ISHR Fellow
Dogu Eroglu is a human rights and ecology activist, a writer, and an investigative reporter for the Daily Birgun, an independent Turkish newspaper. When he first began working at the Daily Birgun, he focused largely on environment and energy issues: from urban rights to environmentalist perspectives, Mr. Eroglu worked closely with local groups who resisted the mega energy and construction projects that the central government planned. He also covered –and continues to cover—issues such as systematic human rights violations in Turkey, ranging from (among many topics) the discrimination of minorities to the state’s actions regarding ill treatment and torture to the oppression of civic rights. As the violence of the Syrian Civil War began to spread in the Middle East, Mr. Eroglu’s focus shifted to the field of conflict journalism, and his current work focuses on recruitment dynamics of radical Islamists, the logistics of armed conflict, migration policies, and other components to the unrest that has defined the Middle East in recent years.
Mr. Eroglu has an MA in Economics, and began his career as a reporter at Turkey’s iconic Cumhuriyet Daily, where he worked from 2011 to 2012. In 2012, he initiated an independent journalism project entitled Violence Stories from Turkey. This project focused on human rights violations in Turkey, and sought to press state actors for greater transparency through exposing personal stories of victims of state-led human rights violations. In addition to being a regular contributor to numerous Turkish newspapers and periodicals, Mr. Eroglu’s work has been published by Newsweek and Vice.com. His first book, which explores the history of local struggle against a proposed coal-based thermal power plant in Gerze, Turkey, is expected to be published in the fall of 2015. As an AHDA fellow, Mr. Eroglu will develop a project that examines the historical movement of jihadists from country to country. The project not only expects to reveal the historical connections between current and past jihadist recruitment practices and patterns of joining, but will be helpful to societies who suffer from jihadist recruitments by enabling them to predict future patterns of joining. The project will also enable societies to design measures for the rehabilitation and reconciliation of potential and actual recruits upon their return to their home communities.
