On 5 February 2025, two weeks after Donald Trump assumed the role of US president, Argonotlar (“Argonauts”), a queer art publication in Turkey, issued an urgent letter to its readers.
“Last week, we were going to apply for a fund from the United States Embassy, which aims to develop cultural co-operation between Turkey and the United States,” the letter began. “We drafted our application on Monday, made revisions, and while we were working on the budget on Wednesday evening, we came across a statement by US President Donald Trump on the fund’s official website, stating that the funds abroad had been annulled.
International funds and support mechanisms have long been a lifeline for progressive publications in Turkey such as Argonotlar. They have been particularly vital since 2014, the year Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became president and his government began waging a culture war on anyone it deemed marginal and deviant. Leftist activists, LGBTQ+ groups, feminists, secularist Kurds, journalists and scholars are among the targeted groups.
Through scholarships, endowments and funds from abroad, journalistic and publishing initiatives and institutions could retain some form of independence.
Columbia University, 22 April 2024. Image: SWinxy / Source: Wikimedia Commons
In their letter, Argonotlar’s editors warned that US financial support for Turkey’s marginalised sectors was “shrinking one by one”. It went on to say: “This situation is crushing on civil society and niche publications like Argonotlar, which rely on financial support.”
Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, the publication’s founding editor, told Index that Turkey’s independent media and NGO sectors entered “a new era” after the coup attempt on 15 July 2016, which Erdoğan used to criminalise various sectors of society that opposed his regime. Trump’s second term, according to Akbulut, will initiate a similarly devastating era for these institutions, with only those that are financially supported by subscriptions or their readers able to weather the storm.
“Now we’re entering a completely different phase, one that we’re completely unfamiliar with,” he said. “Independent media outlets and NGOs that rely on their readers, their circles and their [own work] will survive while others will, unfortunately, bid farewell to readers.”
A few weeks after Argonotlar issued its plea, Gazete Duvar (“The Wall Newspaper”), which was launched in 2016, ceased publication, citing financial difficulties. Turkey’s government-controlled media was jubilant. Takvim, a newspaper owned by a pro-government business group, wrote: “The decision to close down Gazete Duvar came in the wake of the abolition of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This structure, which stirred social fault lines and fed internal conflicts in various countries, is also known in Turkey for the media organisations it has been funding.”
Takvim claimed it was “the CIA’s field operational tool for many years”, cheered how “the Wall is taken down!” and noted how Trump’s former political adviser, Elon Musk, described USAID as a “criminal organisation”.
While Trump’s actions, such as his decision to formally shutter USAID in March, have received similar acclaim among Erdoğan’s network, his attempts to deport international students who have voiced pro-Palestinian views have been met with relative silence in Ankara.
On 25 March, after six masked plainclothes agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 30-year-old Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish government spokesperson said it was “an open regression for American democracy”; but Erdoğan, who under normal circumstances would be infuriated by such a move, didn’t comment.
“In general, Erdoğan is enraged with [the] repression of pro-Palestinian speech in the West – that is his meat and potatoes,” said Howard Eissenstat, chair of the history department at St Lawrence University in New York and a scholar at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies.
“These are the sorts of issues Erdoğan loves to talk about: the perfidy and the hypocrisy of the West. ‘Whenever they criticise us, they are being hypocritical!’ That’s part of his brand. [But] he has manifestly not done that,” he said.
Eissenstat analysed the coverage by Anadolu, the state news agency, where such stories would usually be front and centre. This time, he said, “they have been very delicate”.
“I think that boils down to geopolitics. The government doesn’t want to pick a fight with Trump. They’re thinking, ‘We are hoping for better deals; we are hoping to buy F35s; we are not going to bite that apple’.”
In March, Eissenstat and two other Turkey experts – Lisel Hintz and Nick Danforth – published an essay in The Atlantic headlined “We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See it Here”. They warned readers: “As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.”
Amid Trump intensifying his attacks on US colleges for alleged antisemitic bias, Harvard University dismissed Cemal Kafadar, the Turkish director of its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, in March after the centre faced criticism that some of its programming had failed to represent Israeli perspectives. Following this, a Turkish government spokesperson accused Harvard of “openly assaulting scientific thought”.
But the assault on Harvard carried echoes of the attack on academic freedom in Turkey. Since 2021, Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, one of the country’s most prestigious colleges, has witnessed widespread protests against its government-appointed rector, who shut down its progressive LGBTQ+ club, fired scholars who were critical of Erdoğan, and allowed a police presence on the campus to detain any student he deemed a threat to safety. Students say even kissing on campus has become problematic.
In a 2021 conference, Kafadar noted how his colleagues at Boğaziçi were suffering under these circumstances and defined the events as a “constant state of oppression, a state of torment that is gradually increasing in dose with a sense of revenge”. He recounted how his colleagues at Harvard had told him that Trump was “currently studying Erdoğan, Modi and Orbán on the issue of how to deal with universities and the media, trying to learn what he can swiftly [do to] tackle them if he wins the 2024 election”.
