The Necropolitics of Documents and the Slow Death of Prisoners in Turkey

The government used medico-legal documentation of prisoners’ health condition to solve the biopolitical crisis in penal institutions immediately after the end of death fast (2000-2007) and released hundreds of hunger strikers, who suffered from incurable conditions. That the state turned a political crisis into a medical one using the illness clause had unprecedented consequences for how claims are made in the political sphere. Human rights activists, Kurdish and leftist politicians are now using the plight of ill prisoners to make political arguments in the public sphere. The health conditions of political prisoners, specifically the use of the illness clause has thus emerged as one of the most contentious fields in the encounters between the state and its opponents. This chapter examines how temporality works as an instrument of necropolitics through the slow production and circulation of the medico-legal bureaucratic documents that are produced through encounters with multiple state officials. I argue, first, that medico-legal processes surrounding the detainees are mediated through the discretionary sovereign acts of multiple state officials, including but not limited to physicians, and second, that legal medicine as a technology of state violence is central to understanding the intertwined histories of sovereignty and biopolitics in Turkey.

Neither Civilian nor Combatant: Weaponised Spaces and Spatialised Bodies in Cizre

What kind of work does the categorical distinction between combatant and civilian do in the interplay of the necropolitics and biopower of the Turkish state? This paper focuses on a time period (2015-2016) in the history of the Kurdish conflict when that distinction was no longer operable as the war tactics of the Kurdish movement shifted from guerrilla attacks of hit and run in the mountains to the self-defence of residents in urban centres. It reveals the limit of inciting compassion through the figure of civilian who is assumed to entertain a pre-political life that is directed towards mere survival. It also shows how the government reconstructs the dead bodies using forensics and technoscience in order to portray what is considered by Kurdish human rights organizations civilians as combatants exercising necroresistance. As long as the civilian-combatant distinction remains and serves as the only episteme of war to defend the right to life, the state is enabled to entertain not only the right to kill, but also to turn the dead into the perpetrators of their own killing. Finally, this paper argues that law and violence, on the one hand, and the right to life and the act of killing on the other, are not two polar opposites but are mutually constitutive of each other in the remaking of state sovereignty put in crisis by the Kurdish movement's self-defence practices.

The Use of Blood Money in the Establishment of Non-Justice: Necrodomination and Resistance

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.

Nightmare Knowledges: Epistemologies of Disappearance

This chapter develops a conception of necropolitics as a power/knowledge assemblage by focusing on the games of truth and regimes of knowledge produced around death in the cases of mass graves and disappearance in Turkey. In particular, I am interested in the relations drawn between death, memory, and knowledge in necropolitical spaces, in spaces where life and the living are subsumed under the active production, regulation, and optimisation of death. The chapter consists of three parts: the first part analyses the relation between necropolitics and knowledge production, in order to establish necropolitics not only as a political technology, but also an epistemic one. The second section investigates the specific techniques of knowledge deployed in necropolitics, i.e., necro-epistemic methods, which target the temporal and logical coherence of memory in necropolitical spaces. The last section focuses on the practices of epistemic resistance, which work through mobilising perplexing realities in order to instigate counter-discourses. Overall, I argue that these counter-discourses, which I call ‘nightmare-knowledges,’ constitute necropolitical spaces as spaces of epistemic agency.

The Cemetery of Traitors

This essay examines the aftermath of the 2016 failed military coup in Turkey through the political afterlives of its victims and perpetrators. Focusing on Istanbul's ‘Cemetery of Traitors’ (established to inter the remains of dead coup plotters) as well as the funeral ceremonies of both soldiers and civilians who died during the coup attempt, it illustrates how corpses become politicized sites of struggle and resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates that the treatment and commemoration of the dead is a critical means through which states and other actors demarcate the contours of national, religious, and political communities.

Necropolitics, Martyrdom and Muslim Conscientious Objection

The war between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement has been the site of multiple forms of necropolitical violence, including killing and torture, indiscriminate exposure of the Kurdish population to state violence, and recently, the desecration of the Kurdish dead and prevention of customary burial practices. Military conscription and martyrdom discourses have been complicit in not only justifying this necropolitical violence, but also inspiring enthusiasm to participate in it as a form of national and religious duty. In this chapter, I examine the role played by militaristic invocations of Islamic warfare and martyrdom in the Turkish conscript army in the legitimisation of necropolitical violence from the perspective of those who refuse this necropoliticisation: a group of Muslim Conscientious Objectors (COs) who refuse the draft and peacefully accept the consequences of their criminalised refusal. Disputing the state’s necropoliticisation of theological concepts, Muslim COs marshal dissenting interpretations of Islamic martyrdom through their own readings of the religious texts and other resources derived from Islamic political thought and history. In the hands of Muslim COs, Islamic martyrdom becomes a form of life-affirmation to be achieved through refusing necropolitical violence, thereby suggesting conscientious objection to be a possible venue to resist necropolitics.

