You may have noticed that Populism is getting quite… popular. In the last 20 years, populist parties in Europe have tripled their votes. By 2018, they were in government in 11 countries. Populist leaders now govern countries with a combined population of over 2 billion people. How did we get here? Where are we going? What’s at stake?

There are, of course, no simple answers. Populism evades the traditional tropes of how politics plays out in democracies. Across the world, populist challengers are concocting complex hybrids of left-wing economics with exclusionary social protections to capitalise on mistrust of ruling elites – and a fear of mass migration. We’re joined by award winning author and journalists, Ece Temelkuran and Patrick Cockburn, to try and understand why, how: and why now.

In her new book, How To Lose a Country, Ece is proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing, and too often paralysing, political questions of our time. Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of “real people”, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy, fierce debate and dissent.

Speakers:

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She is also a frequent commentator on BBC and Channel 4. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots and the Ambassador of New Europe Award for Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media. 

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times since 1979 and, from 1990, The Independent. He has also worked as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books. He has received the Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting, the James Cameron Award, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Muqtada, about war and rebellion in Iraq; The Occupation (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007); The Broken Boy, a memoir; and with Andrew Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

  Watch the video stream of How to Lose a Country

In 2012, award-winning photographer Guy Martin moved to Istanbul. At the time, Turkey was regarded as a nation of wealth and power, with a stable democracy with secular leadership. However, this began to change with the rise of Islamic State, Presidential elections, the Kurds becoming a credible political force, the refugee crisis, and the failed coup d’etat by a section of the Turkish armed forces in 2016. In this volatile environment, fake news, before it was known as such, thrived, fuelled by change and instability. Since the abortive putsch, independent media workers have been sacked in their thousands, and scores imprisoned; Turkey is now the world’s leading jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Against this backdrop, Martin was drawn to explore Turkish soap operas, some of the most watched television shows in the world. The soap operas that had previously exported a simultaneously nostalgic and socially progressive vision of Turkey across the Arab world, refocused their storylines to emphasise the Turkish military and political power plots by deep state operatives, collusion by foreign powers, and terrorist attacks. Martin was introduced to a soap opera Director and given free rein to shoot on set, recording the action both during, before and after the cameras were rolling.

What began as a documentary project quickly spiralled into a deeper journey along the fault lines of truth, and the power of narratives to control reality. It is this dizzying blur of fact, urban myth, intense political fear and fiction pervading Turkish society – and Martin’s work – that we come together to discuss. Joining us will be storytellers of all stripes, from prizewinning authors to frontline journalists and translators.

Chair:

Maureen Freely was born in the United States, raised in Turkey, and educated at Harvard. A professor at the University of Warwick, she is currently the chair of English PEN. Her seventh novel, Sailing through Byzantium, was chosen as one of the best novels of 2014 by The Sunday Times. She has translated or co-translated a number of Turkish memoirs and classics, as well as five books by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. She is also the translator of two memoirs about Turkey’s Islamicized Armenians, and the biography of the Turkish-Armenian journalist and political activist Hrant Dink.

Speakers:

Guy Martin is a British documentary photographer. He graduated with a B.A(HONS) in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport and shortly afterwards, won the Guardian and Observer Hodge Award. He went on to pursue a long-term project in Southern Russia and the Caucasus, before documenting the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. His work regularly appears in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, D Magazine, FADER, Huck Magazine, Le Monde M Magazine, Time Magazine, Bloomberg Business Week Magazine, WIRED, Harpers and National Geographic.

The Parallel State was supported by grants from the Magnum Emergency Fund and the Saint-Brieuc Photoreporter Festival and was the winner of the inaugural Viewbook Transformations Grant, and the Project Launch Award at CENTER, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The project was first exhibited in the Rencontres d’Arles 2017 as part of the New Discovery Award. Martin is a member of Panos Pictures, and his print sales and special commissions are represented by NineteenSixtyEight. An exhibition of ‘The Parallel State’ will be on display at Benrubi Gallery, New York, in February 2019.

