Saygun Gokariksel | Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (original) (raw)
Papers by Saygun Gokariksel
MA thesis , 2003
The process of writing this work has been a long and often tortuous one. That I have found it rev... more The process of writing this work has been a long and often tortuous one. That I have found it revealing is due largely to the assistance and support that I have received along the way. Firstly, I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the Centre for European Studies, especially dr Andrzej Szczerski and Prof. dr hab. Zdzislaw Mach for their support and encouragement. I would also like to thank all those who helped me with translations from Polish sources, Aneta Kostrzewa and Leszek Kawalec in particular. It is no exaggeration to say that I could never have completed this work without the long hours put in by Marc Weinstein, who generously offered his help from printing out to the rephrasing of some obscure paragraphs. If any obscure and undeveloped paragraphs and ideas remain, I owe them greatly to the stimulating discussions with Marcin Piekoszewski and S0ren Gauger, who never ceased inciting me to expand the horizons of this work. My advisor, dr hab. Irena Borowik was a sort of antidote to these incitements in that she took care to ensure that this work remained grounded and coherent. Without her invaluable remarks and guidance it would not have been possible to finish this work. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unceasing support for, and belief in, what I have done throughout my stay in Poland, and I dedicate this work to the memory of my grandmother. It goes without saying that any mistakes are solely my responsibility with the exception of formatting inconsistencies, for which I fault a certain unnamed word-processing program.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022
South Atlantic Quarterly , 2022
This essay explores the embodied forms of power and struggle that are manifest in the Boğaziçi Un... more This essay explores the embodied forms of power and struggle that are manifest in the Boğaziçi University protests against the authoritarian offensive of the Turkish government. By focusing on the student and faculty protests, especially, the daily gowned performances, it suggests that Boğaziçi protests could be seen as part of the making of a counter or dissident body politic, which seeks to rethink and revitalize, at this conjuncture of neoliberal authoritarianism, the university as a critical social institution and as an arena of democratic struggle interconnected to other social struggles for equality and liberty in Turkey and beyond. Drawing on the collective history of struggles and different forms and scales of action, this making of the dissident body politic weaves together embodied public performances; mediatized communicative labor, including online forums, commissions, media commentaries, and productions; and formal institutional resistance and legal action. Altogether, Boğaziçi protests highlight, or, better, flesh out, the importance of university autonomy and democracy, reposing the question, What is a university? at this critical moment when public life and institutions have been violently targeted by the apparatuses of the state and capital.
Civil Society Review, 2020
This paper critically engages with Turkey’s refugee governance by offering insight into the daily... more This paper critically engages with Turkey’s refugee governance by offering insight into the daily struggles, aspirations, and longings of Syrian Kurdish migrants living in the inner-city neighbourhood of Demirkapı, Istanbul. It aims to sketch a multifaceted Kurdish geography of displacements beyond nation-state borders and to show how social differences and hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity shape greatly the experiences of the groups living in the neighbourhood. The paper is based on an ethnographic field research that consists of first-hand observations, conversations, and 25 semi- structured in-depth interviews with Kurdish migrants. The emplaced, ethnographic research is particularly promising to understand the daily lives of migrants and their multi-layered history of displacement and migration within and across borders. This history, we underscore, is not a past history, but one that unfolds in the present, within the current social hierarchies and in the midst of the ongoing crises in Syria and Iraq that poignantly shape the feelings, expectations, and memories of the Kurdish people currently living in Demirkapı. Each life trajectory, that we briefly describe, involves a strenuous effort to establish a relatively stable and enriching life under the precarious conditions of ongoing crises and authoritarian neoliberal capitalism.
