During the past two decades, scholars have noted a global expansion of judicial power and court‐led rights revolutions. Far from leading a rights‐revolution, the Constitutional Court of Turkey became renowned for its restrictive take on civil liberties during this period. Why are some high courts more activist than others in protecting and expanding civil rights and liberties? I argue that judicial power and judicial independence offer incomplete explanations of judicial activism on questions of rights. Even powerful courts are activist only selectively, using their clout to protect some groups while suppressing the demands of others. Building on perspectives on legal mobilization and judicial entrenchment, I argue that the sociopolitical alliances in which high courts and judiciaries participate explain the selective nature of their activism. The initial parameters of these alliances are set during critical junctures when formerly dominant coalitions are displaced and new institutions entrench new alliances. Such alliances are not static, however, and struggles within alliances can transform high courts' orientations on rights questions.
Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.
During the 1990s, thousands of Kurdish settlements in Eastern Turkey were forcibly evacuated, resulting in the displacement of more than one million Kurdish villagers. This article examines why some villages survived while the populations of others were forcibly displaced. It also addresses the broader question of why particular groups of civilians become more vulnerable to coercion in the course of armed conflict, and how their vulnerability is shaped by the extent and quality of information that states possess about population groups, particularly minorities deemed dangerous to the regime. The author argues that state practices to categorize the identity of minority groups and to collect information about their behavior and allegiances are integral to the dynamics of violence. Such practices make certain categories of citizens more vulnerable to victimization and often introduce biases into the information gathered. Focusing on Turkey's population census, elections, and the use of informants embedded in communities, the author examines information-gathering practices from the national to the local level. The author uses original data on displacement, Kurdish insurgent violence, and election results, as well as interviews with displaced persons and progovernment militia members, tochallenge the view that civilian victimization in counterinsurgency wars stems primarily from states' inability to distinguish civilians from insurgents.
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