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Sezai Ozan Zeybek, "Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
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- [00:28]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
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- [00:30]
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- [00:58]
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- [01:09]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Let's do this.
- [01:10]
Commercial Narrator
One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streaming on Disney.
- [01:14]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Hey, you weren't listening to me.
- [01:16]
Commercial Narrator
I said Thunderbolts the New Avengers is now streaming on Disney.
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Meet the New Avengers.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
That's cool then.
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Commercial Narrator
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, rated PG 13, now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Ozan Zabeck about his book titled Animals justice and the Politics of Shared Struggles in Turkey, published by Palgrave McMillan in 2025. Now, this book helps us understand some intricate relations between humans and non human animals. And it does this in the context of modern Turkish history, particularly sort of conflict and military related history, because of course there's all sorts of aphorisms running around, around, you know, dogs are man's best friend and that sort of thing. But those sorts of phrases might be kind of everyday speech but aren't necessarily analysed. What does that actually mean when the human part of the relationship is, for example, involved in political contests that can turn violent? What does that mean for the animals that are deeply entangled up with those humans? Whether we're talking household pets, but of course, other animals as well we're going to be talking, for instance, about agriculture too, so there's a whole bunch of things for us to discuss. Ozan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Thank you for having me and lovely introduction. Thank you for that too.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of introductions, could you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us you what, why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Yeah, it is. I am a human geographer, studied in different parts. Basically. I did my PhD in London in the United Kingdom and born and raised in Turkey. Currently I'm a German Turkish scholar based in Germany. And this book is a compilation of different life experiences of me, I will say. And one part, two chapters of it is actually directly related to my life trajectory, I will say. So the starting point of the book was like my concern about justice. When we think about justice, we mainly talk about justice among human beings. And I was thinking about this kind of asymmetric correlations. How can we understand asymmetric correlations through the lens of justice? And one domain will be children, one domain will be kind of human beings with different capacities. And my domain that I chose was animals, non human beings. So my life trajectory is connected to this book in the way that I am one of the peace academics, that is how it is called, that raised their voice against the demolition of the Kurdish neighborhoods back in 2016 and 17. And we signed a petition and therefore there was this kind of oppression and prosecutions to over 2,000 academics from Turkey. And I was one of them. My ex partner was one of that and she lost her job. We had to kind of leave the country at the end. And therefore now I am in Germany and the book is also covering those issues, like what happened in the Kurdish region of Turkey, in the Kurdish majority region of Turkey. And how can we understand that issue from different perspectives? So it is somehow touching to my life as well, deeply.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to understand. Books come often from the intertwining of the kind of academic interest as well as the personal. So thank you for giving us both of those foundations for the rest of our discussion. And in addition to kind of exploring things that are relevant to you personally and things you care about quite deeply, you're also making some theoretical and methodological interventions with this book too. So can you tell us about those?