Efe Murad Balıkçıoğlu, a research associate at Harvard’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, said the situation for humanities departments in general is dire in the USA. Schools have been cutting back on hiring and closing or freezing jobs. Six jobs which Balıkçıoğlu applied for have closed or been put on hold, including tenure-track (which offers a path of progression at a university), non-tenure-track, part-time and lecturer positions.
“It doesn’t look like there will be any tenure-track positions in the next few years,” he said. “Middle Eastern studies is the one getting [hit the hardest]. From now on, international students will have to think twice about entering or leaving the country because the government is threatening to revoke visas. It’s also possible, even likely, that they’ll be blocked if they take part in political activities.”
Balıkçıoğlu predicted this could trigger a migration of US-based academics to Europe. “Columbia’s history department, which has a student body of around 20 [PhD students] every year, accepted fewer than 10 for its doctoral programme this year,” he said.
“Similarly, fewer international students were accepted this year [across US universities] due to visa problems, and the number of students, especially in the humanities, has decreased. It may be difficult for Turkish academics to find tenure-track jobs or research grants if their research focuses on the Middle East and if they do not glorify Israel.”
US-based artists from Turkey are also evaluating their situations. The Kurdish artist Şener Özmen, who won a grant in 2016 from the Institute of International Education’s Artist Protection Fund, an American initiative that provides grants to threatened artists, said he was concerned by how the USA “can and does deport you without question”.
Özmen, who now lives in Wilmette, Illinois, pointed to similarities between Erdoğan and Trump’s hostility toward the media. “Trump targeted the mainstream media through the discourse of ‘fake news’ while Erdoğan targeted the antigovernment media through the discourse of treason and hostility to religion.”
However, he said there was a difference between the free speech landscapes in Turkey and the USA. So far, despite Trump’s pressures, the media in the USA has largely remained independent, academic freedom has been widely maintained, and universities have retained their autonomy (although Trump’s latest threat to remove federal funding from universities that do not comply with his demands is eroding that independence).
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, in contrast, “a large portion of media outlets have been transferred to capital groups with ties to the government. Institutions like the Council of Higher Education [a government agency] have established direct political control over universities. More importantly, during Trump’s first presidential term, opposition journalists or academics were not subject to criminal prosecution or dismissed from their posts”.
The Turkish government has dismissed thousands of academics through statutory decree investigations and had dozens of them arrested.
Fatma Göçek is among these persecuted Turkish scholars. A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, in January 2016 the esteemed sociologist signed a peace petition alongside 1,127 other scholars titled “We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime”, in order to draw the public’s attention to violence in Turkey.
Since then, Göçek has been unable to travel to the country. “They said that there was a list of 40 people in the Ministry of Justice regarding scholars and that I was 14th on that list,” she told Index. “I haven’t been coming to Turkey for the past decade. I have few opportunities to visit Turkey; I can only meet with Turks virtually.”
Over the past decade, Göçek has worked with professor Kader Konuk, who founded the Academy in Exile in 2017. The initiative offers fellowships to scholars from around the world who are at-risk so that they can continue their research in Germany. Göçek also contributes to Scholars at Risk, a US-based network of 530 higher education institutions across 42 countries.
“I’m working with all those scholars who are trying to come to the USA from Turkey,” Göçek said. “Will they be able to stay here or not? I don’t know.”
Recently, she invited a Fulbright Scholar who focuses on the political activities of Ottoman Kurds to conduct research at her university, but said that he would likely not go to Michigan because of the bureaucratic hurdles and would instead head to England to do his research at Oxford University.
Sarphan Uzunoğlu, an assistant professor at Izmir University of Economics, said the current assault on academic freedoms in the USA was a litmus test for freedom of expression in the West. Countries that were once concerned with Turkey’s trajectory towards authoritarianism are now undergoing a similar transition.
“The fact that countries that said ‘We are concerned’ when these things were happening in Turkey are experiencing the same situation is directly related to the harsh turn in the global political climate,” he said.
“As for how this makes me feel, as a former immigrant who later returned to his country, it is frightening even to imagine the fear Rümeysa Öztürk experienced,” he said, referencing the recently detained Tufts student. “Being detained in an immigration detention centre in another country is not an ordinary situation.”
Eissenstat, the professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, has taught three classes on Palestine this year. “I wouldn’t be teaching them if I were a green card holder,” he said. “Not because I feel I am saying anything offensive or doing anything wrong, but rather because we don’t know why the people are selected for targeting, which is meant to intimidate all of us.”
He compared the situation in the USA to Turkey’s own academic crisis that intensified in the mid-2010s, when the red lines about what one could say and write became unclear.
“Arbitrary arrests – and the arbitrary punishment or targeting of one person, putting them in jail – is key to authoritarian rule,” he said. “The authoritarian rule doesn’t try to punish everybody. It tries to create these singular cases that make everybody pause.”
The authoritarian tactics of the Turkish and US governments are increasingly resembling each other. As Erdoğan and Trump borrow from each other’s playbooks on multiple fronts, students, scholars, journalists and any citizens willing to voice their views could be facing the ominous prospect of a fine-tuned, unified and globally accepted autocracy in the near future.
