1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:07,710 The subject of my paper has to do with women's political engagement in the form of rights claiming against the state in Turkey. 2 00:00:08,190 --> 00:00:13,530 In doing so, I propose a reconceptualize framework of political reconciliation. 3 00:00:13,920 --> 00:00:23,250 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, 4 00:00:23,490 --> 00:00:30,000 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. 5 00:00:31,560 --> 00:00:39,210 But essentially, I'm looking at developing a more robust theory of political reconciliation and what it actually entails. 6 00:00:39,540 --> 00:00:44,430 And I approach this for more of a critical legal studies or philosophy of law approach. 7 00:00:46,170 --> 00:00:54,450 So despite its rhetorical appeal, what political reconciliation actually entails in theory and practice is unclear. 8 00:00:54,660 --> 00:01:03,450 Most of the literature on political reconciliation deals with issues of transitional justice in post-conflict contexts, 9 00:01:03,690 --> 00:01:12,630 with individual forgiveness and mercy of perpetrators of violence and the experiences of the truth and reconciliation commissions. 10 00:01:13,590 --> 00:01:14,909 So. Yet. So. 11 00:01:14,910 --> 00:01:25,200 While there's a great deal of moral and rhetorical appeal to the notion of political reconciliation, it remains a noble but ambiguous agenda. 12 00:01:26,370 --> 00:01:35,219 So what I try to do here is to alleviate this ambiguity by contemplating reconciliation is a contextual and transactional process which 13 00:01:35,220 --> 00:01:42,810 aims to rupture relations of inequality and realign the terms of association and system of rights between the state and its citizens. 14 00:01:43,920 --> 00:01:51,840 Now turning to the subject of today's conference, the women's rights situation in Turkey is demonstrative of a legal system which, 15 00:01:51,840 --> 00:01:54,870 through recent reforms to the civil and criminal codes, 16 00:01:55,110 --> 00:02:02,940 now offers a more robust model of formal equality to women than is available to most other women in neighbouring countries. 17 00:02:03,580 --> 00:02:09,030 But despite having these laws and freedoms from the perspective of the law, women still struggle, 18 00:02:09,210 --> 00:02:17,580 struggle and suffer to have them implemented in practice by administrative, judicial and security mechanisms. 19 00:02:18,120 --> 00:02:27,480 And I argue that this pits women as rights clamours against the state in an often tacit but durable form of conflict, 20 00:02:27,750 --> 00:02:32,670 which has roots in gender based and rights based inequalities. 21 00:02:33,840 --> 00:02:40,020 And since the state's strategic response has been to co-opt, ignore or diffuse the conflicts to which is a party, 22 00:02:40,020 --> 00:02:47,340 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. 23 00:02:49,120 --> 00:02:54,190 Or gain and gain legal protection. Genuine protection against domestic violence. 24 00:02:54,430 --> 00:03:00,970 The conflictual nature of the relationship persists. I argue that as it is instrumental, if not urgent, 25 00:03:01,270 --> 00:03:07,840 to acknowledge the unique and conflictual features of the state citizen relationship as it pertains to women as equal citizens. 26 00:03:08,710 --> 00:03:14,080 And this constitutes the core of my understanding of a preconceived idea of political reconciliation. 27 00:03:17,020 --> 00:03:21,580 A critical dimension then of the state citizen relationship that is corrupted by conflict. 28 00:03:21,820 --> 00:03:27,340 Whether it's ideological, gender based or territorial is the protection and enforcement of human rights. 29 00:03:27,700 --> 00:03:34,450 And the focus I adopt here is on rights claiming as an expression of women's democratic citizenship and is a process of legal, 30 00:03:34,690 --> 00:03:40,720 political and social engagement between women and the state within the broader framework of political reconciliation. 31 00:03:42,220 --> 00:03:47,980 Now, the answer to why rights may be a straightforward one, but the reasons, I think, 32 00:03:47,980 --> 00:03:53,200 for why women activists choose to pursue the language of rights in their act. 33 00:03:53,260 --> 00:03:59,260 Activism against the state deserves further exploration, the justifications they give for their struggle. 