Academic Freedoms of Foreign Students in Turkey

In Turkish political literature there is a consensus on the lack of tolerance for negotiation or reconciliation. Whilst Turkey started the new millennium with promising perspectives, its clock moves backward particularly in the terms of democracy. The situations in Turkey had two crucial turning points: December 2013 and July 2016. As human rights issues such as freedom of speech have been violated broadly, the actions taken against the Turkish higher educational system have drawn immediate international criticism. In this milieu, young and foreign students at the Turkish universities have been the targets of harassment as well. I am a Ph.D. candidate (IR, last semester) at a Turkish university on scholarship. After 15 July, I have been banned from travelling abroad to attend IPSA’s Poznan conference in 2016. With the accusations against me of insulting the President, my scholarship has been suspended recently without any prior notification or explanation. My translation of a book (Turkish Foreign Policy, III. Ed. Baskın Oran) is not published yet, and all of my attempts to find an explanation for those harassments resulted in insults against me. I would like to address the situations of foreign students in Turkey after 15 July and the challenges they have been facing in terms of academic freedom.