In this seminar, we draw on the findings from our report From Converging Roads to Narrowing Grounds: The Struggle for Peace by LGBTI+ and Women’s Organizations in Turkey, published by DEMOS Research Association. We examine the understandings and peace activism of LGBTI+ and women’s organisations that fight for peace in Turkey by centring on the 2013-2015 peace process. Through in-depth interviews with participants from various LGBTI+ and women’s organisations that undertook peace-related activities surrounding the peace process, we take a closer look at the experiences of organisations with a gender focus in the peace struggle. We discuss certain concepts we find significant in terms of the relationship between gender and peace and aim to leave a record for potential processes in the future by looking at the period when the hope for peace was the strongest through the eyes of grassroots actors.

About the speakers: Nisan Alıcı is a PhD researcher at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University. She is also a researcher at the Ankara-based DEMOS Research Association. Her research engages with questions around critical peace, transitional justice, gender, and victimhood.
Güneş Daşlı is a lecturer the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (FSU) and doctoral researcher at Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies (JCRS) in Germany. Daşlı pursues the research project of “Transitional Justice from Below: The Case of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey” and has worked as a researcher at DEMOS Research Association based in Ankara. Daşlı’s academic interest relies on the areas of critical transitional justice, Kurdish Conflict, reconciliation, bottom-up peacebuilding, and gender.

Seminar details: www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/the-struggle-for-peace-by-lgbti-and-womens-organisations-in-turkey