Peace Profile: Academics for Peace in Turkey

In 2012, a group of academics in Turkey launched an initiative called the Academics for Peace (AfP). Its foundation coincided with a hunger strike announced by Kurdish prisoners to call attention to a range of unresolved issues surrounding the Turkish–Kurdish conflict in Turkey. The group’s first petition—signed in 2012 by around 300 academics from 50 different universities—marked the beginning of a series of interventions by academics to promote a peaceful resolution to the decades-old conflict. A core AfP aim was to point the way for the peace process to be put on a sustainable path. To do so, the AfP emphasized shining a critical light on the long-standing assumptions that had guided previous attempts to resolve the Kurdish issue, none of which had produced lasting peace. Central to this project was the AfP’s urging of political leaders to foreground the underlying sources of the conflict—particularly the enduring and significant structural disadvantages faced by Turkey’s Kurdish citizens—when drawing a roadmap for peaceful resolution. In light of this, its initiatives still aim at supporting the peace process by producing knowledge on issues such as conflict resolution, peace processes, peace-building at the societal level, and gender dimension of peace-building with regard to the Kurdish rights.