Sacred Children, Accursed Mothers: Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey (original) (raw)
2017, Performance in a Militarized Culture
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315229027-4/sacred-children-accursed-mothers-eyl%C3%BCl-fidan-ak%C4%B1nc%C4%B1 Hundreds of occupational deaths of workers, murders of women and trans people, suicide bombings, and the curfews and special force operations in the Kurdish cities and towns in southeast Turkey exemplify how the state jeopardizes and exterminates the lives of its citizens. Through territorialized violence, the prevalent necropolitics renders these appalling deaths acceptable, ordinary, and in certain cases even enjoyable for the "common citizens". The politics, the promise, and the premise of the AKP's rule have been situated on decades of military and state violence that preceded it. Beginning with their first term in 2002 and continuing onwards, the AKP's initial vow to change the 1982 constitution, drafted under a military provision following the 1980 coup detat, was lauded as a truly democratic turn in the history of Turkish politics. The space of politics is shaped and re-inscribed by the very spectacle of overtaking death under the sovereign hold. [Book Chapter in Performance in a Militarized Culture, 2017, eds. Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan]
Related papers
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2019
This essay frames the emerging regime in Turkey as a question. Starting with a discussion of the limits of conjunctural analysis, we offer some fragmentary analysis. We highlight transgression of law and imperial fantasies as the two constitutive aspects that have conditioned the transformations of the nation-state. We present construction(-destruction) as the nodal apparatus of the AKP rule that has articulated these transformations with those of capital toward forcing a regime change. From the angle of this essay that draws from affective dynamics (such as transgression, repetition-as-failure, and dyadic identification), what is experienced as the “new Turkey” by regime supporters is proposed as the decline of the republic.
Legitimate Means of Dying: Contentious Politics of Martyrdom in the Turkish Civil War (1968-1982)
Behemoth - A Journal on Civilisation, 2019
Until today, commitment to the ‘martyrs’ of the Turkish civil war of the 1970s continues to be a crucial part of Turkey’s political culture. This paper will offer a historical-comparative sociology of state conventions and non-state contentions in defining political cultures of martyrdom during the Turkish civil war of 1970s. First, by outlining the historical semantics and political sociology of the state’s culture of martyrdom, I will argue that the state came to claim a monopoly over legitimate means of dying in the name of the state-nation-religion triad and explain how official martyrdom manifested itself during the civil war. In the second part, this paper will discuss cultures of martyrdom in processes of social mobilisation, collective identification and moral legitimisation in contentious politics, and how the radical-revolutionary left and the ultra-nationalist far-right in Turkey constructed their own cultures of martyrdom. Non-state claims to political martyrdom from the left and right emulated the state’s martyrdom discourse without rejecting its legitimacy. By (de-)legitimising lethal political violence, cultures of martyrdom establish lasting solidarities across people, times and spaces—and in seclusion against ‘others’.
A Topography of Death and Funeral: Kurdistan
"My mother lay in the street for exactly seven days… None of us slept in case dogs or birds came over her. She remained there and we felt dead 150 meters away…The state grieved us as much pain as one can grieve another. Imagine that your mother stay in the middle of the street for seven days, exactly seven days… one easily cannot stay okay with it, one cannot…" This paper intends to analyse the terror which has been undergone since the Suruç massacre on June 20 , 2015 in Turkey and Kurdistan, both of which have turned into a topography of death and funeral, within a different perspective as regards the power the state has asserted over the dead. Doubtlessly, the period in question exceeds the limits of this paper. That is why the paper has the intention of focusing only on some stories that are known, or better, have gained public visibility due to the attacks on their dead bodies amongst other thousands killed in the military operations following the curfew declared in the Kurdish cities and towns on August 16 , 2015. I will address to a new aspect of the form of hegemony the Turkish State has taken on in Kurdistan, pursuant to the concept of "necro-politics," coined by Achille Mbembe. It is necessary to note that the concept Mbembe put into use is not one which excludes colonialism and bio-politics in relation to it; on the contrary, they are interrelated. In this paper will the forms of Turkish State's hegemony in Kurdistan be undertaken in this respect.
Balkan and Near Eastern Studies
The 2016 post-coup attempt measures in Turkey have been evaluated as a process of backsliding on civic rights and freedoms. This contribution takes a slightly different approach. The so-called ‘democratic breakdown’ or ‘backsliding’ in rights and the rule of law should not be regarded as a (mere) attribute of the post-coup aftermath. The idea that a process of democratization in Turkey derailed or became disrupted after the coup only feeds the myth that there had been such a process of pre-coup democratization. In this article, it is argued that the reforms often held up as a ‘democratization’ were rather instruments opportunistically employed in the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) struggle to conquer the state, to take it from a Kemalist elite and to roll back and contain a Kurdish movement that made pleas for a pluralistic citizenship and the strengthening of civil rights. These have now morphed into an overt authoritarianism, in which a regime of exceptions, not unknown to the Kurds and the Kurdistan region in Turkey, has become the norm, the particular generalized. This is what is referred to here as an ‘organizational coup’.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.