Associate Professor of History Howard Eissenstat weighed in on anti-refugee sentiments in Turkey in an article published by Tribune.com on Sept. 5 and TheWashingtonPost.com on Aug. 21.
“Nativism is deeply embedded into the sense of who Turks are. When people in Turkey think about fraternal relations, they think of about Muslims in the Russian empire, in the Balkans— they really don’t think about the Muslims of the Ottoman Middle East,” said Eissenstat.
Eissenstat's recent work has focused increasingly on contemporary Turkish domestic and foreign policy, especially on issues of rule-of-law, minority rights, and the reshaping of political culture under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). At St. Lawrence, he teaches courses on Middle Eastern history and politics and in the First-Year Seminar (FYS). In addition to traditional academic work, Eissenstat served for over a decade as a Turkey Country Specialist for Amnesty International-USA. He has lectured at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. military, and the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, as well as given testimony to the Canadian Senate and offered briefings to Congressional Committees.
