The Arab–Turkish Social Sciences Congress (ATCOSS)

We are at a congress that began yesterday in Ankara and will continue over the weekend. The Arab-Turkish Social Sciences Congress is taking place with a total of about 230 participants from 26 countries, organized by the Institute of Strategic Thinking with the participation of Cairo University and Osmangazi University.

Today it can be seen that the social sciences have reached an important accumulation in both the Arab world and the Turkish world. However, the social science heritage of the two worlds appears to be utterly unaware of each other. When we want to learn any information about Syria, one of Turkey's neighboring countries, about any social subject in Syria, our social scientists have to turn to Western sources such as English or French. Because in Turkey no one knows Syria well enough to follow the social sciences in Syria. We have drifted far from the language of a country right next to us, a country that eighty years ago was part of the same land as ours. Drifting away from a language means drifting away from the world in which that language is spoken. Probably the same is true of the social scientists in Syria and Jordan who are interested in Turkey.

All the scientific disciplines in the field of social sciences are, above all, disciplines of knowledge, and as a discipline each must in some way determine its own areas of interest. It tends to determine which problems it will wrestle with, which concepts it will think with, which subject it will take up, and, in the process, the criteria for what kind of knowledge will be counted as true or false. Considered from this angle too, the great majority of these sciences are, above all, disciplines that try to understand or make sense, again within a Western framework, of the new social relations created by an experience of industrialization-urbanization or modernization-globalization that emerged in Europe within the last two to three hundred years.

However, as Westernization spread to the rest of the world through modernization, the Western-centered way of thinking began to be internalized in some way by other countries as well. This meant that particular problems that emerged in a Western context began in some way to be thought of as the problems of the whole world. Orders of knowledge, scientific disciplines, do not merely perform a descriptive function. They also construct the world. That is why all the sociological theories that emerged within a Western framework have a disposition to construct the world, again, from a Western point of view. This side of disciplines of knowledge is not something that can be avoided very easily. Michel Foucault shed very good light on this side of scientific disciplines.

While these disciplines perceive their problems that emerged in the West as the problems of the whole world, they also place the whole of humanity into their own problematic frameworks. When we adopt these academic frameworks as they are, without thinking about them, our ability to diagnose our own problems also disappears. Yet it is very important that these scientific disciplines be taken after being passed through a certain critical filter, and with the effect of the ethnocentric view they contain definitely taken into account. Otherwise, from within these disciplines that look at the East from an Orientalist framework, our looking at ourselves from an Orientalist framework becomes not a possibility but a reality. Today, unfortunately, unless we adopt a critical view of the social science disciplines, we cannot overcome the problem of a kind of internalized, adopted and assimilated Orientalism. We end up looking both at ourselves and at each other through a Western disciplinary filter.

Of course these perhaps form the deep epistemological and philosophical answers to the question "why ATCOSS?" ATCOSS, through the sharing of an academic environment between the Arab world and the Turkish world, can form a serious ground for overcoming these epistemological problems.

The question "why ATCOSS" also has more practical answers. Today, within Turkey's foreign policy vision, it is inevitable that the increasing Turkish-Arab commercial or cultural relations find a counterpart at the academic and scientific level as well. It can already be seen how strengthening an effect regional integration has for all sides, with borders, which have torn the peoples of the region apart from one another for nearly a century, becoming in a sense insignificant through the abolition of visas. The borders that have caused regional separation for a century have remained not only physical borders; they have also built very thick mental walls in between. On one side of these walls Turkish perceptions about the Arabs, and on the other false Arab perceptions about the Turks, have been produced and put to work.

It is a fact that with the increase of regional exchange, human interaction increases the richness of the people of the region in every respect. While a free movement agreement is being signed among 4 countries of the region today, it is calculated that this freedom of movement has a serious effect on the total economic growth of the region. It becomes very important for this exchange, continuing at the economic and social level, to spread to a more comprehensive field and to be continued among academics as well.

ATCOSS, in which Interior Minister Prof. Dr. Beşir Atalay gave an impressive speech on the first day in his capacity as a social scientist, will continue its sessions today and tomorrow at TOBB University in five separate halls from 09 to 19. We will continue to relay our impressions.