- [05:24]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Exactly as I said, I started with the notion of justice. And we use among human beings, we use notions of equivalence, I will say, like citizenship, human rights, labor rights that could somehow, at least on paper, grant rights to human Beings and puts them on an equal, equal footing, different human beings. We know in reality that there is huge asymmetries between human beings as well and etc. But then these notions somehow tries to create a balance. Try to create a balance. So what happens when we don't have these notions? How do we then regulate our relations to non human beings to or those beings that do not, which do not have these kind of equivalence creating notions? I would say so I started with that what if human rights do not apply? What if citizenship rights do not apply? And in that regard I started thinking, starting with justice, I started thinking about all other human concepts as well, like family, what is a family? Whom does it consist of? What is a neighborhood, what is a nation? So I try to explain this kind of notions with more than human perspectives. How can we understand the non human side of the war? Not just as casualties, but sometimes as drafted conscripts like, I mean animals also joined certain wars in history, also in current times. Or can we think about labor and property in different terms? What if we, if we, if we could include non human beings into the story? How can we, how need to be change, revise our stories that we talk about when we talk about labor and property? And at the end, I guess my concern was, or the ultimate question was, what is really a human? Because we take also this notion as for granted. Humans are, you know, taken for granted. But then we are composite beings when we think of it biologically basic biology here. I mean, our immune system is trusted to other beings, or PH levels on our skin is trusted to other beings. We have full of bacteria. So what is a human then? If we include other beings, entanglements to the story, how can we then need to revise our notions and concepts? Those were the kind of trajectories of theoretical interventions I tried to make.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, those are a whole bunch of questions that could be.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Obviously expand on that, I hope.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, I mean those questions could be asked and answered in many, many different contexts. And obviously we're going to be talking about Turkey primarily. So maybe you can give us a bit of an overview of ways that animals have been involved in the Turkish Kurdish conflict so that we can get into more details answering those questions.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Yes, I wrote about different episodes of recent Turkish history. As you said, two chapters are about the Kurdish conflict, but there are other chapters. And in each chapter, similar to the feminist historians like adding different voices to the story, not just as addendums, not just as kind of, you know, additional voices, but to challenge the existing story. So in the same spirit, I will say I try to include animals to the story. One being the Kurdish conflict, as I said. The other one is like urban centers, urbanization and street dogs. And the other one is transhuman populations. Transhuman is nomadic populations in southern part of Turkey with their goats. In each chapter I try to focus on one specific animal, not every animal, because my aim was not to come up with a compilation of different types of animals, but to tell a story and to challenge the notions that I'm dealing with. So dogs and urbanization, neighborhood and families. So I tried to bundle these discussions together. One was the Kurdish conflict, I will come back to that. And the other one was kind of property labor, not owning land, commons and goats. So cattle, dogs and goats were my primary agents in the book. And the Kurdish conflict, I told different stories there. Basically, for those who doesn't really know the background story here, the Kurdish conflict in Turkey started in early 1980s, late 1970s. It's a guerrilla movement, basically almost 40. The Kurdish guerrilla and the Turkish army fought in the mountains mostly, but also sometimes all the urban centers in the Kurdish majority regions of Turkey. And at one point during 1990s, the Turkish military decided to displace villagers for logistical reasons. They thought, okay, we cannot really fight with the guerrilla as long as these villagers giving assistance to the guerrilla, so let's send them to somewhere else. We don't even know the exact numbers or what happened, basically. But around 1 million people were displaced forcibly by the Turkish army. And sometimes they were given very short notice, like one week, and they had to leave everything behind and move to bigger centers. That includes Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, the bigger centers in, in, in the west, but also the regional cities. So suddenly some cities doubled their population in 10 years time. That happened in a very short period of time. And the short notice was also a kind of threat. Unless if you don't, if you don't leave your village in one week, then we will come back. The Turkish military, I'm just paraphrasing, we will come back and burn down everything. And they did. I worked in that region, talked to people for longer periods of time, and then try to understand what happened. And you can't just ask about their animals, what happened to their animals. So I had to listen to all these other stories, like I was tortured here, my uncle was beaten by the military here. This is the backyard that they were killed. They killed our animals here in this place and et cetera. So I had to listen to all these stories. And then in My interviews, in my talks, I realized that this violence was not just directed at human beings, but at entire ecological setting. Vineyards, agricultural fields, as well as animals. So I tried to then understand this story, putting animals to the center of the story, and try to understand what really happened there and what kind of dynamics played out in this setting. So this is one aspect of the Kurdish conflict, displacing people, killing their animals and replacing them with industrial livestock, which was run not by poor villagers, by Kurdish poor villagers, but by entrepreneurs and rich people. So it is kind of a dispossession and replacing the old structures of husbandry with new industrial forms of production. So I try to focus on that transition. Transformation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think we want to talk a little bit more about that transformation, because I want to kind of make clear the extent to which they were related. Right.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Was it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Was the displacement the goal? And then, oh, by the way, now we can change transformation, right? Or was enacting that transformation part of the reason for displacement? Like how are. If we only looked, for example, at, oh, look, the agricultural livestock sector in Turkey has changed. If we just look at that, would we sort of miss out on this aspect of conflict? How intertwined are they?
