Justice and Development Party won over 50% near 50% of the vote.
Women have been campaigning for legal change, constitutional reform in Turkey for many decades.
When speaking of constitution making, I refer to and highlight the utility of thinking about the active constitution and Hannah Arendt perspective.
The Constitution entails both beginning and end.
Unfortunately, given the climate of real or perceived accurate or exaggerated polarisation in Turkish society, this perspective is noticeably absent.
And that's why the engagement of women in the process is critical to conceive a new sense of community equality and belonging to the state in Turkey.
The Constitution, and in fact is the direct product of the 1980 military coup and the military's interfering interference in politics.
It has been the target of severe criticism in Turkey, both for the way in which it was enacted and for its substance.
There have been positive developments now under the AKP initiative.
A 12 person parliamentary constitutional conciliation commission, as it's called,
was established last year with equal participation of the four parties represented in Parliament.
It's noteworthy that only the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party or the BDP,
has a female member on the commission, and the Commission has already been criticised for several reasons.
I won't go into too much right now, but they did.
They were adamant that citizens and NGOs should submit their views on the Constitution leading up to the formal drafting process,
which was supposed to start in May of this year. And the Commission made a decision earlier this year to basically carry out the
drafting process in secrecy and not to reveal the comments that were submitted to them,
especially by individuals, citizens. I'm now turning to the practice side of the framework of reconciliation.
I have tried to sketch out briefly and talk about some of the examples of women's activism during the current Constitution making process.
There's already been controversy over well, three articles have been preliminarily shared with the public,
and these are on fundamental rights and freedoms.
The first deals with the right to life, the right to bodily integrity and the prohibition against torture and maltreatment.
And there are and these are still there in those draft versions.
But in its proposed language, the article on bodily integrity and the worth of the human body has a statement on how women,
bodies and individuals should be protected from being objectified or commodified.
And women's groups and two of the parties on the commission have objected to this language,
stating that it could subject women to undue prohibitions from public officials acting on their own discretion,
trying to ban obscenity or upholding morality. The second issue, and I point these two examples out, too, to highlight how politics in Turkey,
women's issues have been politicised over women's bodies and sexuality.
The second issue right now, and many of you may have been following this,
but abortion is being deeply discussed now and very seriously, and abortion is legal in Turkey.
And the discussion around it has emerged rather abruptly initiated again by public officials and ministers in the government.
They've condemned women as as murderers, linked this to an event that took place in the Southeast,
saying that abortion was almost as bad as the military attack that happened there and killed several civilian Kurds.
So this is, I think,
another example of the way in which the entire constitution making process and the women's rights in particular is being politicised by.
By the government. We know I must speak about the binary between the Islamist and the secular women's divide in Turkey.
Even though I'm not I'm not a big fan of this divide.
But it is there in certain respects. I think it is important, though, to recognise the lines of demarcation are not rigid and permanent.
Although although factions and fractures do exist and have been well documented elsewhere,
they run across certain fundamental, foundational issues, most obviously the public expression of religion and the headscarf.
Commitments to solidarity do exist, especially at the local and the grassroots level, which is more of where I've been involved.
And as you see, women from across this so-called divide striving for inclusion in limited local relations of power.
But women's political fragmentation does not necessarily undermine a shared commitment to women's rights, to protection against all forms of violence.
For example, and I mention this because of the importance of it in terms of processes of legitimisation by women working in Turkey,
honour killings, high rates of female suicide, and girl child brides in Turkey's southeast, for example,
are issues that serve as a bridge between different women's groups by sharing rights claims with certain woman as demands that cut across boundaries,
women legitimise their own position within the broader women's rights discourse on one level,
while deploying the right to participate in public or the political on another.
Women holding different political worldviews share a deep concern with issues of equality and visibility.
And you see these when you when you approach the discourse that women's groups have been have been involved with in the Constitution making process.
They approach the issues of equality and visibility of women from different starting points.
However, and again, this is very basic.
But to reiterate this, women's groups tend to utilise the wider freedom or emancipation movement to which they're associated.
They associate their cause as a form of legitimisation. Secular women.
Women's groups like the Republican women claim their own legitimate spheres of action is enabled by the attitude,
reforms and period of modernisation launched with the established establishment of the Republic.
Islamist women. Likewise. Or appeal to the marginalisation of Islam in public and link their own anti-discrimination and freedom of thought,
expression and religion campaigns to the wider struggle for the legalised public role of Islam in society.
In politics. For example, the Women's Constitution platform established in 2007.
It's an umbrella organisation,
organisation encompassing over 88 women and LGBT civil society organisations and ten platforms representing over 499 organisations.
