For starters, the vote was held in a state of emergency. What may have escaped the outside gaze, however, is the extent to which the landscape of dissent was steeped in hope in the months leading up to the referendum, despite the fact that all the odds were stacked against a “No” outcome. It is by now common knowledge that the April 2017 referendum in Turkey to move from a parliamentary to a presidential system is likely to grant sweeping executive powers to the country’s president. Image of “No” voters enacting the signifier “h-a-y-ı-r” (“no”), distributed widely on social media. In this installment, Elektra Kostopoulou, Ayşe Parla, Aimilia Voulvouli and Jennifer Curtisreflect on the ramifications of the referendum. In response to Turkey’s constitutional referendum on April 16, 2017, which replaces the parliamentary system with an executive presidency, PoLAR and APLA commissioned a series of responses from scholars and activists working on democracy and human rights in the region.
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