Week Eight
I spent this week polishing off a few items on my to do list, while much of the CEELI staff trickles back into the office after vacation. Among other things, I am finally finishing my big project revamping a document on social media guidelines for Czech judges. I have been through so many rounds and drafts of this document, but my assignment was to restructure the guidelines entirely, to make them less academic and theoretical and more practical. With this task basically done, I have also finished assisting with prep for the program that will begin next week for Turkish lawyers.
I'm quite excited about the Turkish lawyers program, partially because I want to learn more--and report back--about the challenges these lawyers are facing on a daily basis. One of the benefits of being at CEELI has been being able to meet people not only from Central and Eastern Europe, but from across the European region and its periphery, including the Middle East and Asia. I have benefited from being exposed to a wide variety of interlocking issues across the region, and one of the greatest insights I have gained is how intertwined many of these countries are. And yet, a set of one-size-fits-all "best practices" or solutions really cannot be imported from one country to another. Each is particular in its needs and challenges.
Turkey has loomed large in my imagination during the entirety of my time here at CEELI, partially because I have met individuals who work in Turkey, some who have taken refuge in Turkey from other countries such as Azerbaijan, and some who have spoken knowledgeably about Turkey's history and relationship to Western Europe. I have my own reasons for curiosity as well. During the summer of 2012, a year that seems like ancient history at this point, I found myself in Istanbul, a city that was beyond my conception of what was possible in its beauty, complexity, and size. The fact that the city quite literally stretches across two continents alone speaks to its scale, and I found myself captivated by the diversity of cultures, languages, people groups, and history. I shouldn't have been surprised, given what I had learned about Istanbul in school, beginning maybe in the 6th grade, but encountering it first hand and learning about it in a classroom always prove to be two very different experiences.
In 2012, however, I was not in Istanbul to be a tourist, and aside from a quick trip to the Grand Bazaar and the Hagia Sophia, I spent most of my three or four days there interviewing scientists at some of Turkey's most elite universities. At that time, I was in the midst of prior career endeavors in the social sciences, and I was working on a project studying elite scientists' views on religion in countries across the world. Turkey was at the top of our list, largely because it not only had an infrastructure for sophisticated and ground-breaking research science that had been in place for many decades, but its government had positioned itself, from its inception, as a leading secular and liberal nation modeled on France, with a Muslim majority population. Or, at least, that was the dominant narrative at the time.
What we found, instead, was an undercurrent of unease that this narrative was now irrelevant. Erdogan was already in power, and the shifts in the state's relationship to secularism, religion, populism, and democracy were already underway. No one knew how far things would go, of course, but I have thought back to numerous conversations during that trip that I now know were not exaggerated in their level of alarm over what was happening. It was apparent that Erdogan would not surrender power easily, and many of our interviewees were not sure what his rise would mean for the direction of the country--or its relationship to the rest of the world. It was interesting that we were not entering into the conversations with the explicit purpose of discussing politics, rule of law, or the role of the government. In fact, we were almost blissfully ignorant of the tectonic plates moving across the country's political landscape. But, inevitably, the conversations moved toward these topics and the fear and uncertainty these changes implied. Because we were interviewing those at the top of their game in science, individuals who were more accustomed to spending all day in the lab or corralling students in a classroom, it may have been surprising that they would speak so extensively on topics outside of their expertise. Yet, they were fluent on topics of power, observers from afar in certain respects, but also well versed in projecting into the future, paying attention to institutional shifts and their impacts on their students, and of course valuing intellectual freedom and the pursuit of knowledge without the constraint of ideology. These individuals epitomized the profile of someone who had no allegiance, except to the scientific method and the quest for truth.
One of the advantages to CEELI's approach, from what I have observed, is their willingness to open up the conversation and the implementation of the rule of law beyond the sphere of legal professionals. By engaging those who work or are experts in other sectors, they actually strengthen the work of the judiciary. This cross-sectoral approach seems rare and requires a certain degree of humility from those who may not be trained formally in the law but still have valuable insight. In Turkey during the summer of 2012, I gained a small glimpse into what elite scientists had to say about the erosion of legal norms and government accountability, as well as a dangerous populist ideology that was infusing the nation's discourse. There was tremendous value in their perspective.
To conclude, even though this post is looking ahead to the arrival of the Turkish lawyers, I am also, as usual, taking the occasion of this post to mull over some of what I am learning here. Until next week, when I'm sure I will have more to say about the current realities on the ground in Turkey.