Alternative Universalisms? Contemporary Turkish Discourses on Culture in International Relations

Speaker: Katerina Dalacoura, LSE Chair: Zeynep Kaya, LSE Middle East Centre Building on a long intellectual tradition going back to the late Ottoman period, debates in present-day Turkey on the role of culture and civilisation in world politics, and the relationship between modernity and Islam, are vibrant and ongoing. This lecture discusses whether there exist, within this body of thought, new possibilities of going beyond the familiar categories of East and West, secularism and Islam. It asks whether alternative universalist understandings of culture and civilisation in world politics are on offer, or a chimera. Recorded on 2 March 2016. Image description: In 1914, Abdullah Cevdet, an Ottoman intellectual, advocated the wholesale acceptance of Western civilization ‘with its roses and thorns’.