Deliberation in Troubled Times: Women’s Encounters with Multiple Others

Abstract: On 10 January 2018, 19 women from civil society, business, media and academia with different ideological orientation, ethnicity, and sect came together to discuss what has gone wrong in Turkey’s Kurdish peace process and whether and how women of Turkey could work together for peace in troubled times when conflict re-escalated and the oppositional voices in the country have been silenced. Although the focus of the workshop was the Kurdish issue, soon it turned out to be that talking about it meant talking about Turkey’s various other current and historical issues. During the dialogue, as discussion topics changed, friction between different identity groups kept shifting. The main aim of this article is to study how dialogue among diverse women activists shift, what emotions are stimulated during this type of encounters, and how the participants perceive their experience of talking to the “other” women in a country that experiences multiple identity conflicts. Both the agonistic and deliberative perspectives are insightful when thinking about dialogue among multiple others: the agonistic perspective emphasizes the importance of power in dialogue and more recent works in deliberative democracy emphasize the affective element of dialogue and provide suggestions for deliberating sensitive issues. The article offers insights to both bodies of literature by taking into perspective the reality of constantly shifting meanings and axes of disagreement as well as alliance in conflict environments. The article addresses the possibility/difficulty of alliances among ideologically ridden women through looking at the visible and latent power dynamics in dialogue as well as women’s emotions and perceptions regarding their dialogic encounters in conflict environments.