(A shoe in the ruins of a building in Gaziantep)
The recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have had catastrophic impacts across a large area. More than 44,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless, with key infrastructure heavily damaged. Many of those affected are refugee communities already traumatised by conflict. The magnitude and urgency of the humanitarian challenge requires critical reflection and discussion on the responses to the earthquakes from states, international organisations and NGOs. To what extent have emergency agencies been able to access and deliver relief to those most in need? What are the conditions, and prospects for, recovery and reconstruction? The panel at this event will consider these and other questions.
Speakers:
Karabekir Akkoyunlu is Lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS. He previously lectured in Brazil at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) and between 2014–2017 was a post-doctoral research and teaching fellow on Modern Turkey at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, Austria. He is author of the forthcoming volume, Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
Hişyar Özsoy is a Kurdish academic and politician and member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Between 2015–2018 he was an HDP deputy (MP) in the Turkish Parliament for Bingöl electoral district. Currently, he is the MP for the electoral district of Diyarbakır.
Rim Turkmani is Research Director of the Syria Research Programme, Conflict & Civicness Research Group, LSE IDEAS, where she is also Principal Investigator of the research project, Legitimacy and Citizenship in the Arab World.
Amberin Zaman is a senior correspondent reporting from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe exclusively for Al-Monitor. Zaman has been a columnist for Al-Monitor for the past five years, examining the politics of Turkey, Iraq and Syria and writing the Briefly Turkey newsletter. Prior to this, Zaman covered Turkey, the Kurds and conflicts in the region for The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Los Angeles Times and Voice of America. She served as The Economist's Turkey correspondent between 1999 and 2016, and has worked as a columnist for several Turkish language outlets.
Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at LSE.
Jointly organised by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Group, LSE Human Rights, and the LSE Middle East Centre. The event is free but those attending are invited to donate to:
The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC)
The Syrian British Consortium (SBC)
Join the conversation on Twitter using #LSEMiddleEast
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