Die Logik der Aufklärung und revolutionäre Realitäten
In his doctoral dissertation Erdal Kaynar has worked on the political and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire via a biography on Ahmed Rıza, the leading figure of the Young Turk movement, which lead the constitutional revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire and has left its political legacy to a region stretching from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula and from the Caucasus to the Maghreb. He has studied how the emergence of this movement can be explained out of processes of a shared global modernity and has insisted on parallels in different social, cultural, and political evolutions worldwide. In his current research he continues his interrogations on the global and contradictory nature of modernity and concentrates on the political economy of the late Ottoman Empire. His research investigates how the universal concept of the national economy was adapted to the local conditions of the Ottoman Empire, and how it received a particularistic meaning in the multi-national Ottoman context.
Erdal Kaynar war Postdoktorand am Institut français d’études anatoliennes in Istanbul im Jahr 2012/2013 und ist Mitglied des Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centreasiatiques (CNRS–EHESS) in Paris.
(u. a.): mit Nathalie Clayer (Hg.), Penser, vivre et agir dans l’Empire ottoman et en Turquie, Louvain 2013; (ibid.) The Almighty Power of the Written Word. Political Conceptions of the Press at the Turn of the 20th Century, S. 151–170; Les Jeunes Turcs et l’Occident, histoire d’une déception programmée, in: François Georgeon (Hg.), L’Ivresse de la Liberté. La Révolution de 1908 dans l’Empire ottoman, Louvain 2012, S. 27–64.
Wie brechen Revolutionen aus? Diese Frage beschäftigt Sozialwissenschaften und Politik seit über 200 Jahren, um Revolutionen vorherzusagen, zu verhindern oder auszulösen. Dennoch hat jede Revolution ihr Überraschungsmoment, so Erdal Kaynar in seinem Vortrag über die politischen Implikationen gewaltsamer, gesellschaftlicher Umstürze.