Neoliberalism

Occupying democracy

/ F. Azadi / 1 Comment

First published on Open Democracy

The replacement of democratically elected HDP/DBP mayors and local municipality workers by AKP appointees is a grave threat to democracy in Turkish Kurdistan and the larger region.

In the aftermath of the July 2016 coup d’état attempt in Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has dismissed, detained and in some cases imprisoned co-mayors from 51 majority Kurdish local authorities across South East Turkey (North Kurdistan), replacing them with appointees from the AKP. The majority of these co-mayors belong to the AKP’s leading opposition parties, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and its Kurdistan branch the Democratic Regions Party (DBP). Mass layoffs and detentions of municipality workers, again a majority of whom were Kurdish, followed, alongside an occupation of the municipality buildings by the Turkish constabulary forces. Amongst the seized municipalities are North Kurdistan’s de-facto capital city of Diyarbakir (Amed) and other politically consequential cities such as Van, Mardin, Siirt and Dersim.

The capture and occupation of the local authorities is symbolic of a new phase in repression against the democratic opposition in Turkey, following the failed military coup in July 2016. Continue reading →

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Neoliberalism, Feminism and Afghanistan

/ F. Azadi / Leave a comment

Maxine Molyneux (2008) discussing neoliberal trends in feminist social policy in Latin America argues that the term ‘neoliberalism’ has become so profuse it had lost a sense of any specific meaning. In their essay Introduction: Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism, Cornwall, Gideon and Wilson (2008) have described neoliberalism as a ‘set of economic policy prescriptions associated with the Washington Consensus’.

Originally, neoliberalism came to prominence under the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and promoted the theory that privatisation and deregulation of an economy were the best means of safeguarding the freedom of the individual to consume and compete without the intrusion of the state. Economist David Harvey (2006) argues that nations of the global North stumbled towards neoliberalism in response to the 1970s recession, where ‘the uneasy compact between capital and labour brokered by an interventionist state’ broke down. Continue reading →