It’s been over a week since a devastating earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, and it's increasingly clear that this is a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale that many of us can’t imagine. With the rescue phase of operations coming to a close, the challenges facing the Turkish government and its people remain immense. In the meantime, the Turkish government has put a priority on public relations, prioritizing “narrative” over effective policy. Professor Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Turkey Program and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University, joins Thanos Davelis to argue that in order to address the current crisis effectively, the Turkish government will have to place policy above politics. 

Read Prof. Howard Eissenstat’s latest article for The Middle East Institute: Turkey’s government is prioritizing politics over policy in its earthquake response

You can read the articles we discuss on our podcast here:

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