34 00:04:00,130 --> 00:04:01,900 As some feminist critics have argued, 35 00:04:02,230 --> 00:04:10,450 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. 36 00:04:12,720 --> 00:04:18,900 The righteousness of rights, then, has been called into question by scholars such as Wendy Brown and others. 37 00:04:19,260 --> 00:04:25,080 And there's much philosophical debate over the question of whether women are then trapped in by rights as they seek to be free. 38 00:04:25,890 --> 00:04:31,260 But for many evolved in the political struggle, including in Turkey, for women's rights. 39 00:04:31,290 --> 00:04:36,270 Erasing away identities as women is not only counterintuitive, but counter-productive. 40 00:04:36,720 --> 00:04:44,340 The continued reality of de facto inequalities should not distract from the fact that formal and codified equality of rights is a 41 00:04:44,340 --> 00:04:51,270 mechanism for challenging conceptions of formal equality that undermine the ability of women to present themselves as equals of men. 42 00:04:52,590 --> 00:05:00,330 I find that deeper reflection is necessary to understand how rights can be made more useful within the prevailing context of inequalities for women. 43 00:05:01,160 --> 00:05:08,040 And although the new constitution making process in Turkey gained deliberate momentum last year after the June 44 00:05:08,040 --> 00:05:15,870 general elections where the ruling AKP or Justice and Development Party won over 50% near 50% of the vote. 45 00:05:16,200 --> 00:05:21,900 Women have been campaigning for legal change, constitutional reform in Turkey for many decades. 46 00:05:23,280 --> 00:05:32,579 When speaking of constitution making, I refer to and highlight the utility of thinking about the active constitution and Hannah Arendt perspective. 47 00:05:32,580 --> 00:05:35,490 The Constitution entails both beginning and end. 48 00:05:36,630 --> 00:05:45,510 Unfortunately, given the climate of real or perceived accurate or exaggerated polarisation in Turkish society, this perspective is noticeably absent. 49 00:05:45,690 --> 00:05:54,600 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. 50 00:05:55,830 --> 00:06:04,260 The Constitution, and in fact is the direct product of the 1980 military coup and the military's interfering interference in politics. 51 00:06:04,710 --> 00:06:10,320 It has been the target of severe criticism in Turkey, both for the way in which it was enacted and for its substance. 52 00:06:11,160 --> 00:06:15,600 There have been positive developments now under the AKP initiative. 53 00:06:16,740 --> 00:06:21,299 A 12 person parliamentary constitutional conciliation commission, as it's called, 54 00:06:21,300 --> 00:06:26,550 was established last year with equal participation of the four parties represented in Parliament. 55 00:06:27,750 --> 00:06:32,340 It's noteworthy that only the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party or the BDP, 56 00:06:32,610 --> 00:06:40,049 has a female member on the commission, and the Commission has already been criticised for several reasons. 57 00:06:40,050 --> 00:06:43,030 I won't go into too much right now, but they did. 58 00:06:43,050 --> 00:06:50,340 They were adamant that citizens and NGOs should submit their views on the Constitution leading up to the formal drafting process, 59 00:06:50,340 --> 00:06:59,309 which was supposed to start in May of this year. And the Commission made a decision earlier this year to basically carry out the 60 00:06:59,310 --> 00:07:04,830 drafting process in secrecy and not to reveal the comments that were submitted to them, 61 00:07:05,040 --> 00:07:12,989 especially by individuals, citizens. I'm now turning to the practice side of the framework of reconciliation. 62 00:07:12,990 --> 00:07:20,010 I have tried to sketch out briefly and talk about some of the examples of women's activism during the current Constitution making process. 63 00:07:20,880 --> 00:07:28,470 There's already been controversy over well, three articles have been preliminarily shared with the public, 64 00:07:28,770 --> 00:07:31,050 and these are on fundamental rights and freedoms. 65 00:07:31,290 --> 00:07:37,590 The first deals with the right to life, the right to bodily integrity and the prohibition against torture and maltreatment. 66 00:07:38,010 --> 00:07:40,649 And there are and these are still there in those draft versions. 