Coronaversations Videos

About Umut Bozkurt:
Assistant Professor Umut Bozkurt is a full-time lecturer at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Eastern Mediterranean University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of York, UK. Her academic interests include critical political economy, state theory, modern Turkish politics and the nature of the economic relations between Turkey and North Cyprus. She authored numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her publications also include a co-edited volume on “Beyond a Divided Cyprus: A State and Society in Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She was the former co-ordinator of Cyprus program (2009-2011) ran by the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Coronaversations
In Coronaversations, we will discuss the various effects the pandemic has on our daily lives as well as broader economic and political repercussions with different speakers from Cyprus and around the world.

we discussed ‘Radical Politics and the Left in the Post-Covid Era’ with Prof. Werner Bonefeld whose work contributed to the development of the internationally recognized Open Marxism school.

About Werner Bonefeld
Prof. Werner Bonefeld is a faculty member at the Politics Department, University of York. He studied at the University of Marburg, the Free University of Berlin and the University of Edinburgh where he received his doctorate. Before coming to York, he taught at the Universities of Frankfurt and Edinburgh. His work contributed to the development of the internationally recognized Open Marxism school. Werner Bonefeld was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2016/17 and he is the principal investigator of research into the humanist Marxist tradition. He is a member of the Conference of Socialist Economists, and with Hugo Radice, Greig Charnock and Stuart Shields, he organises the Trans-Pennine Working Groups on Critical Theory and Political Economy. His bibliography was selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in the World (Marquis), starting in 2010. Recent book publications include Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy and The Strong State and the Free Economy. With Beverly Best and Chris O’Kane he is co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, three volumes.

1-What will be the impact of the COVID19 on the economies of the developing countries?

2-When did the liberalization of agriculture start? What were the consequences of this process for developing countries?

3-How did this process affect land ownership patterns and inequality in developing countries?

4-How does the liberalization of agriculture influence people’s access to food in developing countries? What are the differences between food security and food sovereignty?

5- What does the liberalization of agriculture entail regarding the production of seeds? 6-Will the COVID19 crisis transform the way agriculture is organized in developing countries?

About Zülküf Aydın:
Zülküf Aydın is an emeritus professor of Politics from the University of Leeds. His research and teaching interests centres around rural transformation in the developing world, Marxism and the agrarian question, internationalisation of agriculture and global commodity chains, democracy and development, ethnicity and development, politics of environment, political economy of development, politics of developing countries with specific reference to the Middle East. He has conducted sociological field work in Turkey, Jordan and Uzbekistan on the changing nature of relations of production. He has taught at London, Durham and Leeds Universities in the United Kingdom and the Middle East Technical University Ankara and Northern Cyprus Campuses and published widely on sociological and political issues.

1. In what ways do pandemics highlight the need for global governance, and what lessons can be learnt?
2. In what ways does a pandemic highlight and exacerbate inequalities?
3. Does Covid-19 undermine the liberal-democratic state?
4. Should we be concerned with authoritarian actions (e.g. lockdowns) and their repercussions on freedom?
5. How will the health security and global governance be shaped in post-COVID 19?
6. How about de-facto states during the global crises such as a pandemic? Where are they situated in the global system?

About Nicos Trimikliniotis:
Nicos Trimikliniotis is a legal and sociology expert. He is Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, University of Nicosia. He heads the team of experts of Cyprus team for the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU. He is also a trained Barrister and legal expert who has researched on nationality, citizenship, asylum and immigration law and Labour Law, constitutional and European law and fundamental rights, free movement of workers, discrimination, state theory, conflict and reconciliation, digitalities, work, precarity. Publications selection: Migration and the Refugee Dissensus in Europe: Borders, Security and Austerity (2020, Routledge); Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City, Palgrave, 2015) and Beyond a Divided Cyprus: A State and Society in Transformation, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012 with Umut Bozkurt); Rethinking the free movement of workers: the European challenges ahead, (Wolf Legal Publishers, Nijmegen, 2009).

About Emel Akçalı:
Emel Akçalı is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. Prior to coming to Swansea, she was a resident fellow at the IMERA – Institute of Advanced Study of Aix Marseille University in France and an assistant professor at the International Relations Department of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests span the state, society, conflict and politics in the Middle East and North Africa, social movements, neoliberal governmentality outside of the Western realm, critical realist philosophy and non-Western and alternative geopolitical discourses. She has been awarded the CEU Institute of Advanced Study and Aix-Marseille University Institute for Advanced Study resident fellowships for her on-going research on the challenges of state and societal transformation in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Her most recent publications are “Facebook: An emerging arena for politics of self-determination in Northern Cyprus?” South European Society and Politics, 24 (4), 2019, “Revisiting Neoliberalism in the Age of Rising Authoritarianisms: Between Convictions and Contradictions” Routledge International Handbook of Global Studies, in Hamed Hosseini, James Goodman and Barry Gills (eds), London: Routledge (forthcoming) and “Variegated forms of Embeddedness: Home-grown neoliberal authoritarianism in Tunisia under Ben Ali” in Journal of IR and Development Studies with Evrim Görmüş (Forthcoming)

1- What does the pandemic tell us about the global order?

2- What explains the different reactions of different countries to the coronavirus crisis?

3- Are we heading towards an economic crisis?

4- Will we see neoliberal globalization evolve into something else?

About Yonca Özdemir
Yonca Özdemir is an Associate Professor at the Political Science and International Relations Program of the Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus. She holds a PhD from the
University of Pittsburgh. She specialized in international political economy and comparative political economy. Her research examines politics of economic reform, development policy, financial liberalization, economic globalization, financial crises, and most recently the links between neoliberalism and populism. Her works include both cross-national studies and also comparative cases of Turkey, Cyprus and some Latin American countries.