- [13:49]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
We can't really know, because during the time, military personnel and politicians will never say it out loud. Like, I mean, our purpose is not just to displace people, but to also kind of enhance capitalist monsoons of production. They never said that. So intentions are unclear, but they are contemporary in time. Like, I mean, they happen, they occurred simultaneously. And these kind of transformations also happened in different parts of Turkey, like the transition from more, say, traditional forms of production to industrial production, but in different degrees. I also compared these kind of regional differences. In the west of Turkey, non conflictual zones of Turkey, the transformation was slow and gradual and sometimes less. But in the east especially, we see a drastic drop in animal numbers, especially of sheep and cattle, a drastic drop in numbers and then an increase in like 10 years time. In a period of 10 years time, there was this drop and then sudden increase again. So I tried to understand what was the drop, what was the reasons of the decrease and then what enabled the increase again. And I figured out that it was not the same dynamic. It was not people coming back to their villages or they try to find a different way of. No, it was actually different actors entered the field, different financial ties, different investment methods and different modalities of production. I visited also these industrial sites and I found out that these old villagers turned into workers, labor force in those industrial production zones. As well. These productions was heavily financed by the European Union funds or by bigger banks and etc. And so it is really difficult to find out the intentions or who did what and to what purpose. I can't really lay it out very clearly. The discourses are absent. The people do not speak up. Didn't speak up as much as I wish for, but anyway. But we see a kind of transformation concrete in the field and the outcomes of it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Don't chew on that, Max.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Cooper loves that shoe too.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it. What do you feed Cooper?
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula.
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Commercial Narrator
He never leaves a crumb.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
I love it because it's made with
- [16:21]
Commercial Narrator
high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
veggies and wholesome whole grains.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Looks like we're switching to blue Blue Buffalo. Foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive. Can your dog food say that? Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more. Yeah, and I mean, even if it isn't as clear as a single document that says this is why. Right. Putting those pieces together does paint quite a picture.
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Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Indeed.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So if we look then at all those pieces coming together and they tell us about transformation and conflict, how does this perhaps change our understanding of war? If we're thinking about this aspect of animals as well and the impact they come under?
- [17:04]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Yeah, I mean there are different uses of animals in wars. Different uses and different impacts on animals. I argue in the book this historical. I look at the historical examples of how animals were affected by wars. In certain instances they were used as weapons, like putting them bombs and sending them behind enemy lines and making them explode there and etc. These are methods that were used before they were used as soldiers. This is a different category. I would say horses, donkeys and all these camels used as soldiers or auxiliary to the military personnel. And also there is this kind of indirect impacts, I will say, because also the living spaces of animals are affected by wars. After many decades of the war, they are poisoned, they get cancer and all that stuff. So there are different types of outcomes of a war. So what I try to do is to understand these kind of problems in the war zone, in the Kurdish conflict, what happens to animals? And also, last category, sorry, I forgot to mention that one last category is sometimes they are taken out, they are killed, the animals because they belong supposedly to the enemy. So this is also what happened during. Sorry. During 1990s and 80s, the Turkish military didn't just displace the human beings, they also threatened to kill their life spaces. And they did so. They sometimes killed their testimonies and also talked to people. It is in the book. They also killed the animals of these people to make them vulnerable and to make them leave their living spaces. So that was a forced choice. By undermining their livelihood, burning down the forest and vineyards and all that stuff and killing the animals, they also made them vulnerable and so weak, basically. So that was a very intentional military strategy. And there are documents saying that actually, like, there are also other examples in different parts of the world that this method was used by different military forces anyway. So the idea of war can be taken in two different ways. One, animals within war zones. That is one category. But also I jump from here to another category, a more general warfare against animals. Not just in war zones, but the conditions that we put them into, I would say, and I argue are war conditions. It's a warfare, a general warfare against animals. And I make this whole arguments in one chapter why we need to call this a war, actually. And there are so many objections, possible objections. I