67 00:07:40,650 --> 00:07:49,250 But in its proposed language, the article on bodily integrity and the worth of the human body has a statement on how women, 68 00:07:49,450 --> 00:07:54,750 bodies and individuals should be protected from being objectified or commodified. 69 00:07:55,080 --> 00:08:00,690 And women's groups and two of the parties on the commission have objected to this language, 70 00:08:00,690 --> 00:08:08,339 stating that it could subject women to undue prohibitions from public officials acting on their own discretion, 71 00:08:08,340 --> 00:08:17,940 trying to ban obscenity or upholding morality. The second issue, and I point these two examples out, too, to highlight how politics in Turkey, 72 00:08:18,900 --> 00:08:22,650 women's issues have been politicised over women's bodies and sexuality. 73 00:08:23,430 --> 00:08:26,850 The second issue right now, and many of you may have been following this, 74 00:08:27,030 --> 00:08:33,630 but abortion is being deeply discussed now and very seriously, and abortion is legal in Turkey. 75 00:08:34,980 --> 00:08:42,870 And the discussion around it has emerged rather abruptly initiated again by public officials and ministers in the government. 76 00:08:43,710 --> 00:08:54,240 They've condemned women as as murderers, linked this to an event that took place in the Southeast, 77 00:08:54,690 --> 00:09:00,810 saying that abortion was almost as bad as the military attack that happened there and killed several civilian Kurds. 78 00:09:02,130 --> 00:09:03,480 So this is, I think, 79 00:09:03,480 --> 00:09:11,190 another example of the way in which the entire constitution making process and the women's rights in particular is being politicised by. 80 00:09:12,210 --> 00:09:23,250 By the government. We know I must speak about the binary between the Islamist and the secular women's divide in Turkey. 81 00:09:23,520 --> 00:09:26,850 Even though I'm not I'm not a big fan of this divide. 82 00:09:27,420 --> 00:09:36,330 But it is there in certain respects. I think it is important, though, to recognise the lines of demarcation are not rigid and permanent. 83 00:09:37,610 --> 00:09:42,860 Although although factions and fractures do exist and have been well documented elsewhere, 84 00:09:43,100 --> 00:09:49,190 they run across certain fundamental, foundational issues, most obviously the public expression of religion and the headscarf. 85 00:09:49,970 --> 00:09:59,150 Commitments to solidarity do exist, especially at the local and the grassroots level, which is more of where I've been involved. 86 00:09:59,780 --> 00:10:06,890 And as you see, women from across this so-called divide striving for inclusion in limited local relations of power. 87 00:10:07,850 --> 00:10:16,309 But women's political fragmentation does not necessarily undermine a shared commitment to women's rights, to protection against all forms of violence. 88 00:10:16,310 --> 00:10:25,280 For example, and I mention this because of the importance of it in terms of processes of legitimisation by women working in Turkey, 89 00:10:26,420 --> 00:10:32,090 honour killings, high rates of female suicide, and girl child brides in Turkey's southeast, for example, 90 00:10:32,090 --> 00:10:40,580 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, 91 00:10:40,820 --> 00:10:45,410 women legitimise their own position within the broader women's rights discourse on one level, 92 00:10:45,680 --> 00:10:49,940 while deploying the right to participate in public or the political on another. 93 00:10:53,710 --> 00:10:59,620 Women holding different political worldviews share a deep concern with issues of equality and visibility. 94 00:10:59,950 --> 00:11:08,170 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. 95 00:11:08,830 --> 00:11:12,580 They approach the issues of equality and visibility of women from different starting points. 96 00:11:12,580 --> 00:11:15,370 However, and again, this is very basic. 97 00:11:15,370 --> 00:11:23,110 But to reiterate this, women's groups tend to utilise the wider freedom or emancipation movement to which they're associated. 98 00:11:23,560 --> 00:11:27,400 They associate their cause as a form of legitimisation. Secular women. 99 00:11:27,610 --> 00:11:33,070 Women's groups like the Republican women claim their own legitimate spheres of action is enabled by the attitude, 100 00:11:33,310 --> 00:11:38,560 reforms and period of modernisation launched with the established establishment of the Republic. 