Ayberk Dizdarlar awarded the Janet Hyer Essay Prize
Ayberk Dizdarlar is a recent master’s graduate from the Centre of European and Eurasian Studies Program. He was the 2025 winner of the Janet Hyer Prize, which is awarded to a second year CEES student for extraordinary work done in their Major Research Paper (MRP). Ayberk Dizdarlar’s MRP examined how authoritarian regimes used the securitization of LGBTQ+ rights in the Turkish context to support democratic backsliding, from 2013-2025.
How did you get inspiration for your MRP topic?
How I started was with the securitization of the LGTBQ rights. Securitization is a theory that I learned about in undergrad and it was really interesting for me. I wanted to specialize on some of the topics that I was already working on. This was one of the things that I already had interest in, so I wanted to check this out. I did some research, and I found some good papers on Russia and Hungary written by a professor from McGill University. When I read that paper, I thought this is absolutely amazing, I want to work on this! I wanted to expand on it, so I added Turkey into my research.
Tell us more about your MRP research.
I didn’t want to only focus on the human rights perspective, but I also wanted to look at authoritarian state tendencies, looking at the relation between these countries and how their democracy is backsliding and how they're becoming more authoritarian. I wanted to show this correlation with LGBTQ rights. In regard to human rights, this is one of the easiest sectors that these countries can target and get away with. It is a good indicator to see where these countries are headed regarding democracy. I did exactly this and I expanded this research with the situation in Turkey. However, this was an ongoing process where things were constantly changing in present-time. The situation in Hungary also changed a lot of things. We can say that Russia is the blueprint, with the other countries following what Russia did with LGBTQ rights. Of course, some of them failed and some of them managed, and I was trying to show if Turkey had managed or failed with this.
But then the Hungarian case helped me to understand that there’s some mixed results. Similar to the Turkish case, Hungary also had another minority group in their country that changed the focus from the LGBTQ community. They did not really fully grasp this “existential threat” coming from the West that wanted to “make” this country gay. They did not fully “buy it” because they had Roma communities in Hungary that they assumed were a much greater threat to Hungarian identity than the gay community. When I was researching the Turkish case, I saw that it was more similar to the Hungarian model then the Russian model because in Turkey, they had the Kurdish people whom they saw as a greater existential threat to Turkish communities, and I went from there. Any academic or anyone who is interested in Middle Eastern politics will know how the “Kurdish issue” in Turkey takes major space. I ended up almost not writing about the LGBTQ rights in my paper because I had to explain the Kurdish issue.
The reason that I believe that my paper ended up in a good place was due to unexpected timing. Around a year ago, the Turkish government, under Erdoğan, decided to make peace with the Kurds. However, this is very much an ongoing process. Now the LGBTQ might be the next thing that they're going to use to consolidate their authoritarian regime. Because of this unexpected timing, it allowed for another dimension to look at in my paper, showing how these authoritarian states act. They can just change anything and change the names. They can say oh, now you are the problem and then they can switch to another scapegoat. With this research project, even though it's a small paper, I tried to explain that it's possible for authoritarian regimes to change the actors, not necessarily just with the LGBTQ communities.
Since this is more of a contemporary research paper rather than something that occurred centuries ago, what type of sources did you use and what methodology did you follow?
It was really difficult! As I said, I started this paper with the idea that I was just going to do a literature review and expand on it, using Copenhagen’s Securitization School. I was just going with the theory and combining it with existing research to expand on the scholarship. But, as I said before, when the peace with the Kurds occurred, I knew I had to talk on this as well. I had to personally use a lot of primary sources from Turkey to explain the situation. I was doing a lot of translation work regarding these sources, so instead of it only being research work, it also felt like I was doing a lot of reporting. I wrote this paper all throughout the year. But to be honest, I had to write much more in July. In July, I had to say that all the information in this paper regarding the LGBTQ community and the Kurds was ending in June, because things were still changing day-to-day. So, until the end of June, I added everything that happened up until then, sorting them into categories. So, I used a lot of primary sources for this.
What was the timeframe for your research?
This paper is mostly trying to explain the LGBTQ communities. The LGBTQ history in Turkey goes back to the Ottomans, when it was decriminalized in 1858. Since this was a small paper, I decided to focus on 2013 and onwards, with Erdoğan. I needed to explain Erdoğan’s regime. This is a really Turkish thing to do I guess: we divide two different eras of Erdoğan. The first era is one of democratization: they're becoming European, they have EU goals, and they're becoming a Western-aligned country. A lot of things happened, and we have to acknowledge that Erdoğan is one of the main reasons that the LGBTQ community and the Kurdish communities were able to have some rights in Turkey, in his first era, until 2013.
After that, there is a quick switch. Then the same person is targeting the LGBTQ. With the Kurdish, it's much more complicated: there’s violence, there’s death attacks from both sides. But with the LGBTQ communities, it's kind of simple compared to other minorities because they were involved in the Gezi protests in 2013. After that, the government thought that this community could be dangerous. I will say that it's 2013 with the Gezi protests and onwards, but I did explain the historical events of this story because there were a bunch of things happening at that time.
How did you feel when you won the award?
I was not expecting it! We had the reception, and Professor Susan Solomon was giving a nice speech, and I had a drink in my hand. When she was about to say the name, I just dropped the drink- I was ready to clap. I was not expecting to get it! I was given a lot of good feedback, and I agree with the things they said! It was very unexpected for me and I did not know that the prize existed. But when they explained the prize itself, her name was Janet Hyer, they explained who she was. I understood what they meant: it wasn’t about the empirical data, but the storytelling that I had in that paper, which is the reason that I got that award. It is an interesting thing. I really focused on storytelling when I was writing that paper, so it felt good to be acknowledged for my work there.
What are you doing now and what are your future plans!
That’s a great question! The world doesn’t seem to be headed towards a better place. I'm a Turkish citizen in Canada right now who's here on a work permit. In an ideal world, I would absolutely want to do a PhD, but right now I am unsure of that because wherever I end up next, I want to have security. I want to make sure I am going to be able to remain where I am without any problems and I don't think the world is going that way. I am trying to keep myself open to working possibilities and looking towards having financial security. I think it's important to acknowledge the world that we are in, and doing a PhD right now is more of a risk to me than a gain. I believe that we are going to have better times eventually!
