Lynching attempts, neoliberalism and securitization
ZEYNEP GAMBETTİ
Lynching attempts and mob violence aimed at eliminating “the nation’s enemies” have been occurring in regular intervals in Turkey over the past one-and-a-half years. Actually, the discourse of national security has a long history in Turkey, reaching a peak after the 12 Sep. 1980 military coup and during the “low-intensity war” between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatist guerillas. But very few lynching attempts occurred during this period. It was only when the war, and along with it the “objective” reasons for securitization, ended that lynching attempts and mob violence emerged. The specific question this paper asks is: why now? This paper claims that the recent forms of societal violence in Turkey reveal a locking together of state-economy-society. Discourses of terrorism in the international arena are articulated to imaginaries of the “enemy in our midst” in domestic politics. The on-going pattern of violence results in the criminalization of dissenting identities and the simultaneous absolution of citizens who take on the role of the state of removing threats to national interests. Not only do dissenters thereby become bodies that can be eliminated, but society itself becomes a branch of the state. The dispensation of justice by citizens themselves may appear to be symptomatic of the collapse of the state under the pressure of neoliberal ideology and practice. But my claim is that vigilantism and lynching events actually buttress the state by aligning civil society and citizens along national objectives. The neoliberal privatization of the functions of the state has actually served to reduce the oppositional space between state and society. In theoretical terms, the passage is from Leviathan to Behemoth, an amorphous structure that engulfs state, economy and society.
Neoliberalism and the construction of the social body: The police organizations and their re-structuring in the West and Turkey in the post-1980 Period
BİRİZ BERKSOY
This paper aims to examine the re-structuring processes of the police organizations in the cradles of neoliberalism (the United States and Britain) and Turkey during the neoliberalization of the social formations in the 1980s and the common dynamics behind them. Police can be depicted as the visualized state power on the street having wide discretionary powers and a social role of acting upon the possibilities of actions of other people. In the post-1980 period, in which “neoliberal punitiveness” became normalized in the everyday life of the United States and Britain partially by the militarizing police organizations to regulate social insecurities and incapacitate challenges to the social order, in Turkey too, the police organization entered an expansion and militarization phase, within which the potential of violence solidified more frequently via the newly established para-military units. Moreover, these organizations also went through a process, in which they gradually internalized the all-encompassing market-rationality and started to engage in “proactive policing” for the minimization of social risks. It is argued in the paper that, in this period, neoliberal political projects, which are composed on similar axes and rendered hegemonic in these Western countries and Turkey, have contributed to the increased significance of the police organizations as important gateways of the state to re-construct the social body. The police incorporated the strategies of coercion as well as regulation/control/incapacitation. They have repressed and incapacitated “internal enemies”, which expanded to include the labor, ethnic/religious sects that pose a serious challenge to the political power and the “underclass” of the big cities. They also embarked to construct the citizens as prudent, responsible subjects who manage their own risk assessments and cooperate with the police like informants. By displaying these common dynamics surrounding these penal phenomena, it is demonstrated that the Western countries such as United States and Britain are far from being the reference points of “democracy”, that this period have been marked by the normalization of the violence-ridden “exceptional practices” of the mentioned states especially through their police and most importantly these techniques of power are partially the consequences of particular political projects which are rendered hegemonic at a certain period of history.
The reader’s newspaper/The newspaper’s reader: On the comment page of Hürriyet newspaper
FUNDA ŞENOL CANTEK
In recent years, the active participation of the reader to mass communication process in order to reach a multi-voiced and democratic structure is widely discussed. One of the means in activating participation is reader comments on the websites of newspapers. Reader comments enable questioning the policies of the newspapers and criticising the public agenda. However, the policy of the mainstream media about the reader comments is to benefit from them in the re-production of the mainstream discourse. Given that a reader comments on the news story about the event/person rather than the event/person itself, comments are shaped through the meaning framework of media professionals, which function as secondary determinants. On the other hand, the comments, which are contradictory with the broadcasting policy of media cannot pass the editorial control.
In this study, the comment page of Hürriyet newspaper is examined and it is determined that the comments on the page function as secondary, and even primary in some examples, determinants in the re-production of the mainstream media. The comments chosen to be published on the page, belong to the commentators, who stay within an ideological framework of nationalism, laicism, Kemalism, who externalise ethnic minorities and radical left, who see Turkey under the threat of conspiracy planned by west including the separatist groups within the country. The comments against the news preparation process of the newspaper, Turkish Army and Kemalism are controlled and even censored. Hence, although, the comment page of the newspaper enable the active participation of the reader but does not permit him/her to be critical.
Honor killing debate as a political issue: Who is civilized, who is barbaric?