Pelin Turgut is a London-based writer, storyteller and international facilitator. Co-creator of the popular alternative film festival -!f Istanbul-, several unique storytelling courses at institutions across Europe and a teacher of the art of storytelling, her first novel Secrets of a Vanishing Country was published in Turkey last year. The book is currently being translated into English.

Hosted in partnership with Bertha Doc House this one-off screening will be followed by a Panel Discussion. Speakers include historian and founding director of the Gomidas Institute Ara Sarafian; Prof. Marc Baer, author and historian of the Ottoman Empire at LSE; and Dr Carla Garapedian (consulting producer, Intent to Destroy; associate producer The Promise).

Book tickets here: http://dochouse.org/cinema/screenings/intent-destroy-qa

The screening will take place at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema.

Award-winning photographer Nish Nalbandian spent three years documenting life and war in Northern Syria from the frontlines to the everyday lives of people struggling to survive amid the ruins. A selection of photographs from this powerful body of work were published in Nalbandian’s critically acclaimed first monograph A Whole World Blind (Daylight, 2016). In 2014, as the situation in Syria escalated and it was becoming too dangerous to stay there, Nalbandian shifted his focus to another story close by: the lives of the nearly three million Syrian refugees still living in southern Turkey. Nalbandian’s humanistic portraits of Syrians in Turkey are published in his second book: A Handful of Dust (Daylight Books, April 2018).

In the book’s introduction, Nalbandian writes: “My intent in this book was not to produce a ‘poor refugee’ story, showing sad pictures of exotic Middle Eastern people living in poverty. I do have some pictures like that. But I challenged myself to show a wide swath of the Syrian population from all walks of life. I do not claim to show a complete picture, just a broad picture of what life is like for these people in this place at this time. I also tried to leave people’s politics and specifics of the war out of it”.

About the photographer

Nish Nalbandian working in Aleppo, Syria. Photo courtesy of Richard Charles Harvey

Documentary photographer Nish Nalbandian has photographed in more than 35 countries worldwide, in a variety of situations and environments, from wars to sporting events, cities to remote deserts. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as The Human Rights Watch World Report, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Bag News National Geographic Traveler, and New Scientist. His first monograph, A Whole World Blind:War and Life In Northern Syria (Daylight Books, 2016) received critical acclaim in such outlets as Smithsonian Magazine, The Daily Beast, Vice, American Photo, Square Mile Magazine, Lensculture and The New York Review of Books. Nalbandian’s work has been shown in the New York Photo Festival, Powerhouse Arena, and IPA Best in Show in New York, and in exhibitions around the world.He has received many honours, including: Applied Art’s 2014 ‘Best Portrait Series’ Award (Portraits of the Syrian Opposition); American Photography AP30 (Aleppo Struggles On); First Prize, IPA (International Photography Awards) Editorial/Conflict (Aleppo Struggles On); Silver Medal, ND Awards (Special – Panoramic, Panoramic Photographs in and around Aleppo); Honourable Mention, ND Awards, Special PhotojournalismStory (Aleppo Struggles On); and Lensculture’s Top 50 Emerging Talent Award for 2014. For more information, go to: http://www.nishnalbandian.com/

Matthew Cassel 

Matthew Cassel is an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist based in the Mediterranean region. For more than a decade he has documented stories of people facing conflict and persecution in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. He works mainly as a one-person video crew, filming, producing and editing short and long-form documentary content for various publications.

Learn more here.

The area of East Ghouta is said to be one of the last strongholds of resistance by Syrian opposition forces and as such the target of renewed violence by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and his foreign allies.

The panel invited for the talk included Dr Abdulkarim Ekzayez, a Syrian medical doctor and an epidemiologist; Leila Al-Shami, a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aims to connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe along with Dr Idrees Ahmad, a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling. The evening was hosted by BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.