Archives and Records, 2020
The communist-era secret police archives have a peculiar afterlife in postsocialist Eastern Europ... more The communist-era secret police archives have a peculiar afterlife in postsocialist Eastern Europe. On the one hand, those archives have become the site to articulate different visions of justice and social transformation and harboured the modernist promise of transparency, and, on the other, the secret police archives, especially in Poland, have become the object of popular suspicions of treachery and secrecy, with respect to their informational content, political instrumentalization, and highly restricted public access. This article focuses on the contentious popular cultural-political life of the communist-era secret police archives in postsocialist Poland. It examines the way those archives have come to produce such ambivalent desires and attachments across social groups and classes, and become part of hegemonic political struggles. Specifically, I focus on Poland’s state-run Institute of National Remembrance, which manages those archives and prosecutes the ‘crimes against the Polish nation.’ By drawing on my ethnographic research at this Institute and analysing popular cultural productions, especially, the ‘documentary-play’ called ‘Files,’ performed by the well-known ex-dissident ‘Theater of the Eighth Day,’ my article shows how this Institute and theatre performance seek to popularize different understandings of the archive and forms of knowing, feeling, and doing.
Antifascism Today: Lineages of Anticommunism and "Militant Democracy" in Eastern Europe. In "Back to the '30s? Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy", 2020
Liberal groups currently organized to “defend” democracy against right-wing authoritarianism ofte... more Liberal groups currently organized to “defend” democracy against right-wing authoritarianism often invoke the terms of the interwar legal-political doctrine of “militant democracy.” This liberal narrative uses the interwar period as a transhistorical moral tale against the “dangers” of fascism and communism, which it typically conflates with each other under the term “totalitarianism.” The liberal defense of democracy, using this moral-political imaginary, not only misses the historical specificity of the current moment, it is also ineffective, not least because it depends on a defense of the capitalist status quo that nourishes right-wing populist and fascist groups. Instead, my chapter, based on research in Poland and Eastern Europe, suggests that for a more effective, popular antifascist strategy, the historical lineages of anticommunism and the security logic underlying both right-wing authoritarianism and the liberal defense of democracy need to be examined more critically and dynamically, with a focus on the shifting conjunctures of social and class struggle and the material constellations of legal and political-economic institutions of power. Analyzing different forms of anticommunism is an important part of this task, not just for a better understanding of neoliberal, liberal, and right-wing formations of power, but also for reckoning with the limitations anticommunism imposes on our political imagination and praxis.
Red Thread, 2020
the interview Meltem Ahıska and I conducted with Raja Shehadeh on law, memory, and ways of resist... more the interview Meltem Ahıska and I conducted with Raja Shehadeh on law, memory, and ways of resistance
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2019
Recent studies of authoritarianism in Turkey often conceptualize the problem as a move away from ... more Recent studies of authoritarianism in Turkey often conceptualize the problem as a move away from the rule of law toward rule by law; that is, law’s political instrumentalization by powerful authoritarian movements or personalities. Informed by the liberal legalist assumption that conceives law and politics as two disparate spheres, these studies tend nostalgically to idealize the liberal rule of law past as a benchmark against which today’s predicament is compared. Instead, we attempt to develop an alternative framework, which analyzes law and politics as co-constitutive domains of power, domination, and struggle. We argue that the current state of exception in Turkey (Olağanüstü Hal, literally meaning “extraordinary situation” and is abbreviated as OHAL) would be more fruitfully analyzed by taking into account the historical and structural relations of power traversing the daily practices of law. In this respect, we suggest the following three points as promising research strategies: (1) offering a more extensive temporal framework that focuses on the historical continuities and discontinuities as well as the uneven experience and spatiality of exceptional rule; (2) avoiding methodological nationalism and situating the current authoritarian surge in the context of other formations of authoritarianism in the “peripheries” of global law and politics; and (3) developing a more relational study of law by including the political economic dimension, not just as a causal factor, but also in terms of its effects.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an ana... more This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.
