The Authoritarian Turn against Academics in Turkey: Can Scholars Still Show Solidarity to Vulnerabilised Groups?

In January 2016 a group of academics published a petition criticising the human rights infringements against civilian populations in the Kurdish provinces of Turkey (Barış için akademisyenler [BAK] 2016). The launch of the petition ignited a massive backlash from multiple sources ranging from local communities to government decrees impeding the signatories’ employment and travel abroad. In a very different context, in 2017 and 2018, the Hungarian parliament passed a bill impeding the possibility of legal functioning of Central European University in Budapest, the institutional home of university access programmes for the Roma minority, as well as refugee students. Soon after,