Conférences

Karam Nachar, Historian, Executive Director and Editor of Al-Jumhuriya Collective

Séance modérée par Nouran Gad (IFEA) et Franck Mermier (IFEA)

The Al-Jumhuriya (Republic) website magazine was launched in March 2012 by a group of Syrian journalists, writers and intellectuals who support the democratic and secular ideals of the Syrian Revolution. The magazine publishes in-depth analyses and investigations on the social, political, economic and military situation in Syria and plays an important role in the development of investigative journalism and documentary literature by bringing out a new range of authors and styles. In 2020, the site's editorial staff created a weekly edition in order to strengthen the deciphering of events. The motto of the magazine "The world in Syria and Syria in the world" reflects both the international dimension of the Syrian tragedy and the transnational character and Syrian anchorage of Al-Jumhuriya.

The presentation will retrace in what circumstances and for what purposes this magazine was founded. It will therefore deal with the modalities of the formation of the collective that animates the site and will analyse the cultural and political functions of this review by highlighting its ethical, aesthetic, thematic and communicational choices. The presentation will focus on the transnational dimension of Al-Jumhuriya. through the location of the members of its editorial team in several countries and will give insights on the changing role of Istanbul in its evolution.

This webinar is part of a series of webinars on Arab Presence in Turkey and is co-organized with the research program aMiMo (Migrations and Mobilities) at IFEA.

Intervention en anglais

Barış Zeren (chercheur indépendant/CETOBAC) 

Séance modérée par Denis Hermann (IFEA)

Sinan Ülgen (EDAM)
Galip Dalay (Oxford University, Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow)

Since its foundation in 1923, the Turkish Republic has never encountered a regional security and political crisis as severe as the Syrian Civil War. Indeed, the Syrian crisis that erupted in the context of the Arab uprising ten years ago continues to have significant impacts on the neighboring countries, especially on Turkey that had a very privileged relationship with Damascus before the civil war.

 In terms of foreign policy, the impact of the Syrian crisis is the most serious one. Turkey has become increasingly torn between its traditional loyalty to the West and new security calculations precipitating a tilt to the East, namely a rapprochement with Russia, Iran, and even China. To what extent is the Syrian crisis a turning point in the Turkish foreign policy traditionally oriented toward the West? What are the other effects of the Syrian crisis on Turkish foreign policy? These are the main issues that will be developed in the 7^th session of the joint seminar organized between Kadir Has University and the IFEA this month with two prestigious scholars: Sinan ÜLGEN and Galip DALAY.

Sinan Ülgen graduated in 1987 from the University of Virginia with a double major in computer sciences and economics. He undertook graduate studies at the College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium where he received, in 1990, a master’s degree in European economic integration. He then joined the Turkish Foreign Service as a career diplomat. In 1992, he was posted to the Turkish Permanent Delegation to the European Union in Brussels where he became part of the team that negotiated the Turkey-EU customs union. Ulgen is the founder and managing partner of Istanbul Economics. The consultancy specializes in market entry strategies for international companies, political and economic risk analysis related to Turkey and regulatory affairs. Ulgen is also the chairman of the Istanbul based think tank, Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM) and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. His research and opinion pieces have been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for European Policy Studies, Center for European Reform, the Atlantic Council, German Marshall Fund, Brookings and the World Economic Forum as well as newspapers such as Le Figaro, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, European Voice, Project Syndicate and the International New York Times. He is also the co-author of a book on Turkey-EU relations with Kemal Dervis and a frequent commentator on Turkish affairs in the international press. Ulgen served on the academic advisory board member of the NATO Defence College in Rome. He was a member of the Europe Council of the World Economic Forum. He was also a member of the international policy experts group setup by the NATO Secretary General Rasmussen.

 Galip Dalay is the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, an associate fellow at Chatham House, and a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Doha Center (BDC). His current research focuses on the question of regionalism, regional order and governance in the Middle East, Turkish politics, Turkish foreign policy, regional Kurdish politics, Middle Eastern politics, Turkish -Russian and history and politics of Turkish -Western/European relations, and history of post-colonial and post-imperial forms of internationalism. Dalay’s pieces and analysis have appeared on Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate,  Newsweek,  Le  Monde,  Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, Middle East Eye and The World Politics Review.