101 00:11:39,190 --> 00:11:48,389 Islamist women. Likewise. Or appeal to the marginalisation of Islam in public and link their own anti-discrimination and freedom of thought, 102 00:11:48,390 --> 00:11:53,969 expression and religion campaigns to the wider struggle for the legalised public role of Islam in society. 103 00:11:53,970 --> 00:12:00,650 In politics. For example, the Women's Constitution platform established in 2007. 104 00:12:01,010 --> 00:12:02,720 It's an umbrella organisation, 105 00:12:02,780 --> 00:12:13,280 organisation encompassing over 88 women and LGBT civil society organisations and ten platforms representing over 499 organisations. 106 00:12:14,720 --> 00:12:22,010 The the NGO, the Association for the Support of Women's Candidates or Kadesh, holds the coordinating role for the initiative, 107 00:12:22,580 --> 00:12:28,070 and they've been mobilising under the slogan From a male democracy to a real democracy. 108 00:12:28,760 --> 00:12:33,979 And their main focus of their campaign is on the need to remove the appalling gap between 109 00:12:33,980 --> 00:12:39,410 the existing framework of laws which work in favour of women in principle and the reality, 110 00:12:39,410 --> 00:12:43,850 the continued reality of multiple forms of discrimination and gendered inequality. 111 00:12:44,810 --> 00:12:47,690 But their interpretation of greater visibility, 112 00:12:47,780 --> 00:12:57,950 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. 113 00:12:58,850 --> 00:13:04,340 They work very hard. They've been working very hard on their on the issue of the quota. 114 00:13:05,030 --> 00:13:08,910 They've also expressed a commitment in a draft document. 115 00:13:08,930 --> 00:13:12,530 They disseminate it on their recommendations for the Constitution. 116 00:13:13,070 --> 00:13:19,700 They express a commitment to expand the scope of equality, to explicitly include the identity categories of ethnicity, 117 00:13:19,910 --> 00:13:23,690 sexual orientation and sexual identity and marital status. 118 00:13:24,740 --> 00:13:29,630 But although they're composed of a wide range of women's feminist, environmentalist LGBT groups, 119 00:13:30,440 --> 00:13:35,870 prominent Islamic or or oriented organisations are absent, which has caused some criticism. 120 00:13:37,770 --> 00:13:44,099 Although wider integration, inclusion of Islamic actors into the secular republic was made largely possible because of a 121 00:13:44,100 --> 00:13:49,770 series of economic and political reforms undertaken by the AKP in the early years of its rule. 122 00:13:50,800 --> 00:13:59,080 This is this is meant that Islamist women can rely or work through and with the state to carry their interests and agendas forward. 123 00:13:59,710 --> 00:14:05,950 Women espousing secular trends work are having to work against her despite the state. 124 00:14:06,220 --> 00:14:12,250 And this has revealed the ways in which women's politics is animated by the internal network of power relations, 125 00:14:13,570 --> 00:14:18,250 turning more directly to women's faith based or Islamist Islamist groups. 126 00:14:18,610 --> 00:14:27,070 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, 127 00:14:27,400 --> 00:14:31,990 religious freedom and education. Mandatory religion and morality. 128 00:14:31,990 --> 00:14:36,940 Lessons in the public education curriculum and the outwardly expression of religion in public service. 129 00:14:37,990 --> 00:14:45,550 Equal opportunity for women to access higher education and participate in state public service constitutes their main rights claims. 130 00:14:46,450 --> 00:14:52,629 And they're there. They've been very vocal in trying to emphasise that any any vague language or loopholes in the 131 00:14:52,630 --> 00:14:58,930 Constitution that would cancel out the lifting of the ban on the headscarf should be removed. 132 00:15:00,370 --> 00:15:06,609 I'd like to point out that although I've tried to give a very brief overview of the secular and Islamist divide that 133 00:15:06,610 --> 00:15:12,790 this this this approach and this preoccupation we have in looking at the women's movement in Turkey in this lens, 134 00:15:13,240 --> 00:15:18,130 is that there's the ethnic dimension of Turkey's women's movement is neglected. 