Dictatorships and universities: The 1980 Turkish military coup d'état and Turkish geography. (November 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bekaroğlu, Erdem; Barnes, Trevor
• Is Part Of: Political geography. Volume 91(2021)
• Publication Date: 2021-11
• Subjects: Dictatorship -- State authoritarianism -- 1980 Turkish coup -- Turkish geography -- Universities; Political geography -- Periodicals; Géographie politique -- Périodiques; 320.12
• DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102481
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0962-6298

Abstract

Abstract: This paper examines the relation between abrupt, often violent political change producing dictatorships and the effect on universities, including the organization and content of academic disciplines. Those disciplines, we contend, can be radically altered, reshaped to conform to the state's new political imperatives. Our case study is the effect of the 1980 military coup d'état in Turkey on that country's tradition of academic geography. The coup was to quell Turkey's social unrest and political-economic instability of much of the 1970s. During the 1980-83 military junta that followed, political dissent was squashed, civil liberties removed, a Nationalistic-Islamic discourse (the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis) enacted, and higher-education centralized and brought under strict state control. The response of Turkish geographers was to turn inward, to practice an earlier regional descriptive tradition underlain by environmental determinism, which, seemingly neutral, bolstered the coup's political nationalism, diverting critical analysis. As a result, Turkish geography became ever-more intellectually distant from Anglo-American geography that during the 1970s increasingly repudiated its own earlier regionalism. Rather than moving forward, in order to survive Turkish geography returned to its past. It pursued a strategy of La Jetée after the 1962 French new wave film of the same name. It summoned the past in order to come to the aid of the present.