This paper aims to explore the growing and deepening trend of politics of repression coupled with prolonged crisis and austerity politics, reflecting on the potentials as well as limitations of progressive politics in such a constrained context. Austerity policies continue pushing for anti-labour and reactionary politics in a variety of forms reflecting the unresolved crisis conditions of contemporary capitalism. While the liberal democratic state-form remains relatively intact in particular contexts, in others, it gradually evolves into repressive forms. The growing repression risks conceiving the anti-authoritarian struggles and the anti-capitalist and labour movements separate and/or mutually exclusive. This review article draws on the recent insights of (de)politicization, labour geography and history and political economy scholarships with specific reference to the case of Turkey while cautioning against the binary thinking of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in leftist and labour mobilisations. It proposes a historical perspective in order to appreciate the diversity and multiplicity of struggles against the intersecting nodes of austerity, capitalism and repression in the complex geographies of periphery.
This article analyses the recent political repression of academia in Hungary and Turkey within the critical scholarship on globalisation and neoliberalisation of higher education. We introduce and challenge the hegemonic definitions of academic freedom that sit comfortably with the capitalist logic as well as repressive governing forms and assess the recent attacks on university communities with emphasis on both academic labour and freedom. Adopting a case study approach, we investigate how economic and political forms of repression accompany and reinforce one another within the specificities of both country contexts. We delineate the underlying structural and historical dynamics as well as emergence and evolution of methods of struggle and resistance employed by diverse university communities in their shared and divergent characteristics. Our conclusions include critical reflections on the broader implications of higher education restructuring, authoritarian interventions, and the future of systemic-level resistance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.