Contrary to what many might think, it’s not just students who “go on Erasmus” to other countries. An example of this is researcher Arturo Zoffmann, who went to Turkey to spend a month at Sabancı University in Istanbul with the support of the Erasmus+ programme.

The visit is related to the STEXEU project, The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship, recently funded by the ERC, and has three main objectives. Firstly, to teach a class at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on the history of states of exception in Europe. Secondly, to present a seminar on his recent research into the First World War in the Balkans at the History Department. Finally, and in parallel with the other two activities, Arturo tells us that he will ‘attend some Turkish history classes as a student’ and improve his knowledge of the Turkish language, ‘with the aim of establishing contacts and networks and being able, in the future, to include the Turkish case study in my research and in the STEXEU project’.

As we previously reported, STEXEU will use the legal literature on states of exception to provide a historical framework, with the aim of shedding ‘new light on the history of democracy and dictatorship, exploring the disregarded constitutional origins of authoritarianism that emerged from the bosom of the liberal regimes themselves’. It will analyse and compare the history of eight European countries: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain and Greece.

Sabancı University is a private research university, established in 1994, whose mission is ‘to develop internationally competent and confident individuals advancing and fostering knowledge in natural sciences and engineering along with humanities, social and management sciences through innovative transdisciplinary research’.

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