İştar Gözaydın, Imprisoned Turkish Scholar: Release Petition

We recently received a request from a network member to share the following notice regarding a petition for the release of İştar Gözaydın, a Turkish scholar of politics and society who has spent time in the United States (at Georgetown and NYU), and who has been imprisoned in Turkey.  We gladly do so.

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Professor İştar Gözaydın has been for many years a prominent member of the European Religion and Politics community. She is an intellectual, a human rights activist and an important scholar who has written significant and illuminating contributions on Turkish society and politics. Istar was fired from her job shortly after the abortive July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey and in December 2016 she was arrested on charges that have still not been clarified.

Over the last two months, her friends and colleagues have made numerous efforts for her release, but without success. The stage has now been reached of a mass petition which we hope will attract signatures from scholars from Europe and elsewhere in the world to demand her release from prison. We hope very much you are willing to sign the petition and if you could circulate it among your colleagues too for their signatures that would be much appreciated.


If you are willing to sign the petition, then please email Ahmet Erdi Öztürk at aerdiozturk [at] gmail.com who is collecting signatures.

The petition is available here.

You may also wish to see the Economist article here.