Interventions en anglais

Séminaire « enjeux actuels des migrations »
Organisé par l’Axe AMiMo de l'IFEA en collaboration avec l’Association pour les recherches sur les migrations (GAR)

Cette étude porte sur l'expérience de la diaspora des Alévis, qui durant un demi-siècle ont émigré à l'étranger pour diverses raisons en quittant leur espace socio temporel établi depuis des siècles. L'une des conclusions importantes de l'étude, qui vise essentiellement à voir les effets de la migration externe sur la mémoire sociale, les croyances et l'identité culturelle à travers les Alevis, est l’argumentation face à la notion d’ «immigrants homogènes». En ce sens, la présentation sera basée sur la comparaison des expériences de la diaspora alévie en analysant les raisons et les périodes d'immigration, le choix des pays migratoires, les différences de génération, le réseau des migrants établis, le profil communautaire et la structure organisationnelle des Alevis de Grande-Bretagne et d’Allemagne.

Cemal Salman est maître de conférences à la Faculté des sciences politiques à l'Université d'Istanbul. Il est titulaire d’une licence et d’un master en Administration publique et en Sciences politiques à l'Université de Gazi. Il a obtenu son doctorat dans le même domaine, à l'Université d'Istanbul.  Au cours de ses études doctorales, il a mené des recherches sur le terrain à Sivas-Yıldızeli, à Ankara, en Allemagne et dans diverses régions de France durant différentes périodes entre 2013-2014, et a travaillé comme chercheur invité à l'Université de Cologne en Allemagne pendant six mois en 2014. Sa thèse intitulée "Transformation de l'identité alévie dans le processus de migration et d'urbanisation" a reçu le prix des jeunes scientifiques sociaux de l'Association des sciences sociales turques dans la catégorie Doctorat en 2017. Il a également participé à l'équipe chargée de la recherche «Syrian Immigrant Labour», qui a reçu le prix DİSK-Kemal Turks Labour Research Award en 2017. Il a remporté une bourse TÜBİTAK avec son projet de recherche post-doctoral  intitulé «Les effets de l'émigration sur la mémoire sociale, la croyance et la culture: l’exemple des Alevis de Grande-Bretagne et d'Allemagne» et a travaillé comme chercheur invité à l'Université College London entre août 2018 et 2019. Il fait parti depuis septembre 2019 de l'équipe de recherche du projet TUBITAK intitulé "Les expériences d'abri des réfugiés syriens à Istanbul".

Intervention en turc

Seda Altuğ (The Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History)

Session moderated by Alexis Wick (American University of Beirut)

Scholars working on refugees and the refugee issue in the Middle East usually operate within the fields of minority, refugee, diaspora and area studies. Many scholars assume that refugees, as victims of state violence can solely be understood with reference to the past violence that they were exposed to in their home country. Similarly, these groups are considered as self-made and self-enclosed entities whose history, present and future stand out as marginal annexes to the national history. These historiographical claims hold true for the scholarly work on the post-WW1 Christian and Kurdish refugees in Syria under the French mandate (1921- 1946). This talk attempts to nuance these claims and demonstrate the ways in which these internally diverse groups of refugees who are survivors of genocide and state-sponsored mass violence in Turkey and British-Iraq (1915-1931) have cultivated novel subjectivities and articulated the terms of their belonging in French-Syria. Through reflecting on the experiences of these refugee groups, this talk will argue that the refugee issue, namely the debates about the arrival of refugees, the French colonial state’s governing of the issue and the refugees’ involvement in Syrian politics in mid-1930s reveals the terms of Syrianness-in-making in the first half of the 20^th century in Syria.

Evren Balta (Özyeğin University)
Vasily Kuznetsov (Head of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Science)

Session moderated by Bayram Balcı (IFEA) and Mitat Çelikpala (Kadir Has University)

Turkey and Russia have unbalanced bilateral relations that influence broad geography- almost all Eurasian territories that cover both countries' immediate surroundings from the Black Sea to the Caucasus but Central Asia and the Middle East. Both states’ relations with Western actors also play a significant role in shaping their foreign and security policies and their bilateral relations. During the last decade, Turkish and Russian leaders focused on prospective areas of cooperation and left the traditional issues of contention to hibernate. Thus, the two parties reframed their relations based on the principle of 'compartmentalization' of issues. Through this compartmentalization policy, Ankara and Moscow managed to segregate geopolitical and economic issues, especially in different regions, including the Middle East. The ebbs and flows of events in Syria since 2012 and their reflections on the Turkish-Russian relations are worth analyzing the fickle nature of Turkish-Russian relations. This seminar seeks to analyze the ebbs and flows of Turkish-Russian relations with a particular reference to the Syrian war and the Middle East with the participation of two distinguished scholars.

