Author: Erdem Denk
-
The Mirror of Neolithic Art: How Çatalhöyük Confronts the Hubris of the Modernist Perspective
—
Illustrated by Asya Denk The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East Technical University’s faculty of architecture. They questioned how the map—exhibited in the Çatalhöyük section…
-
Arkeopolitics: Unearthing Politics
—
Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük—a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” My training at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) was defined by a dominant doctrinal paradigm: that wherever households…
-
Arkeopolitics: Reframing Human History From Scratch
—
In the heart of Ankara, less than a kilometer apart, stand two pillars of Turkish academia: the Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) and the Faculty of Language and History-Geography (DTCF). Mülkiye was established in 1859 to navigate the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic relations with the West, while DTCF was founded by the first president of Turkey,…
-
Surviving a Pan-Crisis
—
Why the political, technological, ecological, and epistemological crises of our time are no longer separate—and why existing paradigms can no longer explain them. We are not facing separate crises, but the simultaneous collapse of multiple historical orders unfolding in the present. Not only international relations and political science scholars but also the broader communities of…
-
An Amodernist Approach to International Law: The Law of the Sea in the Amarna Letters
—
Abstract: It is a widely held assumption that international law is one of the unique achievements of modern society. This modern(ist) paradigm postulates that international law is a product of the European/Western civilisation that has flourished in recent centuries. Even ‘critical scholars’ of international law only suggest that it was discovered in the sixteenth century.…
-
THE AGENCY PROBLEM FOR DE-COLONIAL INTERNATIONAL LAW STUDIES
—
Classical approaches to international law accept States as the basic law agent both as a lawmaker and obligation holder. Limited and functional legal agency of international organizations and relatively passive legal personality of individuals are also gradually mentioned in this context. However, it is clear that neither of these render “human” the active legal agent.…