Erdogan’s Daughter: “Decolonize the West, Replace Paris and London With Istanbul and Gaza”
Esra Albayrak, the daughter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addressed the World Decolonization Forum with a call to fundamentally reshape where the world's knowledge is produced and who controls it. Her remarks outlined what she described as the first phase of a broader plan, one that operates not through politics but through ideas.
Albayrak argued that the major intellectual centers of the Western world, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and New York, need to be replaced by new hubs in Istanbul, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Rabat, Cairo, and Gaza. The goal, as she framed it, is not to erase the West but to invite it to accept its own "decolonization." That distinction did little to soften the scope of what she was proposing.
The target is the very foundation of how knowledge is created, validated, and distributed globally.
She presented the effort as a cultural and epistemological project, meaning the target is the very foundation of how knowledge is created, validated, and distributed globally. The forum itself positions this as a coalition of non-Western nations and movements pushing back against what they call centuries of Western intellectual dominance.
Albayrak is not a fringe figure in this conversation. As the daughter of Erdogan and a prominent voice in Turkish public life, her presence at such a forum carries the weight of the Turkish state's own ambitions to position Ankara as a leading power in a post-Western world order. Turkey has spent years cultivating influence across Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans under that same banner.
The inclusion of Gaza among the proposed new centers of global knowledge is striking given the ongoing conflict there and adds a deliberately charged political dimension to what Albayrak called an intellectual mission.