Evren Balta is a Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Ozyegin University and Senior Scholar at Istanbul Policy Center. Her main research interests include political violence, security, foreign policy and politics of identity. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from The Graduate Center, CUNY (2007) and an MA in Sociology from the Middle East Technical University (1999) and an MIA from Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (2001). She is the co-author of The American Passport (Upenn Press,2020), author of Age of Uneasiness (Iletisim Publications, 2019) and Global Security Complex (İletisim Publications, 2012); editor of Introduction to Global Politics (Iletisim Publications, 2014); co-editor of Military, State and Politics in Turkey  (Bilgi University Publications, 2010) and Neighbors with Suspicion: Dynamics of Turkish-Russian Relations (İletisim Publications, 2017).

Vasily Kuznetsov PhD in history (2010), Head of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, Institute of Oriental Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences, associate professor of the Faculty of World Politics, Moscow State University, senior policy adviser of the Russian Contact Group for Inter-Libyan Settlement under Russian Foreign Ministry and Parliament.

From the very beginning of his scientific career, he tries to combine researches in the field of classical Arabic studies to analysis of the current political process in the Arab World and especially in the Maghreb States.

As a medievalist, he defended under the supervision of Professor Isaak Filshtinsky thesis on the medieval Arab-Muslim historical knowledge and has published several articles on the topic.

He is author of several Analytical Reports for the International Discussion Club “Valdai”, for Russia’s International Affairs Council, author of a monograph on political transformation in post-revolutionary Tunisia written on fieldwork (2011-2017). He is contributed with Al-Monitor.

He is interested in studying of socio-political processes, problems of statehood and religion life in the contemporary Arab societies. Also, he is involved in several track-two initiatives on the Russian politics in the Middle East.

Interventions en anglais

Film Screening and Discussion. "A year in Exile" by Malaz Usta.

Discussant: Eda Elif Tibet.

Faruk Bilici [Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris]

Romantique représentant des Lumières en faveur de l’islam, fin politique pour instrumentaliser les sentiments religieux, lecteur assidu des « Ruines » de Volney, de « Mahomet politique » de Savary et de la traduction du Coran de ce « littérateur déiste », Napoléon Bonaparte est tout cela à la fois. Souvent confondu avec ses ambitions politiques orientales et ses sentiments religieux, il aura des idées parfois naïves, souvent ambigües envers l’islam pendant son règne sur l’Empire français et encore plus lors de son exil à l’ile de Sainte-Hélène.

Historien, spécialiste de l'Empire ottoman, Faruk Bilici est professeur émérite des universités à l’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) à Paris. Ancien membre de l’IFEA et du Centre d’études alexandrines (CeAlex), il travaille essentiellement sur les relations franco-ottomanes (XVI^e-XIXe siècles) et l’histoire de l’Égypte ottomane. Il a dirigé la collection Bibliothèque turque chez Actes-Sud/Sindbad et a co-dirigé La Turquie : d'une révolution à l'autre (Hachette, 2013). Ses deux derniers ouvrages portent sur L’expédition d’Egypte, Alexandrie et les Ottomans : l’autre histoire (Alexandrie, Centre d’études alexandrines, 2017) ; Le Canal de Suez et l’empire ottoman (Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2019).

Intervention en français

Illustration: le 23 aout 1789, Napoléon Bonaparte à la fête de Mevlut  devant la mosquée Al-Azhar.

Sepideh Parsapajouh (CNRS-CéSor/EHESS)

Event hosted by Orient-Institut Istanbul in Cooperation with the Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes (IFEA).

In Twelver Shi’ism, as in many other religions, devotion and piety are not merely conceptual and ideational nor are they directed towards a purely abstract God. Twelver Shi’a consists of a set of beliefs and practices dedicated primarily to fourteen holy figures: The Prophet Muhammad, his daughter, Fatimah al-Zahrâ, and the twelve Imams are known as the fourteen infallibles or 14 ma'sum that are woven together and developed by believers in order to lead them to God. Concrete materials such as time, places, objects, and even persons mediate believers’ connections to the holy figures and act as vehicles for devotion. In this presentation, after a short introduction to Twelver Shi’ism, I will address the issue of religious materiality in the life of some Iranian Imamite Shi’a groups on three levels: in their daily lives; in the ceremonies and particular rituals on annual occasions, and finally in pious visits (ziyârat). This presentation is based on the results of field research, the methodology of which I will briefly discuss. It will also be articulated with some anthropological concepts and ideas that my colleagues, Michel Boivin, Annabelle Collinet and Delphine Ortis, and I put forward and discussed in a seminar based on research conducted over four years (2015-2019) at the EHESS (Paris), entitled “Material Culture and Devotional Practices in Shi’a Societies”.   