The the NGO, the Association for the Support of Women's Candidates or Kadesh, holds the coordinating role for the initiative,
and they've been mobilising under the slogan From a male democracy to a real democracy.
And their main focus of their campaign is on the need to remove the appalling gap between
the existing framework of laws which work in favour of women in principle and the reality,
the continued reality of multiple forms of discrimination and gendered inequality.
But their interpretation of greater visibility,
what that entails is an expansion of women's participation in active politics at the national or local levels and their rights to be elected.
They work very hard. They've been working very hard on their on the issue of the quota.
They've also expressed a commitment in a draft document.
They disseminate it on their recommendations for the Constitution.
They express a commitment to expand the scope of equality, to explicitly include the identity categories of ethnicity,
sexual orientation and sexual identity and marital status.
But although they're composed of a wide range of women's feminist, environmentalist LGBT groups,
prominent Islamic or or oriented organisations are absent, which has caused some criticism.
Although wider integration, inclusion of Islamic actors into the secular republic was made largely possible because of a
series of economic and political reforms undertaken by the AKP in the early years of its rule.
This is this is meant that Islamist women can rely or work through and with the state to carry their interests and agendas forward.
Women espousing secular trends work are having to work against her despite the state.
And this has revealed the ways in which women's politics is animated by the internal network of power relations,
turning more directly to women's faith based or Islamist Islamist groups.
They have been arguing and in the lead up to the new constitution process that there should be more public discussion of the role of secularism,
religious freedom and education. Mandatory religion and morality.
Lessons in the public education curriculum and the outwardly expression of religion in public service.
Equal opportunity for women to access higher education and participate in state public service constitutes their main rights claims.
And they're there. They've been very vocal in trying to emphasise that any any vague language or loopholes in the
Constitution that would cancel out the lifting of the ban on the headscarf should be removed.
I'd like to point out that although I've tried to give a very brief overview of the secular and Islamist divide that
this this this approach and this preoccupation we have in looking at the women's movement in Turkey in this lens,
is that there's the ethnic dimension of Turkey's women's movement is neglected.
And so the public role of Kurdish women in politics is not as clearly evident in mainstream discourse.
Kurdish discourse typically emphasises that women suffer discrimination not once but twice along both ethnic and gender identity lines.
Kurdish women, then, are most vulnerable to exclusion and invisibility from public politics when they are depicted in the public realm as politicians.
They are often, often characterised as being too masculine, too forward, disrespectful, not feminine enough.
On the other hand, they're shown as victims of honour killings or suicide or domestic abuse.
But their agency as citizens of the state is less evident, if not.
Keeping is less evident.
I can talk about this more in the Q&A, but a parliamentary subcommittee on Women's and Men's Equality of Opportunity and it is
the formal title is Women and Men's Equal Opportunity Commission and Equality Commission,
which has also been kind of a contentious point. But they finalise a report on their recommendations on women's rights, the new constitution.
And I won't dwell on this too much, but it looks like the headscarf issue, of course, will be very,
very much debated and that the ban will be lifted based on the the recommendations of this committee as well.
Eventually, just to close a close examination of the government's political discourse on the nature of women's engagement with
the current Constitution making project confirms traditional conceptualisations of the role of women in politics.
More broadly, if women are to engage in the political, they are typecast as peacemakers, mediators and mothers who want peace.
There is a deliberate emphasis on women's perceived responsibility to become political only to the extent that they are able to foster consensus.
Consensus and accord political contestation either against the states or among women themselves, is viewed as somehow unnatural.
And it's important to avoid replicating this homogenising tendency in how we think about rights.
Claiming as Lever points out, the differences among women are not less important than the similarities in conflicts
that arise from such differences are not less meaningful than the agreed points.
So rather than criticising, which is often the case and the Prime Minister has also been involved in this,
rather than criticising women's groups for failure to cross the secular Islamist divide on the one hand,
or assume that the divide itself is insurmountable on the other,
I argue there is an alternative possibility, one which recognises the articulation of women's within differences, ideological or otherwise,
as a feature of their democratic agency and as a way of opening up rather than closing down the possibility and promise of a future shared community.
An important implication of my reading of the situation in Turkey is that by making rights claims,
women alter the prevailing masculine presumptions about women's role in politics,
not only by securing greater inclusion in the political sphere,
but by renegotiating the conceptual limits on what inclusion and exclusion
practically mean by constituting practices of democratic citizenship rights,
claiming serves as a mechanism of political reconciliation, is conceived here not as the restoration of moral community or forgiveness,
but as a practical reality of a reconfigured, renegotiated state citizenship relationship which recognises women as equal citizens.
So please do ask me questions about this. Yes.