Author spotlight: Tuğba Bayar on Human Rights, International Relations, and Developing Your Scholarly Voice

What first sparked your interest in this research topic?

I had been directing a Jean Monnet Module project, funded by the European Commission, on the International and European Protection of Human Rights for three years, which kept my focus firmly on human rights developments globally, within the European Union, and specifically in Turkey. Alongside the academic work, there was the daily reality of the news. Turkey’s human rights landscape was deteriorating in a way one cannot ignore. From women’s rights to rights of the child, rights related to expression, association, and press, to judicial independence, the backsliding is impossible to overlook. As an ordinary citizen, I kept returning to the observation that, for a decade, rights in Turkey were blossoming in the early 2000s. It was the very same government and the same European Union. There was genuine reform momentum that had a positive impact across many areas, including the economy, higher education, and mobility. As a scholar, that intuition as a citizen became a research question. The question that drove me was not simply “Why are things bad now?” but “How did we get from there to here, and what does that trajectory tell us about the relationship between political power, international institutions, and human rights protection more broadly?” This inquiry, pursued over years of archival work, discourse analysis, and engagement with the comparative literature, became this book.

What is one book that changed your perspective during your research?

I cannot point to a single book, but the writings of the Canadian scholar Robert Cox opened an entirely new intellectual world for me at a crucial moment in my research. For much of my academic life, I examined human rights in international relations through the lens of regime theory and rationalist approaches. I was quite convinced that my scholarly instincts were a natural fit for these frameworks. They are rigorous, parsimonious, and widely respected in the field. I had also studied Cox and his critical reinterpretation of Gramsci's concept of hegemony during my PhD, so his work was not unfamiliar to me. But returning to Cox with my specific research question in mind, how and why Turkey’s human rights trajectory reversed so dramatically under a government that had initially embraced reform, was an entirely different experience. Rereading a familiar thinker through the lens of a concrete empirical puzzle can be transformative in a way that first readings rarely are, and that is precisely what happened here. Cox gave me the tools to understand human rights behavior not as a rational calculation of costs and benefits, but as something embedded in deeper structures of power, legitimacy, and consent. In particular, Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, the process by which a ruling power absorbs and neutralizes potentially transformative demands without genuinely conceding them, became an extraordinarily productive analytical lens for my work. It allowed me to examine how mechanisms such as soft power, normative power, human rights conditionality, and EU accession processes can be strategically appropriated by governments to pursue reform while simultaneously consolidating authoritarian control. That insight sits at the heart of this book.

What do you hope readers will take away from ***The Rise and Relapse of European Human Rights in Turkey*?**

I hope readers will come away with a clearer (and perhaps more unsettling) understanding of why human rights behavior so often disappoints us in practice. The book shows that human rights are rarely, if ever, the primary driver of any actor’s foreign policy, whether that actor is a state or an international organization like the European Union. Instead, human rights commitments tend to serve one of two functions. They are either deployed as instruments of normative projection, a subtle form of influence through which powerful actors transmit their values and consolidate their leverage, or they are quietly set aside when a more pressing strategic interest emerges. In both cases, the logic is fundamentally the same; human rights are pursued when they are useful, and shelved when they are not. What I hope readers find genuinely thought-provoking is the corollary of this argument that even when states do advance human rights goals, this is rarely the result of principled commitment alone. More often, rights promotion coincides with the removal of an obstacle before a government's broader agenda, or with the prospect of a material benefit such as expanded trade, migration containment, or geopolitical alignment. This is not a comfortable conclusion. But I believe it is an honest one and that understanding this logic is the necessary first step toward imagining how things might be otherwise.

Which finding from the book surprised you the most?

The finding that surprised me most was one I had not fully anticipated when I began the research, and it concerns the nature of the early AKP reforms rather than their eventual collapse. The conventional narrative, which dominated both academic and policy circles for much of the 2000s, treated the AKP’s early reform period as a genuine success story of EU conditionality: external normative pressure producing real domestic change. What my research revealed, however, is considerably more complex. Applying a neo-Gramscian analytical lens and specifically Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, I found compelling evidence that the early reforms, while formally aligned with European human rights standards, were simultaneously serving a distinct domestic political function. The dismantling of military tutelage over civilian politics, the judicial reforms, the expansion of certain civil liberties... these were not only responses to EU conditionality. They were also strategically functional for a government seeking to consolidate power by removing the institutional constraints above all the military establishment that had historically checked Islamist political movements in Turkey. In other words, the reforms were real, but their primary driver was not normative conviction. They were an exercise in what Gramsci calls passive revolution. The top-down transformation that absorbs the language of democratic progress while fundamentally serving the consolidation of a new hegemonic project. The EU, in this reading, was not the author of Turkey’s democratization, but it was, unwittingly, a legitimating resource for a political transformation whose ultimate trajectory was authoritarian. I found this conclusion genuinely surprising because it complicates both the optimistic and the pessimistic readings of the period simultaneously. It is not that the reforms were fake—they had real consequences for real people. But neither were they what they appeared to be. That gap between appearance and function is, I think, the most important and most unsettling finding of the book.

What project are you working on now?

My current work takes me back to the broader question that has always driven my research: Why do states comply with or defect from international commitments they have voluntarily undertaken? I am currently leading a TÜBİTAK-funded research project that examines the compliance behavior of right-wing populist governments with international treaty regimes. The project is motivated by a puzzle that has become increasingly urgent in the current political moment: as populist governments have come to power across a growing number of states, we are witnessing a pattern of systematic disengagement from international legal commitments treaty withdrawals, selective non-compliance, and the deliberate erosion of multilateral frameworks from within. Yet this pattern has not been studied comparatively and systematically. That is what this project sets out to do. Methodologically, the project is particularly ambitious. I am constructing an original dataset covering unilateral withdrawals and compliance deficits across a range of treaty regimes, which will allow for large-N comparative analysis. This is being complemented by semi-structured elite interviews, which allow me to probe the domestic political logics and decision-making processes that drive these choices at the government level. In a sense, this project is the natural complement to my book. Where the book asked how international human rights norms rise and relapse in a single country over time, this project asks how populist governments across multiple countries relate to international legal obligations more broadly and what that pattern tells us about the future of the multilateral order.

What advice would you give to young scholars writing their first books?

I finished and submitted this manuscript just as AI tools began transforming academic work at scale, which has led me to joke, only half in jest, that I may have written one of the last organically produced academic books. Whether that is true or not, the timing has made me reflect more seriously on what the research and writing process actually gave me, beyond the finished product. My honest advice to young scholars writing their first book is not to delegate the hard parts. The struggle of not knowing, sitting with a theoretical puzzle that will not resolve itself, reading a body of literature until it finally speaks to you, or writing a paragraph twelve times until it says what you actually mean is not inefficiency. It is the process through which you develop your scholarly voice, your analytical instincts, and your genuine expertise. These things cannot be outsourced. And in a field like ours, where the quality of your thinking is ultimately what distinguishes you, they are everything. I am not naive about AI. It is here, it is powerful, and it will change the terms of academic work dramatically and irreversibly. Young scholars will have to navigate this landscape in ways my generation did not. But I would encourage them to be deliberate about what they keep for themselves. Use tools where they genuinely help. But trust your own mind for the arguments that matter. Your first book is, among other things, proof that you can think and that proof has to be yours. The ideas in this book are mine. The mistakes are mine too, but so is everything I learned from making them.

Tuğba's new book is available for purchase at: https://www.aup.nl/nl/book/9789048573813/the-rise-and-relapse-of-european-human-rights-in-turkey