Bowen began by asking Dr Ekzayez how he manages to work and provide medical care in hostile situations such as East Ghouta to which replied:

We see the same patients that we discharged a few days ago, with even more serious injuries, but they (hospitals) don’t have space to treat patients, they don’t have the medical supplies…they don’t have food, water or any essentials. Even the word catastrophe can not describe what’s happening in East Ghouta.

What can done about the conflict in Syria? UK could expand its Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, support the 5.5m Syrian Refugees into work + schools & help rebuild Raqqa – @BowenBBC at @frontlineclub with @LeilaShami pic.twitter.com/64thtTW1ap

— James Denselow (@jamesdenselow) March 13, 2018

He went on to explained that the Assad regime causes delays and confiscates certain medical supplies provided by UN humanitarian convoys and  they hardly reach the population or meet their basic needs.

He further added: “My interpretation is that they (Assad Regime) use this tactic to weaken the community, because this scenario happened many times before…in Baba Amr in Homs, in Eastern Aleppo and other places. First, they besiege the area, then they target all the civilians, so people don’t have access to healthcare or any essentials.”

The lack of a concerted effort on part of the international community was raised by Al-Shami. She pointed out that the UN has not managed to get aid in these besieged areas such as Eastern Ghouta and starvation is being used as a weapon of war. She commented:

This should not be a negotiating principle, this is a basic humanitarian standard.  The aid has to reach these communities in need. We need more efforts, we need air drops of aid. The international community has to start asking questions when a regime purposefully stops aid and starves people, what they can do?

"Civil society, suppressed under Assad but multiple in opposition controlled areas = hope for future of #Syria" #EastGhouta @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/NYsZSDvL2C

— Suzy Madigan (@Suzy_Madigan) March 13, 2018

Further along in the discussion Bowen turned to Dr Idress to see what he thinks the international community can do besides watching the conflict unfold and discussed UN’s classification of words such as ‘besiege’ and ‘hard to reach areas’.

In terms of expectations from the UN agencies Dr Idress explained:

The problem is that the UN has no international backing. The UN alone cannot enforce resolutions. Its efforts have been repeatedly thwarted even for humanitarian efforts and we have had 11 vetoes from Russia which blocks any kind of accountability. In the absence of this it doesn’t have any mechanism with which to confront the regime. So, it’s incumbent on the states which are supposed to be guarantors of world order, but what we have seen is a collapse of that.

One of the questions raised from the audience in this open discussion was on the support for the Syrian government. On this Dr Ekzayez commented that the Syrian regime is not similar to any other authoritarian regime. It relies roughly on 2500 people within its core structure and each person from this inner core was holding positions of power within institutions such as the army, The Ba’ath Party and society agencies. They similarly had links within communities who had shared interests with the regime.

After the formal ending of the conversation for the evening the panel and audience continued to discuss their individual points on the unfolding of events in East Ghouta in the members room on the lower floors of the Frontline Club.

To mark World Day against Trafficking in Persons, we will be hosting a screening night in collaboration with the Ethical Journalism Network to present –Sea of Pictures.

Over the last three years improving the quality of migration reporting has been a priority for the Ethical Journalism Network, conducting two major studies on migration coverage, creating practical tools for journalists.

Sea of Pictures is a documentary that supports this work. The film focuses on the image of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, who was found drowned on a beach in Turkey while trying to reach Europe with his family. This image went viral and became a symbol of the refugee crisis and the widespread international apathy up until that point. His image was seen on newspapers across the globe. But how as a media outlet do you choose which pictures to show to the public? What are the ethics surrounding taking pictures such as these? Can you really control how these pictures are interpreted and repurposed?

The screening will be followed by a debate around these questions. The panelists will discuss how pictures can impact and reshape public discourse and policy, but often in ways that were entirely unintended.

The EJN has released a special edition of Ethics in the News  in which the makers of Sea of Pictures,  Misja Pekel and Maud van de Reijt write a Report on the Ethics of Photographing Refugees.

Last year the EJN was commissioned by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) to write a report on how media on both sides of the Mediterranean cover migration. The report, which was published to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3, covers 17 countries and provides recommendation for media and policy makers.

