Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory


Book Description

This book makes a strong case that Turkey's regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. Building on the insights of critical and contemporary theory, the essays address the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power. Once there, they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, and to modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. This produces new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. Bringing together historical, discursive, and ethnographic approaches from multiple disciplines, this collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey.




Populism, Authoritarianism and Necropolitics


Book Description

This book examines how Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan produces and employs necropolitical narratives in order to perpetuate its authoritarian rule. In doing so, the book argues that as the party transitioned from socially conservative Muslim democratic values to authoritarian Islamism, it embraced a necropolitical narrative based on the promotion of martyrdom, and of killing and dying for the Turkish nation and Islam, as part of their authoritarian legitimation. This narrative, the book shows, is used by the party to legitimise its actions and deflect its failures through the framing of the deaths of Turkish soldiers and civilians, which have occurred due to the AKP’s political errors, as martyrdom events in which loyal servants of the Turkish Republic and God gave their lives in order to protect the nation in a time of great crisis. This book also describes how, throughout its second decade in power, the AKP has used Turkey’s education system, its Directorate of Religious Affairs, and television programs in order to propagate its necropolitical martyrdom narrative.




Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy


Book Description

This book covers selected topics on contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy to understand and critically analyze the ideas, discourses, actors, processes and structures in the foreign policymaking. It provides the readers with a compilation of chapters on the critical analysis of Turkey’s changing positionality and foreign policy identity. In doing so, it draws on the tools and perspectives offered by the critical theories and approaches in International Relations and relevant disciplines. Most of the chapters included in this project deal with the dramatic metamorphoses that took place in Turkish Foreign Policy during the period when the Justice and Development Party ruled and their ongoing consequences.




Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust


Book Description

This collection reaches beyond fake news and propaganda, beyond misinformation and charismatic liars, to explore the lesser-publicized cultural forms and practices that serve as a cultural infrastructure for post-truth society and politics. Situating post-truth in specific contexts as a site of contestation or crisis, the book critically explores it as a dynamic and shifting site around which political and cultural practices in specific contexts revolve and overlap. Through a breadth of perspectives, the volume considers a number of overlapping cultural and political developments across varying national and transnational contexts: changing technologies and practices of cultural production that sometimes shift and at other times reproduce authority of traditional institutional truth-tellers; seismic cultural changes in representations, values and roles regarding gender, sexuality, race and historical memory about them, as well as corresponding reactionary discourses in the “culture wars”; questions of authenticity, honesty, and power relations that combine many of the former shifts within an all-encompassing culture of (self-) promotional, attentional capitalism. These considerations lead scholars to focus on corresponding shifting cultural dynamics of popular truth-telling and (dis-) trust-making that inform political culture. In this more global view, post-truth becomes foremost an influentially anxious public mood about the struggles to secure or undermine publicly accepted facts. This nuanced and insightful collection will interest scholars and students of communication studies, media and cultural studies, media ethics, journalism, media literacy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and politics.




The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla


Book Description

The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.




Human Rights on the Edge


Book Description

This book grapples with the challenges inherent in an uncertain period for global human rights and explores the future of international human rights law and practice. Many Western scholars are increasingly pessimistic about the future of international human rights law. However, the contributions to this volume demonstrate that far from collapsing in the face of duress, the concept of human rights has endured despite contractions and the spectre of co-option and manipulation by the powerful. In addition, law is a malleable tool that is deployed in novel ways to promote human rights. The book illustrates that the power of human rights lies not in their essentialized transcendence of time, culture, and context but in their enduring promise that a more just world can emerge from sustained and creative struggle through, against, and at the margins of states, law, and institutions. The key questions to emerge are not whether human rights law and practice will survive, but rather what are the forces that sustain, revitalize, and transform them? And what are human rights in the process of becoming? This book will be of immense interest to those studying and researching across Politics, Human Rights, Gender and Law. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights.




Antigone


Book Description

This book explores the figure of Antigone and her many reconceptualizations from antiquity to the present. One of the most popular heroines of classical literature, Antigone defied political authority to carry out the forbidden burial of her brother. Readers will become familiar with the key themes of Antigone’s story, such as the law and politics, gender, and death, tracing their survival and transformations over time. Notably, the book explores the thorough de-politicization of the heroine in philosophy and psychoanalysis, followed by a reversal and re-politicization through feminist and socio-political theories. It provides a useful tool to approach postmodern receptions of Antigone in the arts and society in the modern era, particularly in the contexts of occupied and civil war-era Greece, in Palestine, and in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. It also addresses issues of Antigone-like struggles of individuals or collectivities to overcome obstacles of systemic and racialized violence and gender-based oppression in the 21st century, while challenging heteronormative practices and policies to allow new subjectivities to emerge. Though Antigone’s story is complex, Karakantza provides an accessible, fascinating overview of this enduring figure’s legacy and impact over the course of history. Antigone provides a comprehensive study of this classical heroine, suitable for students and scholars of classical literature, reception studies, and gender studies. It also appeals to theatre practitioners interested in adapting and staging Sophocles’ Antigone, or any Antigone of the ancient sources.




Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis


Book Description

What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted back in the formal worlds of plays named after and, to an extent, epitomized by tragic characters. Structured around four thematic clusters – Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, and Insurrections – this book presents timely interventions in critical theory and in the debates that matter to us as disaster becomes routine in the time-out-of-joint of a (post-)pandemic world. Violently encompassing all pre-existing and future crises (relational, political and ecological), the pandemic coincides with the queer unhistoricism of tragedy, and its collapsing of present, past, and future readerships.




The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics


Book Description

The study of politics in Turkey : new horizons and perennial pitfalls / Güneş Murat Tezcür -- Democratization theories and Turkey / Ekrem Karakoç -- Ruling ideologies in modern Turkey / Kerem Öktem -- Constitutionalism in Turkey / Aslı Ü. Bâli -- Civil-military relations and the demise of Turkish democracy / Nil S. Satana and Burak Bilgehan Özpek -- Capturing secularism in Turkey : the ease of comparison / Murat Akan -- The political economy of Turkey since the end of World War II / Şevket Pamuk -- Neoliberal politics in Turkey / Sinan Erensü and Yahya M. Madra -- The politics of welfare in Turkey / Erdem Yörük -- The political economy of environmental policymaking in Turkey : a vicious cycle / Fikret Adaman, Bengi Akbulut, and Murat Arsel -- The politics of energy in Turkey : running engines on geopolitical, discursive, and coercive power / Begüm Özkaynak, Ethemcan Turhan, and Cem İskender Aydın -- The contemporary politics of health in Turkey : diverse actors, competing frames, and uneven policies / Volkan Yılmaz -- Populism in Turkey : historical and contemporary patterns / Yüksel Taşkın -- Old and new polarizations and failed democratizations in Turkey / Murat Somer -- Economic voting during the AKP era in Turkey / S. Erdem Aytaç -- Party organizations in Turkey and their consequences for democracy / Melis G. Laebens -- The evolution of conventional political participation in Turkey / Ersin Kalaycıoğlu -- Symbolic politics and contention in the Turkish Republic / Senem Aslan -- Islamist activism in Turkey / Menderes Çınar -- The Kurdish movement in Turkey : understanding everyday perceptions and experiences / Dilan Okcuoglu -- The Transnational Mobilization of the Alevis of Turkey : from invisibility to the struggle for equality / Ceren Lord -- Politics of asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey : limits and prospects of populism / Fatih Resul Kılınç and Şule Toktaş -- A theoretical account of Turkish foreign policy under the AKP / Tarık Oğuzlu -- US-Turkey relations since WWII : from alliance to transactionalism / Serhat Güvenç and Soli Özel -- Turkey and Europe : historical asynchronicities and perceptual asymmetries / Hakan Yılmaz -- Turkey's foreign policy in the Middle East : an identity perspective / Lisel Hintz -- Turkey and Russia : historical patterns and contemporary trends in bilateral relations / Evren Balta and Mitat Çelikpala -- Citizenship and protest behavior in Turkey / Ayhan Kaya -- Gender politics and the struggle for equality in Turkey / Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat -- Human rights organizations in Turkey / Başak Çalı -- Truth, justice, and commemoration initiatives in Turkey / Onur Bakiner -- The politics of media in Turkey : chronicle of a stillborn media system / Sarphan Uzunoğlu -- The AKP's rhetoric of rule in Turkey : political melodramas of conspiracy from "ergenekon" to "mastermind" / Erdağ Göknar -- The transformation of political cinema in Turkey since the 1960s : a change of discourse / Zeynep Çetin-Erus and M. Elif Demoğlu -- Political music in Turkey : the birth and diversification of dissident and conformist music (1920-2000) / Mustafa Avcı.




New Cannibal Markets


Book Description

Thanks to recent progress in biotechnology, surrogacy, transplantation of organs and tissues, blood products or stem-cell and gamete banks are now widely used throughout the world. These techniques improve the health and well-being of some human beings using products or functions that come from the body of others. Growth in demand and absence of an appropriate international legal framework have led to the development of a lucrative global trade in which victims are often people living in insecure conditions who have no other ways to survive than to rent or sell part of their body. This growing market, in which parts of the human body are bought and sold with little respect for the human person, displays a kind of dehumanization that looks like a new form of slavery. This book is the result of a collective and multidisciplinary reflection organized by a group of international researchers working in the field of medicine and social sciences. It helps better understand how the emergence of new health industries may contribute to the development of a global medical tourism. It opens new avenues for reflection on technologies that are based on appropriation of parts of the body of others for health purposes, a type of practice that can be metaphorically compared to cannibalism. Are these the fi rst steps towards a proletariat of men- and women-objects considered as a reservoir of products of human origin needed to improve the health or well-being of the better-off? The book raises the issue of the uncontrolled use of medical advances that can sometimes reach the anticipations of dystopian literature and science fiction.