Global Dialogues

I have spent much of my life caught between two worlds—Turkey, the country my family left behind, and the United States, the country where I grew up. Last summer, I had the amazing opportunity to study in Istanbul at Bogazici University through the Turkish department at Georgetown. While looking over one of the most breathtaking views of the Bosphorus from campus, I struck up a conversation with a local student, and she asked me why anyone would choose to come back and study in Turkey. Her confusion was not rooted in a lack of pride for her country, but in exhaustion of living under political and economic systems that constantly failed her. It was a moment that impacted me. She saw her reality as something so marginalized, so disregarded and hopeless that it made no sense to her that somebody who had escaped it would want to come back to learn more about it.

This moment strikes me as something important about the crisis of human fraternity in our time: our inability to see one another not as problems to be fixed or symbols of failure, but as people worthy of being heard, understood, and learned from. Globalism and its integration of shared markets, information, and technology seems to have reached its zenith, but what has lagged is global solidarity. In other words, what has been lacking is the moral courage to listen rather than instruct and receive rather than impose.

Global inequality, the issue that single-handedly fuels my intellectual curiosity, is often solely framed as a material problem, and of course, it is. However, it is also a deeply social one, an inequality in the problems that receive the most attention. Inequality fractures our shared humanity. It allows us to tolerate—even justify—the suffering of others. This is why I study international political economy: to understand the systems that produce inequality and to imagine ones that recognize our interdependence and shared stake in a more just world.

In order to reimagine human fraternity, we must start by decentering the dominant narratives that excuse suffering and view the voices of the most marginalized as peripheral. We must create intellectual spaces, like the Georgetown Global Dialogues, where knowledge flows from all directions, and all voices are engaged in meaningfully through true dialogue.

That student’s question—“Why would you come back to study in Turkey?”—has stayed with me not because it was offensive but because it revealed how deeply inequality distorts not only how others see us but how we see ourselves. The question assumed that value, knowledge, and meaning only flow in one direction: from the powerful to the powerless. To build true fraternity, we must reject that assumption. We must recognize the places most often dismissed; those that have been subjected to struggle and scarcity are often the ones most capable of teaching us what justice, equity, and solidarity really mean.

Sinan Yucel (SFS'27) is a sophomore in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.