PINAR ECEVİTOĞLU – AHMET MURAT AYTAÇ
Contemporary debates on honor killings have been focused on analyzing a background which is believed to be a result of a so-called primitive social life. Many authors tend to describe social mechanisms that are forcing individuals to behave in certain ways and provide a starting point for an inclusive social reform program based on findings of honor killing researches. This article, from a critical point of view, aims at disclosing the civilizationist and/or civilizing characteristic of the honor killing paradigm. We argue that these civilizationist approaches depoliticize the ways through which different cultural demands are expressed and become an axiological tag by which ethno-cultural hierarchy is accentuated. In contrast to the theses of civilizationist paradigm, the axis of duality cannot be drawn between progressive/regressive or liberal/repressive styles of life, but rather between two different modalities of how female and male sexuality is controlled. These modalities shape the actions of individual subjects through a long process of historical transformation. There is no doubt that at this point, family comes forth as the loci of the formation of regimes of desire and discipline. This paper aims to analyze the very logic of community which depends on eliminating those believed to have transgressed the constitutive law (nomos) without necessarily nominating the act of killing as a murder. Consequently, we argue that unless a politico-anthropological approach is adopted, the honor killing problem cannot be understood satisfactorily, and an emancipatory solution of the issue could be possible only by founding the analysis on a contextual point of view based on the world of meaning of the individuals involved.
Racism in the journal Türksolu (Turkish Left)
ŞENİZ SAÇ
It is not rare for a journal to become the spearhead of a popular political discourse and of the rising political mobility following it in Turkey. However, in its relatively limited lifetime so far, the journalTürksolu (literally meaning “the Turkish left”) has set a remarkable example of being one of the major periodicals to predict or, in a sense, to provoke an upsurge of nationalism, not only stemming from the inherent nationalist political structure, but also shaping a newer and more dangerous nationalist psyche. Although the incoherent and outright demagogic articles make it a somber task to grasp the ideological core of the journal, this type of rhetoric itself is combined with several connotations, and moreover certain open statements lead us to the conclusion that it is positioned as an instrument of fascistic and nationalistic propaganda as well as a fervent supporter of military intervention in politics.
Although Türksolu defines itself as an anti-imperialist, Kemalist and leftist periodical, in the article it is asserted that racism –a controversial topic questioned by some columnists with its mere existence in Turkey– is deeply rooted in the aforementioned political notions in Turkish politics and it is presently discussed in many of the articles published in the journal. Such reality, though strikingly unfamiliar to a foreign eye who would expect internationalism in a magazine with an apparent claim of being “leftist” in its name, is argued to be one of the founding elements of the “nationalist left” in Turkey.
Theses on the “National Truth”: Border crossings between history writing and historical fiction in Attilâ İlhan’s Gâzi Paşa
EROL KÖROĞLU
The aim of this essay is to read Attilâ İlhan’s novelGâzi Paşa, a historical novel about the Turkish Independence War, with a focus on the distinction between history writing and historical novel. I begin my analysis of this novel from the narratological perspective developed by Dorrit Cohn, who emphasizes two aspects of this distinction: different reference fields of history and fiction, and fiction’s distinctive ability in reaching into the minds of characters. These aspects will help me to unravel the production of meaning in Gâzi Paşa through its ambivalent and intentional border crossings between the two fields. Then, I will explain this intentional textual swing through an analysis of its roman à thèse features, which I ground on Susan Rubin Suleiman’s description of the genre. Finally, the essay will discuss Gâzi Paşa’s authorial intention that aims at instructing an audience through a narrative of charisma, founded on a specific representation of Mustafa Kemal for the purpose of propagating a black-and-white perception of history and politics.
A Daímon-less Land (Further Reflections on Modern University, Inc.)
HASAN ÜNAL NALBANTOĞLU
Written somewhat as a sequel to author’s former articles on the nature of ‘modern’ university as a corporation as well as the ethos of its intellectual labourers, this article deploys the ancient quasi-divine notion ofdaímon as a useful metaphor for a quality of soul getting increasingly rare within academe in order to further elucidate threats posed by today’s academic market and its most important agent, modern corporate university, to the essential artisanal nature of independent ‘scholarship.’ The argument unfolds via a detour through certain Platonic dialogues and selected Aristotelian texts where figura such as Thales and Socrates are among examples of inquiring souls endowed with an authentic curiosity and perplexity vis-à-vis ‘things, thanks to being possessed by supposedly a quasi-divine force known as daímon, sadly lacking among the overwhelming majority of todays academic work-force, anyway. And yet...