Chair

Dorothy Byrne is Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel Four in the United Kingdom. She was appointed in September 2003, having previously edited the award-winning Dispatches. During her tenure, the Channel’s news and current affairs programmes have won numerous BAFTA, RTS, Emmy Awards and others. In 2014, Dispatches won the RTS Journalism Awards for both best Home and best International Current Affairs, the first time one strand won both awards, and Channel Four News won the RTS Journalism Award for Best News Programme of the Year for the second year running.

Speakers

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist who has been working on issues relating to women, population and war for over a decade. She is a Harvard Nieman Fellow 2016, and recently finished a year of research at the university on war, and how we tell stories about modern conflict. During the program she studied narrative non-fiction writing. Anastasia is also a TED fellow. She has written about her experiences as a photojournalist for The New York Times, TIME LightBox, Nieman Reports and National Geographic. As a photographic storyteller, her focus has been on long-form narrative reportage for monthly magazines. She is a National Geographic Magazine contributor, and other clients include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian.

Misja Pekel is a film maker and producer of the film Sea of Pictures. Misja studied Law and Journalism in Amsterdam and Leeds. He is a documentary filmmaker at the Dutch public broadcasterHuman. Besides documentaries, he is working on Medialogica, a tv series about public opinion and the influence of media

Find out how to donate to the EJN here: https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.charitycheckout.co.uk/

Check out Moving Stories, a report on how to cover the migration crisis here: http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/resources/publications/moving-stories

President Erdogan’s campaign has been driven by anti-European rhetoric and led to stand-offs with Germany, The Netherlands and others. Declining relations between Turkey and the EU raise questions about the stability of Turkish economy, which is largely dependent on trade relations with the EU, and how Turkey will cope with the continuing strains of war, terrorist insurgencies, and the refugee crisis.

Our panel will reflect on President Erdogan’s fraught relationship with the EU in the context of the country’s political future after the April referendum.

Speakers (Full panel announced soon)

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love and her most recent, Three Daughters of Eve.

Andrew Gardner has worked on human rights issues in Turkey for over ten years. Currently he is Researcher on Turkey for Amnesty International. Since joining the organization he has researched and written on issues including freedom of expression and assembly, torture, impunity for human rights abuses and refugee rights. He lives in Istanbul.

On Wednesday the 12th of October, a panel of five experts in the refugee crisis gathered to discuss the tragedy that often ensues when a refugee attempts to leave their home country.

May Bulman, a journalist with The Independent, chaired the event and asked Reece Jones, a Professor at the University of Hawaii, whether the brutality when crossing borders has worsened, and if so – why?

“Yes. I would say definitely it has gotten worse. I argue it’s for two reasons: one is that the changing perception that border guards’ primary duty is to prevent the movement of terrorists and other violent threats… The second factor is the funnelling of people on the move to much more dangerous places to cross… as the easier places to cross are closed down, they have to take a much more dangerous route.” Reece Jones

The International Rescue Committee’s Elinor Raikes described the ripple effect caused by the poorly coordinated border closures: “We’ve seen a significant impact on people right across the route – families separated, fathers and husbands in Germany waiting for their families that were on their way, families now stranded in Turkey.”

Heaven Crawley discussed the varied and troubling backstories of migrants in Greece

“When we talk to people we found that it’s pretty unusual that people left the place where they lived with an idea they would go to Europe, and that’s where they went… The vast majority of people get out, and then work out where to go next.”

Richard Savage, works for charity Save the Children, and works to move refugees directly from their homeland to a new country. “The risks of going across the mediterranean were less than going home.” He highlighted the benefits of the borders to private military companies: “they’re going to make money, aren’t they? By rolling out barbed wire, producing weapon systems for border guards – does it stem from the perception of terrorism?”