try to answer to them as well. Like, I mean, well, the animals do not retaliate. These are not balanced opponents. There is no presumed balance between these two parties. Or sometimes people care about their animals, they love their animals, they keep them as pets and all that stuff so that this can't be a warfare. Or some people say, like, I mean, animals choose to stay with us as well, so it's a kind of mutual relationship, so it can't be war. So I try to address all these objections, give examples from human warfare that all these conditions can be met as well. Like how, for example, in certain wars, the enemies or children of enemies are adopted as adopted children. Or how, for example, they are used as servants, nannies. In certain parts of the world, women of the enemy are taken as comfort women. These are, I mean, in quotation marks. So there are all these kind of examples where we see that this care that we show against animals is also used in wars against members of the enemy society, against the enemy. So I try to argue. So therefore, I try to argue two different things. Animals in war zones are affected in this and that way. This is one line of argument. And the second line of argument, what we make them experience the animals, is a general warfare. Can we think of it as a general warfare against animals? So I try to combine these two arguments in my book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very helpful to have that sort of overview. I'd like to kind of explore in a few more sort of detailed instances that you look at in the book. So if we move from eastern Turkey and kind of the agricultural sector, can we talk about urban spaces and Turkish cities and what these human animal relationships look like around dogs?
- [22:18]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
I tell this story around one recent event. The Turkish government in 2025 decided to round up the street animals in big cities in Izmir, in Ankara and etc. And there was a huge backlash against that decision, against this provision. There were demonstrations, police sprayed gas to people to demonstrators and et cetera. And. And there were animal protection units in specific neighborhoods try to protect their street animals. I don't call them stray animals, by the way, stray dogs, but street dogs. First I need to clarify this. I guess because these animals belong to certain neighborhoods. They are not roaming around freely, they are not straight. Basically they are well taken care of in specific neighborhoods. They know certain people and certain members of that neighborhood know these dogs as well. So there is a kind of mutual friendly relationship. So anyway, the reasons of the government rounding up these dogs was. There were many reasons. But this is not good for a modern city is the basic argument. They bite people, they can become aggressive, they sometimes harass trespassers and all that stuff, which is not entirely untrue, by the way. That happens as well. And we need to. We can talk about the reasons for. Of that too. But at the end, the government, I will say, won. The majority of the dogs, not cats, but dogs were rounded up and it was a big thing. So I'm looking at that story in my book. What does it mean to live together? In what condition? Under what conditions can we live together? And it is a very difficult question because I also criticize all this kind of. I mean, I love dogs and cats and I'm. I grew up in Istanbul and we grew up with cats around us and sometimes they jumped on our. On us and we cuddled them, we gave them food and all that stuff. So that relation existed already. But despite. So I realized, the more I looked into it, I realized most street animals do not live in perfect conditions. I mean, there is this romantic view. Oh, Istanbul with cats is so beautiful. Yes, but they die very early. They sometimes suffer. There is traffic in the city and they are run over. Cats and dogs. And also the other option for dogs and cats is being a pet. I also looked into those type of relation. What does it mean to have a pet in a domestic space? What type of violence does it produce? Not necessarily violence at home, but violence in other places. What do I mean by that? Is that we feed animals or animals or Pets mostly with other animals. And these other animals are coming from industrial food production. Chicks are squeezed after they get born. In seconds they die and turn into cat feed and given to our. So that relation I find is very problematic. And also we take fish from the sea, this small fish that is not edible for human beings or not tasty for human beings, and then we turn it into pellets and give them to dogs. You see, all these relations I find very problematic. So I try to problematize all this kind of living together mitos, so to say, the love and affection on the one hand and brutality on the other hand. How do they coexist? And I oriented my discussion towards how can we live in a just society, not in an regime of over accumulation, these big centers, 50 million people, live on top of each other. But can we imagine a society, a post growth society, where we have more free space, more wildlife, more freedom for animals to move from one place to another. So my reasoning was that we can't really take away dogs from the cities. It's a certain death for them. I don't argue that we need to get rid of our pets. That is like, I mean, there is an affection and it's a real affection that would be very brutal. But in the long run, maybe we can think of different urban designs, different ways of economical regimes that take the kind of burden off the shoulders of animals. And there is a long argument about that. How can we imagine a post growth society that doesn't put so much pressure on every type of animal on earth?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, do we want to talk a little bit about that? What alternatives there might be?
