is Professor of Political Science at Sabancı University, Istanbul and currently a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Unversity, Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies. She is the author of Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey (The University of Utah Press, 2011).
Russian refugees influenced Istanbul’s cultural life from the 1920s despite the Turkification policies of the new republic. The Sevastopol-born sculptor Iraida Barry’s life in exile and love for the city is a piece of this history. However, admiring the Russian diaspora shouldn’t have meant demeaning others – as ended up happening in US press. Ayşe Kadıoğlu revisits a life exiled to Istanbul, while longing for the heartbeat city herself.
Ayse Kadioglu reads the protests in Istanbul as a sign that people demand more than representative democracy. Indeed, it is the citizens’ search for participatory democracy that, for the first time in years, may mean Turkey really does become a model in its region.
