It’s another hot Australian New Year’s Day, and 1200 people are aboard a train bound for a picnic when a burst of gunfire shatters the festive atmosphere. Police return fire, killing the attackers – but…
Few people had heard of the Syrian town of Kobanê until recently. But since coming under sustained attack in the last fortnight by Islamic State (ISIS) militants, the town has attracted international attention…
The official Turkish policy is that it doesn’t accept asylum applications from outside Europe. The Syrian refugee crisis forced this to change. It led the Turkish authorities to implement, in their words…
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has swept to a landslide victory in the country’s first direct presidential election. His win follows three terms as the country’s prime minister and he has…
The prospect of the first direct presidential election in Turkey’s history – and the candidacy of pro-Kurdish Selahattin Demirtaş has generated much excitement among the country’s Kurds. Though Demirta…
Turkey awaits a fateful election on August 10. The electorate will be heading back to the polls to elect, for the first time in the country’s Republican history, the president by popular vote. If no candidate…
Turkey’s presidential elections mark a crucial moment for the country, not only because it is the first time that a president will be elected directly by the people, but the future of the country’s political…
One of the worst mining tragedies in Turkish history, the explosion at the Soma coal mine has taken at least 282 lives and many more miners remain unaccounted for. I come from a town 13kms away from the…
Soma, a little mining village in western Turkey, became host to one of the greatest industrial crimes in mining history when an explosion trapped 800 miners 2km underground and 4km from the exit. At the…
In the deadliest coal mine disaster in Turkish history, the tragedy seems to tear this already polarised society even further apart. It has already been confirmed that more than 200 workers have been killed…
The Turkish people went to the polls at the weekend against a backdrop of some of the most serious unrest the country has seen in living memory. The local elections, in which the ruling AKP (Justice and…
Eight years ago, Twitter became a free and open resource to all who had access. Since then we have connected across devices and geographies in ways that have awakened a new type of social interaction…
In an extraordinary move Turkey has banned Twitter, blocking access to the social networking site that has more than 10m users in the country. The ban has come just hours after the prime minister, Recep…
Demonstrations have broken out across Turkey following the death of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy, who fell into a coma during last summer’s Gezi park protests after he was struck in the head by a teargas…
The global financial crisis has morphed into its latest form: an emerging markets currency crisis. Investors are fleeing developing and middle-income countries – even those with strong long-term growth…
The long-standing and, hitherto, powerful government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is under unprecedented pressure after one of the strangest fortnights in recent Turkish political history. Some key allies and…
Victims of genocide die twice: first in the killing fields and then in the texts of denialists who insist that “nothing happened” or that what happened was something “different”. On the eve of two centennial…
As autumn comes to Turkey, the spirit of Gezi Park can still be felt in the air. After months of mass anti-government demonstrations, the only common consensus is that political climate will never being…
A protest against the destruction of green space in central Istanbul escalates to national protests against a remote, desecularising political leader; public transport fares in Brazil lead to a national…
While protesters were asleep, police stormed Istanbul’s Gezi Park using tear gas and water cannons. They set fire to the encampments. And yet pictures of bloodied protesters, or those blinded by plastic…
Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University