- [27:18]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Yes, I mean, this is a very difficult discussion and I know there are probably pet lovers with us. Again, I try to emphasize that one more time. I am not against having a pet under these conditions. It is a necessity. There is no other way. We can't let them go. There is no kind of wild places where we can release them and be done with it. It doesn't work that way. We can't undo decisions made centuries ago in the blink of an eye. It's not that easy. So we somehow are entangled together in an urban center. But when we were transforming our cities into these concrete asphalt places where apartment blocks and all these kind of, you know, 50 million people living on top of each other, it's not easy to kind of think, oh, but the dogs wanted to stay with us, they chose to stay with us. That argument doesn't really apply, I guess because that choice is not necessarily choice that we are Certain of. And the other option, like taking them away is not an option for me. I'm repeating the same argument and I'll come to the solutions that in my mind that are in my mind that was also tried before. Hundred years ago, almost a hundred years ago, Ottoman Empire in Turkey rounded up dogs. Similar story put them in a deserted island near Istanbul, 80,000 dogs, no food, no water. And over months that the kind of solution for the Ottoman regime was to get rid of the dogs by sending them away somewhere else and they died over months they become cannibalistic, they started attacking each other because there was no food and et cetera. It was well recorded and that was one of the solutions somehow implemented in the Ottoman Empire. I don't want to have that either. So all rounding up dogs and sending them to shelters and etc. It said that sentence. Basically it's a very complicated story. Therefore I'm not saying we should get rid of the paths, I'm not saying let's round them up and have dog free cities. These are very good. But then again what we have right now is not optimal either. That is my argument. And there is no easy solution. Unfortunately the easy solution and there is no easier. But the solution to my mind is that we need to take a step back and think how we really have a kind of what is our economic system, how do we produce, what pressures do we put on the nature, on other beings and on other human beings as well as on other non human beings. So slowing down would be my direction. Slowing down. When people say degrowth it sounds negative. Degrowth going back to the kind of middle ages and etc. I don't mean them, but the post growth society to me is to setting up different priorities. It's not about producing everything to the, you know, as as many consumer items as possible, but it is just setting priorities. Do we need hospitals or do we need weapons? Do we really have to have so much things in our flats, so much plastic, so much textile, so much, I don't know, whatever we have. So we really need to think about our priorities. We need certain things, we need more of certain things, but we can decrease the numbers of things that we have as well. What are those things? What objects can we get rid of? So unless we address these questions, I guess there is no easy solution to the animal questions. I would say.
- [31:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, I think if there was an easy answer then we'd know it already.
- [31:10]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Right?
- [31:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And we obviously don't. There's a lot that needs to be thought about. Now and going forward too. So are there any other things you're especially hoping that readers take away from this book?