“Law” as a “play” in Turkish cinema
HİLMİ MAKTAV
Despite the major existence of legal cases in almost all melodramas of Turkish cinema, the legal approaches handled in the films have not been subject to a serious consideration. The reason for that is the lack of a realistic reflection of legal relations by the movie makers of especially the Yesilçam era and the setting of exaggerated scenes built upon emotional abuse. Just like other elements in these movies, the legal cases mentioned are handled in accordance with some formulas which go parallel with the sovereign ethical structures and ideologies. This formula applied in Yesilçam cinema consists of various components including traditions, customs, current law system to a certain extent, fear of censorship, melodramatic repetitions, the constant selection of easy way during the construction of a scene, the effects of Hollywood cinema and literary adoptions, commercial concerns and market conditions, and this may be qualified as “the law of melodrama.”
The law of melodrama is a law that is internalized by the public and represents the spirit of public though it does not correspond to anything as a whole in means of legal norms. It has been the transporter of conservative and unprogressive ideologies in cinema with its positivist understanding of law; what makes it impossible to see its importance is the exaggerated presentation of legal matters in the movies. Functioning as the essential component of melodramatic structure, law is reflected in movies just like a “play” as Huizinga introduced in his association of law and play. As the “play” state of law is underlined too much, these movies are qualified today as “childish”, “naïve” or “funny” due to their failure in being realistic. However as in Huizinga’s words, the term “play” embraces what is “real” as well, what stands behind all legal case scenes is the perception of law by Turkish public with its full reality. Furthermore, the mentality that carries law to the cinema with its archaic form of “play” also shows itself in serious films that are built upon a social thesis.
Considering Turkish cinema through inspiration from Huizinga’s term of “play” and association of law and play, we can see the “law of melodrama” with its authoritarian spirit and its mythical characters which reflect the spirit of public spirit and we can read the structure from a different point of view. We believe that such reading would open new channels of criticism not only for the melodramas of Turkish cinema but also for different types of current movies and even for television series/programs.
Social policy, employment and informal work: The case of liberal welfare state
SANİYE DEDEOĞLU
The aim of this article is to analyse the specific patterns of informal work in the United Kingdom. It will first chart the changing arrangements of work and welfare in Britain in the past two decades, which have helped construct what has been defined as a liberal welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1999). The main features, size and patterns of informal employment will be examined and explained in relation to the institutional, socio-economic, and cultural factors that help to shape them. The types of informal workers and users, their motivations for engaging in an informal working relationship and the conflicts that such work creates will be identified and analysed. Three main areas of informal work will be specifically explored in depth in accordance to these factors; informal employment, family based childcare and family based elderly care. In addition the role played by changing semi-formal forms of care provided through welfare state reforms will be considered.
In 1979, the Conservative Party was elected on a radical reform platform that had work, welfare and employment at its centre. The Conservatives saw employment practices as a crucial cause of a social and economic crisis gripping the UK. In 1997, the Labour Party was elected with a similarly reforming mandate that equally held reform of work and welfare to be crucial to its central policy agenda of social inclusion and regeneration. This account will examine how the last twenty-five years of government activation and welfare policies have impacted upon the forms and extent of informal work conducted at household, and community levels. In doing so it will take into account of how these policies have adapted and contributed to changes in the UK economy and demography of the workforce and wider society.
The moral status of the embryo in the context of human rights
AYKUT ÇOBAN
Recent scientific and technological developments in the area of genetics have caused a lot of controversy over the status of human embryos as to whether or not they can be regarded as moral agents. This paper contributes to the debate by taking a step forward and considers their moral status within the human rights context. It argues that the concept of human rights can be extended to the unborn. The paper exhibits the immanent inconsistencies and problems of the liberal conception of moral agent as an abstract and isolated human individual having certain properties such as rationality, autonomous will, self-sufficiency, a capacity to recognise moral requirements and to be held responsible for actions. A theoretical position against the views emphasising these properties is advanced through an inquiry into historical, genetic and sociological aspects of humanity as a species-being so as to provide a conceptual foundation for the status of embryos as members of the human species. The paper then moves to discuss the grounds for acknowledging human rights-holding status of embryos. The first line of this discussion focuses on the asymmetry between right and responsibility, the difference between uttered claim to right and enduring entitlement to right, and the meaning of morality leading us to consider moral duties towards embryos as objects of moral concern. The second line drawing upon the work of Orend (2002) on the conditions for being a human rights-holder seeks to show that these conditions are properly met in the case of the embryo. Related to this is the third line which investigates the problem of the relevance to the embryo case of the relationship between vital needs and human rights, by especially drawing attention to the issue of well-being. Along these lines, the paper suggests that there are convincing reasons to introduce the embryo as an equal rights-holder into the human rights system. It also indicates the significant implications of the embryo dispute for the concept of humanity and the content of the rights of the human being we know.
