Embracing the Peace Petition: Confronting Challenges with Solidarity and Resilience

In January 2016, 1128 academics signed a petition titled “We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime!” to denounce the Turkish state’s military offensive in North Kurdistan. On January 12, one day after making this petition public, President Erdogan made a public statement and called the signatories ‘so-called academics,’, ‘colonialists’, ‘traitors’, and ‘dark brains’ and he stated that ‘those traitors should be punished as soon as possible’. After that speech, all over the country, huge persecution started against the AfP, and some of them found themselves in exile. Ironically, most of these academics ended up in Germany, where the first massive academic purge in modern history took place. In this article, as an exile academic for peace, she does an auto-ethnographic analysis of the possibilities and/or unforeseen difficulties of ‘being in exile’.