In the absence of legitimate methods of travelling to safer lands, smugglers enjoy a booming trade with a huge supply of refugees willing to pay to escape their home country. Elinor Raikes discussed the irony of a system that refuses entry actually increases risk: “you’re pushing people into these illegal, uncontrolled, unmanaged routes, and actually it’s worse for our security.” She described the “pitiful” EU numbers in rehoming refugees, “the UN considers that 10% of displaced people globally should be resettled because they’re considered the most vulnerable, the EU share of that should be 108,000 a year. And the latest draft that’s making the rounds around the council and Parliament at the moment is talking around 20,000 a year.”

After a Turkish court ruled in March that Zaman, an opposition newspaper critical of president Erdoğan, should be run by appointed trustees, the offices were raided and tear gas and rubber bullets were used to dispel protesters. Local journalists continue to face extreme intimidation, threats and charges of espionage.

Restrictions on press freedom reflect similar treatment within civil society groups, which are widely seen as losing independence from the government. The recent attempted military coup led to further attacks on journalists, raising international concerns that Turkey has become an increasingly perilous place for writers and reporters.

While Erdoğan maintains that the press in Turkey is among the most free in the world, human rights organisations warn that freedom of expression is under ever-growing threat. We will be joined by prominent Turkish writers, along with media monitoring experts, to discuss their work in the context of the new dangers faced by writers and journalists in Turkey today.

Full panel published soon.

Chair:

Maureen Freely is the President of English PEN. An author, journalist, translator and academic, she has written seven novels and non-fiction books. She is Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her novel Sailing through Byzantium was named as one of the best novels of 2014 in both the TLS and the Sunday Times, and she has translated five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Speakers:

Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best known novelists and political commentators and her work has been published in several languages. Her books have explored highly controversial topics in Turkey, including Kurdish and Armenian issues and women’s rights. She is a of winner of Turkish Journalist of the Year, the PEN for Peace Award and the Freedom of Thought Award from the Human Rights Association of Turkey. Temelkuran was a victim of coordinated social media abuse for two years following her criticism of Turkey’s ruling AKP government.

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Dr Esra Özyürek is an Associate Professor and Chair for Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, London School of Economics. She received her BA in Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining the LSE she taught at the Anthropology Department of University of California, San Diego. Dr. Özyürek a political anthropologist who seeks to understand how Islam, Christianity, secularism, and nationalism are dynamically positioned in relation to each other in Turkey and in Europe. For her research received funding from Fulbright Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German Academic Exchange, Institute for Turkish Studies.

Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the maelstrom in the Middle East.

Bejan’s poetry is certainly engaged in her people’s struggles, currently spilling across borders that ill-define ravaged eastern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. She has been jailed by the Turkish regime, and – with other writers – faces continuous menace and harassment. She writes dissident journalism and a prose work based on interviews with Kurdish men and women became an instant bestseller in Turkey.

Her first book of translations into English, In The Temple of a Patient God, refers in stark terms to an Exodus by stateless people who “… walked with touches of the moon / veiling our pain / but still we were tired”. And more vividly: “My mother shows the dead / to my brother / and has become the journey. / They weep together”. 

And yet there is always this palpable mysticism in her writing, close to nature, imagining dragons and leopards, meditating on creation – a dialogue with God. Or what her translator calls “an endless spiritual quest to understand the nature of being”. And this is what propels a second translated volume, How Abraham Abandoned Me, which Matur wrote after being impelled to abandon a trip to Lebanon and listen to the poetry in her mind inspired by her native Diyarbakir. The result can only be likened to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – visionary, as though dictated from some outer world, writing of: “A long sleep in the garden / and before roses / and birdsong / the serpent, / his body unfamiliar with earth / would slither along / and steal heaven away from us.” Or: “Where poets / and prayers / and words cannot reach / a lover’s breath / and his throbbing breast / will be the guide. / A lover’s swelling heart / watching the river at night / will summon the tiger”. 

For this very special BookNight, Bejan will talk about her work and people, but – here’s the difference – sections of Bejan’s poetry will be read first in translation, and then by her in Turkish or Kurdish, according to the original.

Recommended reading: In The Temple of a Patient God, and How Abraham Abandoned Me, both published by Arc. 

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.

Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

The event will be hosted by Senior Correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.