Sepideh Parsapajouh is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research - Center for
Social Research on Religion (CéSor-EHESS). Her first research focused on an Iranian slum where she
uncovered an order based on various solidarity mechanisms. This research led her to the importance of
value systems and religious beliefs in the balance of a society. Since 2010, she has been studying various
aspects of popular Shi'a religion, individual and collective, intimate and spectacular, in Iran and beyond,
in particular practices related to death, devotion, and the worship of saints and martyrs, faith and acts in
which the material and the spiritual are intertwined. Her publications include: Au coeur d'un bidonville
Iranien, Paris, Karthala-IFRI, 2016 ; Cimetières et tombes dans les mondes musulmans à la croisée des
enjeux religieux, politiques et mémoriels, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Université
de Provence, n° 146 (with Mathieu Terrier), 2019 ; Religions en Iran, special issue Archives de sciences
sociales des religions (ASSR), éditions de l’EHESS, n° 189, (with Sabrina Mervin), 2020 ; Bodies and
Artefacts : Relics and other devotional supports in Shia societies in the Indic and Iranian worlds, special
issue of Islamic Material Culture, édition de Brill, n° 1, (with Annabelle Collinet and Michel
Boivin), 20221

Intervention en anglais

Image: Procession participants carrying a standard (Karaj, Ashura, 2007). kindly provided by Sepideh Parsapajouh.

To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary: Please send an email specifying your name and academic affiliation to Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.  by 14 June 2021 (Monday) at the latest.

For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.

Tolga Bilener (Université Galatasaray)

Situés aux deux extrémités du continent asiatique, la République de Turquie et la République populaire de Chine continuent d’approfondir leurs relations bilatérales dans plusieurs domaines, notamment en ce qui concerne les échanges économiques depuis le début du 21^ème siècle. Alors qu’elle n’était qu’un partenaire marginal il y a une dizaine d’années, la Chine est désormais devenue, avec un volume commercial annuel de 26 milliards de dollars, le troisième partenaire commercial de la Turquie. Même si le déficit commercial en faveur de la Chine demeure un problème structurel, les liens économiques se développent et se diversifient. Les investissements et acquisitions chinois augmentent dans le secteur minier, dans les infrastructures portuaires et autoroutières, dans le commerce numérique ou dans le secteur énergétique, sans oublier la diplomatie vaccinale de la Chine.  

Les deux pays célèbrent en 2021 le cinquantenaire de leurs relations diplomatiques et affichent à l’occasion la volonté d’aller plus loin parce que, d’une part, les relations de la Turquie avec ses alliés traditionnels occidentaux sont de plus en plus dégradées, et de l’autre, la stratégie chinoise concernant les nouvelles routes de la Soie voit la Turquie comme un pays important. Même si les points de convergence et la détermination de coopérer ne manquent pas, ce rapprochement est quand même limité par des facteurs tant internes qu’externes, comme la question ouïghoure ou l’appartenance institutionnelle de la Turquie à l’alliance occidentale. Quoi qu’il en soit, l’avenir des relations entre la Turquie et la Chine sera aussi déterminé par l’évolution de l’équilibre des puissances sur le plan international.

Tolga BILENER, docteur en sciences politiques, après une licence à la Faculté des Sciences politiques de l’Université d’Istanbul, a fait son master en relations internationales à l'Université Paris-II (Panthéon-Assas) en tant que boursier de la Commission européenne dans le cadre du programme Jean Monnet Sa thèse de doctorat, sous la direction de M. Jean Marcou, à Sciences-Po Grenoble, porte sur les relations turco-chinoises. Soutenu en 2018, ce travail est publié chez l’Harmattan l'année suivante, sous le titre "La Turquie et la Chine: une nouvelle convergence en Eurasie?". Il a publié en 2020 (en turc) “Diplomatie et traités internationaux en Anatolie ancienne selon les tablettes de Kültepe/Kanesh”. T. Bilener travaille actuellement à l’Université Galatasaray (Istanbul) comme maître de conférences associé, au sein du département de relations internationales. Il est chargé des cours sur le Moyen-Orient, l'Asie orientale, la Sécurité internationale, ainsi que l'Histoire de la diplomatie.

Interventions en français