Money for Life: Border Killings, Compensation Claims and Life-Money Conversions in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands

This chapter examines the state’s necropolitical management of cross-border mobility and the border killings that border patrols committed in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands. Based on ethnographic research among Kurdish litigants and human rights lawyers in courtrooms and border villages of Van Province, the chapter examines compensation claims that Kurdish litigants pursued for the border killings at Turkish courts. Although most of the killing cases resulted in criminal impunity and individual perpetrators were often exonerated from criminal liability, compensation claims can still be pursued to hold state authorities financially responsible for the killings. The chapter discusses how Kurdish litigants and their lawyers articulated the state’s financial responsibility as an alternative form of justice-seeking and gave political-symbolic meanings to compensation claims. Examining the ways in which Turkish courts converted the lost lives into money value through factual as well as counterfactual legal, social, economic and biological assumptions, it further documents that the compensation awards often fell short of compensating the lost livelihoods and Kurdish litigants were compelled to engage back in smuggling and face a constant risk of death. The chapter ultimately shows the co-constituted and co-exercised political and economic subjugation of lives and livelihoods in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands.

Proper Subjects of Gendered Necropolitics: A Case of Constructed Virginities in Turkey

Is virginity the glorified signifier of proper and disciplined female subjectivity or is it the site of resistance and sabotage of the hegemonic gender norms? Focusing on hymen reconstruction operations (hymenoplasty) in Turkey and conceptualising them as medico-political assemblages, this chapter explores how virginity is understood and constructed in Turkey and the kinds of female subjectivity configured through these operations. Framing hymen reconstruction cases and virginity within the problematic of necropolitics helps us understand how the enemies to be expunged from the unfolding gendered regime and ideology in Turkey are defined and how the boundaries of a realm where an authorized female subject – the virgin – can dwell are reconstructed. The chapter focuses on the metaphorical death of the (female) subject as a result of the appropriation of its most defining features, such as autonomy on her own body, which renders her a threatening subject when she is not ‘the virgin.’ Thinking about hymen reconstruction as an example of necropolitical performance, this chapter analyses the possible meanings of the death of virginity within the medico-political assemblages of Turkey.

‘These are ordinary things’: Regulation of Death under the AKP Regime

Turkey is far from being the most violent place in the world, but for those who find themselves vulnerable due to their socioeconomic, political, and gender identities and positions, death is an all-too-real possibility. Large-scale death as a result of government action, complicity or inaction is nothing new in Turkey, but I argue that the AKP regime has enacted a remarkable shift in how courts and government officials address incidents resulting in death, what ordinary citizens are allowed to know and discuss about those deaths, and what kinds of demands for redress the relatives of the deceased can make. I identify four strategies through which the AKP regime regulates death: (1) the expansion of martyrdom, a concept hitherto used as a religious justification for military casualties, into the civilian sphere, and the increasing distribution of material benefits through formal laws and informal government discretion regulating civilian and military conceptions of martyrdom; (2) the normalisation of death as an inherent feature of some citizens’ occupational, and socioeconomic, and in some cases, gender position; (3) the depoliticisation of death to eliminate the risk of dissident mobilisation after deadly incidents; and (4) controlling the narrative around the news of death to maintain discursive hegemony.

Another Necropolitics

Necropolitics is often used to denote how the living is subjected to the power of death and destruction. Omitted from this conceptualisation is the violence that takes as its object the realm of the dead – the corpse, the act of burial, funerary rituals, the graves and cemeteries as sites of burial and commemoration, and forms of mourning and reverence. In this chapter, I examine different forms of postmortem violence directed at insurgent bodies. I focus on the image of the naked and bloody corpse of a woman, later revealed to be a Kurdish militant and guerrilla fighter known as Ekin Wan, leaked to the press in the period of Turkey’s hung parliament in the summer of 2015. I argue that the circulation of her denuded image after being killed in combat with the state’s security forces was a symptom of the end of the peace process and the beginning of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. I theorise violence that targets the realm of the dead as a distinctive and neglected form of necropolitics and necropolitical violence as the entire ensemble of practices that target the dead as a surrogate for, and means of, controlling the living.