Dialectical Anthropology , 2018
In critical conversation with George Baca's recent article " Neoliberal narratives of crisis: the... more In critical conversation with George Baca's recent article " Neoliberal narratives of crisis: the feeble crises of a vanishing " class, " " this article discusses how revolutionary politics and neoliberalism may be explored non-teleologically in time and space, with a focus on the historical interconnections of labor, capital, praxis, and memory across the West, East, and South. The article has two parts. The first one is concerned with the questions of time, history, and memory posed by revolutionary politics. It explores the contours of the modern epistemic and imaginary space of belonging and liberatory praxis constituted by, primarily, the French, Haitian, and Russian revolutions. The second part seeks to situate the history of Eastern European neoliberalism within the global history of capitalism. By focusing on the spatial and temporal unevenness in world capitalism and modernity and problematizing the Eurocentric views on Eastern Europe, it suggests rethinking universality with and in difference.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2017
The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of ... more The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of history, ideology, and revolution; the foreclosure of the symbolic and epistemic space of emancipation opened up by the French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions. Yet, the celebrations of the march of liberal democracy and capital have soon given way to alarming observations about a new wave of right-wing populism that feeds on the contradictions of inequality and freedom, largely generated by neoliberal capitalist globalization. Based on my field research in Poland, my paper engages with this familiar problem, which is often discussed as the Bcrisis^ of liberal democracy, or Bdedemocratization.^ I show how the ends of communism and revolutionary politics have contributed to the social environment of emptiness , nihilism or the void, in which right-wing groups were able to thrive and claim to be the real voice of social change and justice, as opposed to the liberal establishment. To explore the way that void has been historically and materially constituted, my paper traces the shifting conditions of collective action or revolutionary practice in Poland and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Specifically, I focus on the tragic dissolution and absorption of the massive BSolidarity^ worker movement into neoliberal state building in the 1990s and thereby engage with the often-invoked dialectic between insurrection and constitution, or movement and institutional-ization that haunt the revolutionary struggles.
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 5, 2012
Anthropology of East Europe Review , Dec 2013
This paper analyzes the public life of a highly contested list of names, the "Wildstein List," le... more This paper analyzes the public life of a highly contested list of names, the "Wildstein List," leaked from the former secret service archives in early 2005 in Poland. Concentrating on the contentious debates on historical truth, transparency, victimhood ethics, and problems concerning public access to the archives, I examine the conjuncture of neoliberal transformations and the kind of lustration (verifying one's past links with the former secret service) proposed by nationalist-conservative groups. By highlighting the role of "scandal," I aim to show how the Wildstein List has generated a popular desire for lustration and "obligation" to know the truth to be revealed by the archives; how lustration has become an integral component of a politics of fear and suspicion propagated by the Polish nationalist-conservatives; and how the legitimacy crisis of post-89 liberal nation-state building project and class dispossession, the "dual crisis of labor and popular sovereignty" (Kalb 2009), is articulated to the "authoritarian populism" (Hall 1988) of nationalist-conservative groups that largely draw on Margaret Thatcher's (and Ronald Reagan's) neoliberal authoritarian policies (deregulation, privatization, "tough on crimes and corruption," moral policing). Finally, I reflect on the social consequences of this permeation of neoliberal ideology into conservative historical truth and justice projectsthe social and legal effects of this populist authoritarian reconstruction of the socialist past.
