Rising threat of hate speech, extremism discussed at global summit in Istanbul

Panelists at the International Strategic Communication Summit 2022 in Istanbul on Saturday delved into ways of combating the rising threat of extremism and hate speech.

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) is a critical platform in this respect, said Jonathan Fowler, a UN regional communications officer.

The UNAOC was founded in 2005 as a political initiative of then-UN chief Kofi Annan co-sponsored by Türkiye and Spain.

The UNAOC was established “precisely to explore the roots of polarization and how hate speech was actually accentuating that polarization,” Fowler said during a discussion on “How to Combat Extremism and Hate Speech for Global Good.”

It was also part of an “attempt to spur international intercultural interfaith dialogue, through education, through youth work, through work on migration and work on the media,” he added.

“Governments who are concerned about this issue are very deeply involved and have been deeply involved in the UN’s work on this for some time,” he said.

He also explained how “misinformation and disinformation” spurred the UN’s decision to declare June 18 as the International Day for Countering Hate Speech.

“Now you’re all aware, of course, that hate speech and misinformation and disinformation go hand in hand. One of the reasons why this International Day was created was because of hate speech, and misinformation related to the (COVID-19) pandemic,” he said.

“Everything was accelerating with finger-pointing about who was supposedly to blame for the pandemic.”

Fadi Farasin, assistant director general of the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC), said combating extremism and Islamophobia was part of the organization’s 2025 action plan.

SESRIC is a subsidiary organ of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Mersiha Smailovic, an activist and founder of Legis, an NGO that works with migrants, emphasized that hate speech never ends with “just the speech.”

“It also goes on to hate crime” and then “it ends with the genocide as we witnessed in the Balkans,” she said.

She was referring to the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in which over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces, despite the presence of Dutch peacekeeping troops.

According to Smailovic, the reason for hate speech in “fragile countries like those in the Balkans” is just to “make people unsafe, isolated, or powerless.”

In that way, individuals are also dehumanized, she explained.

Other sessions

An earlier panel discussion focused on what institutions can do to mitigate communication issues during “global uncertainties,” such as the burgeoning forced migration crisis.

Basak Yavcan, a political scientist from the Ankara-based TOBB University of Economics and Technology, spoke about communication strategies in the field of migration management.

Fuad Huseynov, deputy chairman at Azerbaijan’s State Committee for Affairs of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, talked about the reasons and impact of forced migration.

Other speakers in the event – titled Capacity Building for Public Communication: Coping with Global Uncertainties – were Ipek Tekdemir Rupp, policy and strategic communication advisor at the European Parliament, and Pieter Idenburg, a senior adviser for the Netherlands-based communications consultancy Issuemakers.

Another panel discussion was on Conflict Resolution and Stabilizing Power, with a separate session on the Role of Intelligence in Counterterrorism.

Participants in the latter were political scientists Ali Burak Daricili of Türkiye’s Bursa Technical University, Hamoon Khelghat Doost of Istanbul’s Uskudar University, Kaan Kutlu Atac of Mersin University, and Cavid Veliyev, head of the Foreign Policy Analysis Department at Azerbaijan’s Center of Analysis of International Relations.