Director | Teaching Professor | Podcast co-host | Perpetual host of dinners | Future of work and AI 🔮 Communication 📠 Politics 🗣️ Literature 📚 Transformative Learning 🎓 https://paa.ge/itallhappenedbefore/
Ekin Yasin
When political transformation happens to large populations, we try to make sense of it — from up close and from a distance. Why has this happened? Has it happened before? If so, why now, or again? What is the story? open.substack.com/pub/itallhap...
On Hansen, Hochschild, and the Limits of Understanding Authoritarianism
The people of Karagümrük in Istanbul watched Erdoğan improve their lives for a decade before noticing what was being taken from them. @ekoshy.bsky.social & I talk to Suzy Hansen who wrote about this shift and what it feels like to watch the US thru TR itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/p/episode-11...
Suzy Hansen's first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, is one of the books we kept returning to in the conversations that eventually became this podcast.
Istanbul's mayor: arrested, facing up to 2,430 years. The Kurdish opposition leader: jailed since 2016. Whoever might win gets removed by other means. Some of these tactics used in Turkey today will be tried out elsewhere, in the future.
Hansen's new book follows one Istanbul neighborhood — Karagümrük — across a decade, using local politics to track what authoritarian transformation actually looks like from the ground. The book resonated when it came out. It resonates harder now.
Last week, a court removed the leadership of Turkey's largest opposition party.
Then riot police stormed their headquarters. This isn't infighting. It's a pattern.
"Authoritarianism is an act of creation, a process of transformation that begins when few are watching and, once identified, is often too late to stop."
— Suzy Hansen, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (2026)
As Turkey's "too late to stop" keeps unfolding, understanding what happened there matters — not just for us, but for everyone trying to make sense of this global transformation. New episode @baykurt.bsky.social and I talk with
with Suzy Hansen. A must-read book. open.substack.com/pub/itallhap...
@baykurt.bsky.social and I explore what is going on in Turkey in our recent post: open.substack.com/pub/itallhap...
Burcu Baykurt
Is there hope amid democratic backsliding ? @baykurt.bsky.social and I talk about Brazil (and Turkey, US and more) with @karabekir.bsky.social —Lula, Bolsonaro, coup convictions, and what coalition-building across polarization might teach us about fighting back. itallhappenedbefore.substack.com
Ekin Yasin
From Russian journalists in exile to Chinese journalists who never left, @ekoshy.bsky.social & I talked with Dr. Maria Repnikova this week about what political action looks like when it walks around autocratic obstacles instead of confronting them itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/p/episode-12...
Ekin Yasin
Ekin Yasin
Suzy Hansen's first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, is one of the books we kept returning to in the conversations that eventually became this podcast.