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Sociologia, 2011
MA thesis , 2003
The process of writing this work has been a long and often tortuous one. That I have found it rev... more The process of writing this work has been a long and often tortuous one. That I have found it revealing is due largely to the assistance and support that I have received along the way. Firstly, I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the Centre for European Studies, especially dr Andrzej Szczerski and Prof. dr hab. Zdzislaw Mach for their support and encouragement. I would also like to thank all those who helped me with translations from Polish sources, Aneta Kostrzewa and Leszek Kawalec in particular. It is no exaggeration to say that I could never have completed this work without the long hours put in by Marc Weinstein, who generously offered his help from printing out to the rephrasing of some obscure paragraphs. If any obscure and undeveloped paragraphs and ideas remain, I owe them greatly to the stimulating discussions with Marcin Piekoszewski and S0ren Gauger, who never ceased inciting me to expand the horizons of this work. My advisor, dr hab. Irena Borowik was a sort of antidote to these incitements in that she took care to ensure that this work remained grounded and coherent. Without her invaluable remarks and guidance it would not have been possible to finish this work. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unceasing support for, and belief in, what I have done throughout my stay in Poland, and I dedicate this work to the memory of my grandmother. It goes without saying that any mistakes are solely my responsibility with the exception of formatting inconsistencies, for which I fault a certain unnamed word-processing program.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2022
South Atlantic Quarterly , 2022
This essay explores the embodied forms of power and struggle that are manifest in the Boğaziçi Un... more This essay explores the embodied forms of power and struggle that are manifest in the Boğaziçi University protests against the authoritarian offensive of the Turkish government. By focusing on the student and faculty protests, especially, the daily gowned performances, it suggests that Boğaziçi protests could be seen as part of the making of a counter or dissident body politic, which seeks to rethink and revitalize, at this conjuncture of neoliberal authoritarianism, the university as a critical social institution and as an arena of democratic struggle interconnected to other social struggles for equality and liberty in Turkey and beyond. Drawing on the collective history of struggles and different forms and scales of action, this making of the dissident body politic weaves together embodied public performances; mediatized communicative labor, including online forums, commissions, media commentaries, and productions; and formal institutional resistance and legal action. Altogether, Boğaziçi protests highlight, or, better, flesh out, the importance of university autonomy and democracy, reposing the question, What is a university? at this critical moment when public life and institutions have been violently targeted by the apparatuses of the state and capital.
Civil Society Review, 2020
This paper critically engages with Turkey’s refugee governance by offering insight into the daily... more This paper critically engages with Turkey’s refugee governance by offering insight into the daily struggles, aspirations, and longings of Syrian Kurdish migrants living in the inner-city neighbourhood of Demirkapı, Istanbul. It aims to sketch a multifaceted Kurdish geography of displacements beyond nation-state borders and to show how social differences and hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity shape greatly the experiences of the groups living in the neighbourhood. The paper is based on an ethnographic field research that consists of first-hand observations, conversations, and 25 semi- structured in-depth interviews with Kurdish migrants. The emplaced, ethnographic research is particularly promising to understand the daily lives of migrants and their multi-layered history of displacement and migration within and across borders. This history, we underscore, is not a past history, but one that unfolds in the present, within the current social hierarchies and in the midst of the ongoing crises in Syria and Iraq that poignantly shape the feelings, expectations, and memories of the Kurdish people currently living in Demirkapı. Each life trajectory, that we briefly describe, involves a strenuous effort to establish a relatively stable and enriching life under the precarious conditions of ongoing crises and authoritarian neoliberal capitalism.
Archives and Records, 2020
The communist-era secret police archives have a peculiar afterlife in postsocialist Eastern Europ... more The communist-era secret police archives have a peculiar afterlife in postsocialist Eastern Europe. On the one hand, those archives have become the site to articulate different visions of justice and social transformation and harboured the modernist promise of transparency, and, on the other, the secret police archives, especially in Poland, have become the object of popular suspicions of treachery and secrecy, with respect to their informational content, political instrumentalization, and highly restricted public access. This article focuses on the contentious popular cultural-political life of the communist-era secret police archives in postsocialist Poland. It examines the way those archives have come to produce such ambivalent desires and attachments across social groups and classes, and become part of hegemonic political struggles. Specifically, I focus on Poland’s state-run Institute of National Remembrance, which manages those archives and prosecutes the ‘crimes against the Polish nation.’ By drawing on my ethnographic research at this Institute and analysing popular cultural productions, especially, the ‘documentary-play’ called ‘Files,’ performed by the well-known ex-dissident ‘Theater of the Eighth Day,’ my article shows how this Institute and theatre performance seek to popularize different understandings of the archive and forms of knowing, feeling, and doing.
