As the European Union moves forward with the Return Regulation, the lessons from Australia, Italy and the EU–Turkey deal are hard to ignore. Externalisation measures including offshore detention have repeatedly proven costly, legally fraught and damaging to human rights, while agreements with third countries often create dependencies and diminish the EU’s authority and influence. 

If built on shared political principles, sustained collaboration, and equal representation, a joint feminist front between Turkey and Syria can generate the kind of transformative power that today’s anti-gender climate seeks to constrain.  

Sustainable progress in women’s rights cannot be achieved through top-down, externally imposed frameworks. It must emerge from local knowledge, local leadership, and locally driven solutions.

We need a feminist media agenda to protect, amplify, and institutionalise Syrian women’s voices as equal partners in shaping the country’s political future.

In 2025, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought was awarded to Seyla Benhabib, a philosopher whose life’s work confronts one of the most pressing questions of our time: what social, political, and moral conditions are necessary for human beings to recognize one another as equals. 

The Brazilian Presidency had promised that COP30 in Belém would be the “COP of truth” and “COP of implementation”, held in the spirit of Mutirão with the global community working together to face the climate emergency. It faced a reckoning instead.

At the panel Heinrich Böll Stiftung Istanbul Office organized on 24 November at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, the speakers were Syrian women. While they acknowledged concerns about women’s rights in a country undergoing transition, they also delivered a clear message: “We are not just victims, but political agents.”

Agroecology in Turkey is more than a set of farming techniques; it is a battleground of ideas. Competing narratives are shaping who controls food systems, how communities thrive, and what the countryside will look like tomorrow.

This analysis looks at the regional dynamics before and after the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran and analyzes the opportunities and challenges the War has presented for Türkiye. It argues that the weakening of Iran leaves Türkiye and Israel as the main rivals in the region’s strategic balance. Syria risks being the major theater where this rivalry could escalate.

According to Tunçay Koç, an experienced lawyer with years of expertise in environmental cases, forest and water resources—critical assets for the future—are being depleted at an accelerated pace due to privatization policies.