Liberal Intellectuals and Human Rights in the Turkish Public Sphere

This dissertation examines the public interventions, rhetoric, and actions of liberal intellectuals in Turkey between the early 1990s and 2012 regarding the rights of Kurdish and Islamic actors and restrictions on discussing the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The analysis of diverse texts published by the interconnected intellectuals – newspaper columns, academic articles, policy papers, reports, and manifestos – and the institutions they used shows how an effective counter-public could take shape i