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Profs & Pints: Turkish Politics, U.S. Trouble

Profs and Pints presents: "Turkish Politics, U.S. Trouble," with Lisel Hintz, assistant professor of international relations and European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Turkey holds national elections on June 24th, and the run-up to them and their all-but-preordained results are worrying NATO and international human-rights observers. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a strongman who has jailed thousands of his opponents, is expected to easily remain in office and remain free to continuing pursuing his vision of "New Turkey" that embraces Islamism and authoritarianism.

Whether you have connections to Turkey, plan to travel there, or just care about world affairs, developments in Turkey should concern you. In addition to violating human rights on a massive scale, the nation has purchased a missile defense system from Russia and escalated tensions with European nations it dismisses as "Nazis."

What is going on there? Come hear it all explained by Professor Hintz, who spent 18 months conducting extensive fieldwork across Turkey for her forthcoming book Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey.

Her talk will explore Turkey's domestic struggles over what it means to be Turkish, and how these struggles shape, or are shaped by, the nation's foreign policy. She's describe how this formerly secularist nation has embraced what she calls "Ottoman Islamism," ushering in a dramatic rise in the presence of Islam throughout the public sphere, from the education curriculum to military training to the soap operas on television. She'll touch upon the nation's recent coup attempt, the stalling of its efforts to join the European Union, and its war against Kurdish forces in Syria. And she'll talk about how its leaders' new understanding of what it means to be Turkish has rendered possible domestic and foreign policies previously seen as unthinkable. (Tickets $10 in advance, $12 at the door.)