Kasaba Delivers Campagna-Kerven Lecture on Turkey
The Campagna-Kerven Lecture on Modern Turkey was hosted by the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies on April 20, 2016 in the Metcalf Trustees’ Ballroom, and was led by Professor Reşat Kasaba, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
This year’s lecture, which was attended by students, faculty and guests of the Pardee School, was the twenty-first in an annual series that began in 1996.
The event began with a tribute to Suzanne Campagna by Augustus Richard Norton, Professor of International Relations and Anthropology at the Pardee School, as well as the inauguration of a new Campagna-Kerven Fellowship for a doctoral student whose research and dissertation deals substantially with modern Turkey.
Norton discussed the values that Campagna held, and the causes that were close to her heart.
“She was very much involved in civic affairs in Washington where she lived, she was involved with the League of Women Voters, she was very much committed to civil rights,” Norton said. “She was very much committed to a hands on improvement to public school education in Washington and spent a great deal of time working to that end.”
Kasaba, who was introduced by Pardee School Associate Professor of the Practice Roberta Micallef, discussed the transformations of Turkish political, economic and social institutions in a lecture entitled “Turkey’s Impossible Journeys From Past to Future and Back Again.”
“Today, 70 years after the coming of the multi-party system, Turkey is still a country where the university presidents, judges and prosecutors are appointed by the government,” Kasaba said. “National Police are administered centrally by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Turkish Constitution or the many laws that are on the books do not provide any real protection of freedom of speech or assembly — or obviously protection of the rights of the minorities. I think the weakness and in fact the absence of institutions make the democratic regime in Turkey vulnerable still.”
Kasaba’s lecture was followed by a question and answer session where he was asked for his opinion on the current Syrian refugee crisis. He said that he has been disappointed by the global reaction to the crisis as a threat instead of as a humanitarian crisis.
“Instead, as you know, it has become a tool for politicians to compete with one another — in Europe and also unfortunately in this country,” Kasaba said. “So it’s not a humanitarian crisis and a discourse on people — it’s seen as a threat. Instead of mobilizing to help these people, countries seem to be interested in protecting themselves from them.”
This year the lecture was supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, the Institute for Iraqi Studies, the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies (BCARS), a private gift and the Pardee School.