Introduction The Burdur Lake basin in Turkey's Mediterranean region (see figure 1), despite its Ramsar status as a major wintering site for the endangered white-headed duck (Oxyura leucocephala), has been facing severe environmental damage in the form of increased pollution and a decrease in water volume. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands is an intergovernmental treaty signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. Its purpose is to achieve the conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local, regional, and national actions, and international cooperation. However, as the convention is not a regulatory regime and has no punitive sanctions for violations of, or defaulting upon, treaty commitments, it comes as no surprise that some Ramsar sites have suffered conservation failures. (1) The basin is one of these. Since being granted Ramsar status it has been subject to a`hard-park' conservation policy, which has not, in fact, been fully and effectively implemented and thus has not been conducive to effective conservation. Nevertheless, this partial practice has caused local people's disenfranchisement and alienation. It has not been possible to realise win^win opportunities (eg sustainable tourism) at the local level either.
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.
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