Antifascism Today: Lineages of Anticommunism and "Militant Democracy" in Eastern Europe. In "Back to the '30s? Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy", 2020
Liberal groups currently organized to “defend” democracy against right-wing authoritarianism ofte... more Liberal groups currently organized to “defend” democracy against right-wing authoritarianism often invoke the terms of the interwar legal-political doctrine of “militant democracy.” This liberal narrative uses the interwar period as a transhistorical moral tale against the “dangers” of fascism and communism, which it typically conflates with each other under the term “totalitarianism.” The liberal defense of democracy, using this moral-political imaginary, not only misses the historical specificity of the current moment, it is also ineffective, not least because it depends on a defense of the capitalist status quo that nourishes right-wing populist and fascist groups. Instead, my chapter, based on research in Poland and Eastern Europe, suggests that for a more effective, popular antifascist strategy, the historical lineages of anticommunism and the security logic underlying both right-wing authoritarianism and the liberal defense of democracy need to be examined more critically and dynamically, with a focus on the shifting conjunctures of social and class struggle and the material constellations of legal and political-economic institutions of power. Analyzing different forms of anticommunism is an important part of this task, not just for a better understanding of neoliberal, liberal, and right-wing formations of power, but also for reckoning with the limitations anticommunism imposes on our political imagination and praxis.
Red Thread, 2020
the interview Meltem Ahıska and I conducted with Raja Shehadeh on law, memory, and ways of resist... more the interview Meltem Ahıska and I conducted with Raja Shehadeh on law, memory, and ways of resistance
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2019
Recent studies of authoritarianism in Turkey often conceptualize the problem as a move away from ... more Recent studies of authoritarianism in Turkey often conceptualize the problem as a move away from the rule of law toward rule by law; that is, law’s political instrumentalization by powerful authoritarian movements or personalities. Informed by the liberal legalist assumption that conceives law and politics as two disparate spheres, these studies tend nostalgically to idealize the liberal rule of law past as a benchmark against which today’s predicament is compared. Instead, we attempt to develop an alternative framework, which analyzes law and politics as co-constitutive domains of power, domination, and struggle. We argue that the current state of exception in Turkey (Olağanüstü Hal, literally meaning “extraordinary situation” and is abbreviated as OHAL) would be more fruitfully analyzed by taking into account the historical and structural relations of power traversing the daily practices of law. In this respect, we suggest the following three points as promising research strategies: (1) offering a more extensive temporal framework that focuses on the historical continuities and discontinuities as well as the uneven experience and spatiality of exceptional rule; (2) avoiding methodological nationalism and situating the current authoritarian surge in the context of other formations of authoritarianism in the “peripheries” of global law and politics; and (3) developing a more relational study of law by including the political economic dimension, not just as a causal factor, but also in terms of its effects.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an ana... more This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.
Dialectical Anthropology , 2018
In critical conversation with George Baca's recent article " Neoliberal narratives of crisis: the... more In critical conversation with George Baca's recent article " Neoliberal narratives of crisis: the feeble crises of a vanishing " class, " " this article discusses how revolutionary politics and neoliberalism may be explored non-teleologically in time and space, with a focus on the historical interconnections of labor, capital, praxis, and memory across the West, East, and South. The article has two parts. The first one is concerned with the questions of time, history, and memory posed by revolutionary politics. It explores the contours of the modern epistemic and imaginary space of belonging and liberatory praxis constituted by, primarily, the French, Haitian, and Russian revolutions. The second part seeks to situate the history of Eastern European neoliberalism within the global history of capitalism. By focusing on the spatial and temporal unevenness in world capitalism and modernity and problematizing the Eurocentric views on Eastern Europe, it suggests rethinking universality with and in difference.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2017
The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of ... more The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of history, ideology, and revolution; the foreclosure of the symbolic and epistemic space of emancipation opened up by the French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions. Yet, the celebrations of the march of liberal democracy and capital have soon given way to alarming observations about a new wave of right-wing populism that feeds on the contradictions of inequality and freedom, largely generated by neoliberal capitalist globalization. Based on my field research in Poland, my paper engages with this familiar problem, which is often discussed as the Bcrisis^ of liberal democracy, or Bdedemocratization.^ I show how the ends of communism and revolutionary politics have contributed to the social environment of emptiness , nihilism or the void, in which right-wing groups were able to thrive and claim to be the real voice of social change and justice, as opposed to the liberal establishment. To explore the way that void has been historically and materially constituted, my paper traces the shifting conditions of collective action or revolutionary practice in Poland and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Specifically, I focus on the tragic dissolution and absorption of the massive BSolidarity^ worker movement into neoliberal state building in the 1990s and thereby engage with the often-invoked dialectic between insurrection and constitution, or movement and institutional-ization that haunt the revolutionary struggles.
Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 5, 2012
Anthropology of East Europe Review , Dec 2013
This paper analyzes the public life of a highly contested list of names, the "Wildstein List," le... more This paper analyzes the public life of a highly contested list of names, the "Wildstein List," leaked from the former secret service archives in early 2005 in Poland. Concentrating on the contentious debates on historical truth, transparency, victimhood ethics, and problems concerning public access to the archives, I examine the conjuncture of neoliberal transformations and the kind of lustration (verifying one's past links with the former secret service) proposed by nationalist-conservative groups. By highlighting the role of "scandal," I aim to show how the Wildstein List has generated a popular desire for lustration and "obligation" to know the truth to be revealed by the archives; how lustration has become an integral component of a politics of fear and suspicion propagated by the Polish nationalist-conservatives; and how the legitimacy crisis of post-89 liberal nation-state building project and class dispossession, the "dual crisis of labor and popular sovereignty" (Kalb 2009), is articulated to the "authoritarian populism" (Hall 1988) of nationalist-conservative groups that largely draw on Margaret Thatcher's (and Ronald Reagan's) neoliberal authoritarian policies (deregulation, privatization, "tough on crimes and corruption," moral policing). Finally, I reflect on the social consequences of this permeation of neoliberal ideology into conservative historical truth and justice projectsthe social and legal effects of this populist authoritarian reconstruction of the socialist past.
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Sociologia, 2011
H-Nationalism, 2019
Nikolay Koposov’s book explores the “changing forms of historical consciousness and political leg... more Nikolay Koposov’s book explores the “changing forms of historical consciousness and political legitimation” (p. 6) in contemporary Europe and Russia through a comparative historical analysis of “memory laws.” These laws typically concern past tragedies like genocides or “crimes against humanity,” and involve their memorialization and protection by criminalizing certain statements about them, especially denials. This terrain of law and memory, as Koposov’s book cogently shows, is full of tensions. Some of them result from the conflicts between different legal rights in liberal democracies (freedom of speech vs. the right to human dignity and public order), some from different understandings of history and politics, and some from the agonistic discussions regarding the efficacy of those laws, whether they can really protect human dignity or prevent fascism. Koposov specifically focuses on the following question: how is it that the memory laws, which were initially formulated to promote or “maintain peace,” have recently transformed into a manipulative instrument of memory wars across Europe, particularly in post-Soviet Eastern Europe (p. 9)? This is a crucial question for anyone concerned with the politics of history and memory in the early twenty-first century. And Koposov offers useful insights into the historical conditions that make memory malleable and instrumentable, especially by authoritarian nationalist politics, at our current conjuncture.
Call for Paper: Historical Materialism Ankara, 2020
The rise of far right authoritarian regimes, nationalist and populist political parties and movem... more The rise of far right authoritarian regimes, nationalist and populist political parties and movements, and neo-conservative ideologies and politics across the globe, present a new challenge to states and to the global order. For those on the left and the center-right embracing neo-liberalism, the new challenges of autocratic leaders and fundamentalist radicalisms require analyses and responses. The popularity of those right movements, and their political success in both democratic politics and their political success in securing power within democratic politics