135 00:15:21,250 --> 00:15:28,180 And so the public role of Kurdish women in politics is not as clearly evident in mainstream discourse. 136 00:15:29,050 --> 00:15:36,430 Kurdish discourse typically emphasises that women suffer discrimination not once but twice along both ethnic and gender identity lines. 137 00:15:37,090 --> 00:15:46,900 Kurdish women, then, are most vulnerable to exclusion and invisibility from public politics when they are depicted in the public realm as politicians. 138 00:15:47,320 --> 00:15:56,620 They are often, often characterised as being too masculine, too forward, disrespectful, not feminine enough. 139 00:15:57,700 --> 00:16:02,950 On the other hand, they're shown as victims of honour killings or suicide or domestic abuse. 140 00:16:02,950 --> 00:16:07,690 But their agency as citizens of the state is less evident, if not. 141 00:16:09,290 --> 00:16:12,530 Keeping is less evident. 142 00:16:15,570 --> 00:16:24,510 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 143 00:16:24,900 --> 00:16:30,570 the formal title is Women and Men's Equal Opportunity Commission and Equality Commission, 144 00:16:30,570 --> 00:16:37,680 which has also been kind of a contentious point. But they finalise a report on their recommendations on women's rights, the new constitution. 145 00:16:38,070 --> 00:16:43,200 And I won't dwell on this too much, but it looks like the headscarf issue, of course, will be very, 146 00:16:43,200 --> 00:16:50,190 very much debated and that the ban will be lifted based on the the recommendations of this committee as well. 147 00:16:50,950 --> 00:17:00,059 Eventually, just to close a close examination of the government's political discourse on the nature of women's engagement with 148 00:17:00,060 --> 00:17:05,790 the current Constitution making project confirms traditional conceptualisations of the role of women in politics. 149 00:17:05,790 --> 00:17:13,650 More broadly, if women are to engage in the political, they are typecast as peacemakers, mediators and mothers who want peace. 150 00:17:14,310 --> 00:17:22,340 There is a deliberate emphasis on women's perceived responsibility to become political only to the extent that they are able to foster consensus. 151 00:17:22,530 --> 00:17:30,780 Consensus and accord political contestation either against the states or among women themselves, is viewed as somehow unnatural. 152 00:17:31,770 --> 00:17:37,139 And it's important to avoid replicating this homogenising tendency in how we think about rights. 153 00:17:37,140 --> 00:17:43,680 Claiming as Lever points out, the differences among women are not less important than the similarities in conflicts 154 00:17:43,680 --> 00:17:47,550 that arise from such differences are not less meaningful than the agreed points. 155 00:17:49,290 --> 00:17:54,450 So rather than criticising, which is often the case and the Prime Minister has also been involved in this, 156 00:17:54,900 --> 00:18:00,420 rather than criticising women's groups for failure to cross the secular Islamist divide on the one hand, 157 00:18:00,810 --> 00:18:03,810 or assume that the divide itself is insurmountable on the other, 158 00:18:04,350 --> 00:18:12,300 I argue there is an alternative possibility, one which recognises the articulation of women's within differences, ideological or otherwise, 159 00:18:12,450 --> 00:18:20,880 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. 160 00:18:21,690 --> 00:18:27,629 An important implication of my reading of the situation in Turkey is that by making rights claims, 161 00:18:27,630 --> 00:18:32,190 women alter the prevailing masculine presumptions about women's role in politics, 162 00:18:32,190 --> 00:18:36,120 not only by securing greater inclusion in the political sphere, 163 00:18:36,360 --> 00:18:40,739 but by renegotiating the conceptual limits on what inclusion and exclusion 164 00:18:40,740 --> 00:18:45,719 practically mean by constituting practices of democratic citizenship rights, 165 00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:54,060 claiming serves as a mechanism of political reconciliation, is conceived here not as the restoration of moral community or forgiveness, 166 00:18:54,300 --> 00:19:02,610 but as a practical reality of a reconfigured, renegotiated state citizenship relationship which recognises women as equal citizens. 167 00:19:03,680 --> 00:19:11,660 So please do ask me questions about this. Yes.