- [31:22]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Yes. I mean, I didn't want to imagine a future per se, because it is always difficult to building up an utopian. Because that is not my task either. My task is to make us think through these notions. Justice, family, neighborhood, urban centers, labor, property. How can we think them differently? That is my purpose. But at the end of the book, instead of giving a kind of utopian future, that should be the kind of future society look like. I didn't say that. Instead I tried to come up with methods, how to induce transformation, how to induce change. And this is the only chapter where I don't specifically talk about animals, but it is the chapter where I try to revise some of the methods of pushing change. So I came up with this three pillared or three legged model of social transformation by revising historical examples, by looking at existing transformations. And I can briefly, maybe recount those, if that is possible. Please. Well, these are methods, as I said, so they don't have a vision of a future. The visions will come from us, from the actors in the field. But the methods are, I guess, more concrete. I find there are three kind of modalities of doing politics. And my claim is that we do two of them very well still today. But the third one is lagging behind. And therefore, this is my perception, we are losing ground in terms of politics, especially in this age. The first modality, the first type of politics is changing the representations, telling the truth, speaking up. This is not okay. This is not correct, what you say, telling or calling liars a liar. And we do that a lot, actually, as journalists, as academics, petitions, we speak up in trying to change the norms of that society. This is not okay. We can, you know. The second type of politics, I will say, is creating alternatives. The first one and second one can overlap, but I try to, for heuristic reasons, I try to analytically separate them, coming up with alternatives. This could be alternative hospitals, alternative schools, alternative family units, alternative anything. So this is more like an implementation of ideas. We do things, we do that as well. The first modality exists. The second modality, it's there, I can see it. People try a lot. But the third modality I'm not that sure of. And this is like sometimes when the powerful people, the government, states and et cetera, do not listen or do not really care about when we speak up or when we create alternatives, then there is a need to push them back. And it can have different Forms. This pushback, like civil disobedience, is one of them. Like blocking the system, stopping the business as usual, harming the business as usual. There are different methods for that. Strikes is the first thing that comes to mind. Not paying taxes, not going to the military, not consuming. But not just as an individual choice. I buy fair trade goods and etc. But doing that as a collective. As big amount of people coming together and harming the businesses in a specific way. So pushing back, blocking, using or leverage. I would say this is the third modality and it also involves civil disobedience, as I said, but also parts of violence. Most of the transformations in the past happened because these three types of politics could come together if we only do one speaking up. It is I guess not enough. Just creating alternatives that could easily be integrated into the existing system. Like organic farming becoming a posh thing very easily. It can be kind of co opted. These three types of politics somehow should come together. And we need not to be afraid of implementing the third type of politics either. The old transformations all happened with the kind of inclusion of the third type of politics. Pushback was always on the agenda. Feminists used that. They didn't just speak up, but also sometimes they smashed windows. Right. ANC in South Africa, they attacked power stations in South Africa. That was kind of part of the old anti colonial moments, slave moments. The liberation of India. We try to tell that story as the kind of in a Gandhian way, the peaceful protest and then the British Empire pulled back. It is not entirely true, is it? Because there had been long struggles also, some of them armed struggles of the Indian liberation movement. Over two centuries. Over two centuries. So it was not just Gandhi that enabled deliberation. So without that pushback, I would say it would be very difficult to gain ground in politics. I stop here for.
- [37:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, I think that's a whole bunch of things to keep thinking about. Is there anything else you want to say on takeaways or the book before I ask you what you might be working on Now?
- [37:16]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
The book, the main takeaway is, I guess is when we really want to talk about justice, a more equal world, we need to include these ecological concerns as well. And these ecological concerns, as you said at the very beginning, cannot be just fascination or oh, dogs are humans best friends or nature is so amazing and et cetera, nature is amazing. All these other non human beings are amazing. And I agree with that. But fascination in itself, I guess is not enough. We need to come up with this kind of also ecological, economical dimension should be there should be on the agenda how can we revise these existing economies so that we can leave animals or take the pressures on them away? And that requires a kind of transformations of our economic models which is not based on growth, which is not based on more flying, more producing, more consuming more, whatever. That is a kind of sharing the world in a different way with different priorities. And that is I guess my main takeaway. Unless we talk about the post growth society, we can't really solve the animal question. That is the main message I would send. My next project is now I'm focusing on more drought, water systems and again about Turkey. Turkey is getting dry more and more each year. That is partly because of dams, big dam projects, and secondly because of the climate crisis that is happening. So how do people cope with drought, especially farmers? What survival tactics we can observe? There are my upcoming questions, I guess against ecological concerns.
- [39:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that certainly sounds very important as well as obviously the concerns raised in this book that we've been discussing. So if anyone wants more food for thought in addition to our discussion, they can of course read the book titled Animals, justice and the Politics of Violence Shared Struggles in Turkey, published by Palgrave McMillan in 2025. Ozan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [39:35]
Dr. Ozan Zabeck
Thank you, thank you for hosting.