On the Collateral Impact of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn: Re-securitization of the Kurdish Issue and the Kurds’ Struggle for Minority Recognition and Self-Determination

Since the collapse of the peace process in 2015, the Turkish Government has sought to turn every move towards Kurdish rights into an existential threat – a process led to the re-securitization of the Kurdish question. Ever since the descent of Turkey into an authoritarian polity has begun in the aftermath of the June 2015 elections, the Kurdish minority has suffered a brutal crackdown marked by high of political imprisonment and greater restrictions on freedom of assembly and association and on electoral aspects of self-determination. This commentary will take a closer look at the dire consequences of the collateral impact of Turkey’s authoritarian turn on the Kurdish political movement from the perspectives of minority rights and self-determination.

Political Prisoners of the Italian Mezzogiorno: A Transnational Question of the Nineteenth Century

Through a case study of a group of Neapolitan political activists incarcerated in Naples after the 1848 Revolution, this article aims to rescue the Italian convicts’ experience from its subsidiary status, presenting the prisons as a site of struggle and in particular highlighting the international, European dimension of political imprisonment in the nineteenth century. I argue that together with the exiled, political prisoners also acted as transnational actors of the Risorgimento; they aroused the interest of both public opinion and the world of diplomacy and were perceived as a humanitarian cause. Neapolitan political prisoners became spokespersons of their national and political cause abroad, had a clear agency and exploited European public opinion. This study will thus explore the dynamics of the Risorgimento from a transnational perspective, as well as in relation to British and French imperialistic policies in the Mediterranean, the international de-legitimization of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and more generally in terms of foreign humanitarian interventions in the nineteenth century and the role of political prisoners. The Neapolitan dungeons were not significantly different from those of other European states; however, they became the target of international diplomacy showing how Naples was considered somewhat in between European and non-European states.

Narrating Political Imprisonment in Tsarist Russia: Bakunin, Goethe, Hegel

How have modern cultures of dissent learnt to narrate the experience of political imprisonment? From 1851 to 1853, M. A. Bakunin was incarcerated in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Here, the “father of Russian anarchism” wrote what has become known as his Confession: an account of his personal and political development, penned in the most notorious prison of the Russian autocracy at the behest of the tsar. Previous scholarship has focused entirely on the content of this peculiar text. The present article is the first to mobilize extensive archival research—on its carceral conditions of production and intellectual conditions of possibility—in order to understand the form of Bakunin's Confession. Doing so reveals the text as one of the first Russian Bildungsromane: the birth of a genre whereby the imprisoned self became legible through a new epistemology of self and history between Goethe and Hegel. Excavating the nature and afterlives of this novel political aesthetics provides original insights into the “politicization” of state incarceration in European history, the origins of modern Russian autobiographics, and the construction of the radical self.

Human Rights Violations and Post-election Protest

How do human rights violations affect post-election protest? Until recently, post-election protests have been explained primarily by election-related factors such as the level of manipulation and the quality of electoral institutions. We argue that there are three dimensions along which human rights violations influence post-election protest: (1) the physical cost to protesters, (2) the ability to connect the violation to an election outcome, and (3) the ability to connect the repressive action to the government. Using this framework, we identify political imprisonment as the physical integrity right violation most likely to increase the probability of post-election protest. We test our hypotheses empirically with data on all national-level elections in the world between 1982 and 2012. We find that political imprisonment, a violation easily connected to government action and election outcomes, and less costly physically than other physical integrity rights violations, increases the probability of post-election protest.

Psychological sequelae of political imprisonment, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder, in 491 Days by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

This article analyses well-known anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s prison memoir 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 (2013) for depictions of suffering. This memoir reveals aspects of politically inflicted trauma, particularly the suffering sustained in prolonged solitary confinement and the resulting psychological sequelae for the prisoner. To move beyond a vague understanding of her traumatic experiences, this article draws on the field of psychiatry, specifically the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to gain greater insight as this tool may also be regarded as a type of narrative that could aid in the comprehension of traumatic events. References will be made to the three main cluster symptoms of PTSD: involuntary re-experiencing of the traumatic event, avoidance of reminders and an ongoing sense of threat. An interdisciplinary literary-psychological approach will probably lead to a deeper understanding of the mental consequences of political imprisonment, as PTSD was not an acknowledged disorder during Madikizela-Mandela’s detainment.