Welcome back everybody to the SAIS Review's The Looking Glass Podcast. We’re your hosts, Maya Martin and Luc van der Linden. In this podcast, we’re unpacking the protection of cultural heritage in Diyarbakir, Turkey, and its recovery since the 2015 Kurdish insurrection. Diyarbakir is considered the unofficial capital of the Kurdish community in south-eastern Turkey. The historic heart of the city is the old town of Sur. There, one can find the UNESCO World Heritage sites of the imposing Diyarbakir walls and the lush Hevsel Gardens. However, many of the cities historical sites were unfortunately damaged between July 2015 and March 2016 during the Kurdish insurrection. In the aftermath, Turkish efforts to rebuild the urban areas of Sur threatened Diyarbakir’s heritage, and the Kurdish communities that reside in the ancient city. Here to help us unpack the cultural heritage recovery of Diyarbakir is Dr. Ronay Bakan.

Dr. Ronay Bakan is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute with a research focus on political violence and the urban spatiality of everyday warfare. By the time she earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, she was already equipped with bachelor's and master's degrees in political science and international relations from Boğaziçi (Bo-ah-zichi) University in Turkey. Dr. Bakan leverages her extensive academic background to use ethnographic methods to investigate Kurdish politics within Southwest Asia and North Africa. In her writing, she examines why and how states use, and sometimes weaponize, urban development and heritage tourism as tools in counterinsurgency strategies. 

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