Celal Cahit Agar

Introduction The Philippines opened the 30th Southeast Asian Games this year with a performance celebrating the country's Indigenous cultures. A day earlier, Indigenous Aeta communities were given a notice evicting them from their ancestral lands.

Dr Celal Cahit Agar is a lecturer at St Andrews University, School of Management. This article was co-authored with Steffen Böhm, professor in organisation studies at the University of Exeter Business School. Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Syria – i.e. “Operation Peace Spring” – sought to displace largely Kurdish communities and establish what Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls a 20-mile ‘safe zone’ alongside the Turkish-Syrian border.

Turkey’s “Operation Peace Spring”, which aims to displace Kurds and establish, what President Recep Erdogan calls, a 20-mile ‘safe zone’ alongside the 400 km Turkey-Syria border, has been condemned by most countries. The commentaries and analyses of Turkey’s latest onslaught on the Kurds have mostly focused on the history of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict and its relation to Turkey’s national security concerns and the Syrian refugee crisis.