Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey

Abstract

The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond the framework of collective obligation and responsibility. This essay examines comments delivered by a pro‐Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers‐of‐the‐disappeared group during Turkey's Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those demonstrations. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late occurrence in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation. The essay asks how these invocations of history enabled interventions into imagined futures. The commentaries were not primarily aimed at repudiating the historical judgment of minority as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of state violence, and to view it as prefiguring a political community to come.

Ethnographic views of Brazil’s (new) authoritarian turn

“…Under his government, the president explicitly declared, "minorities would bend to the majority." These movements are analogous to those observed by Kristóf Szombati (2018) in relation to populations classified as gypsies in Hungary or studied by Kabir Tambar (2016) in relation to the Kurds in Turkey: historically excluded minorities who, taking as a reference point the construction of democratic institutions, demanded and eventually won rights. They also directly echo the discourses of an anticonstitutionalist party like Vox in Spain and its incessant attacks on feminism and the institutional and legal apparatus created to confront the structural violence of gender.…”

The Great Homeland: Nationalist discourse and disappointment among the ‘grandchildren of the Ottomans’

“…How and why is it that, for many (though certainly not all) Ahıska, Turkey has come to be considered not simply the homeland, but the Büyük Vatan , the Great Homeland? Like Kabir Tambar, I am interested here in the ways that ‘appeals to history act as interventions into imagined futures’ (Tambar, 2016: 31). For Ahıska, historical claims to the Great Homeland sidestep or bluntly reject any inconsistencies or gaps within the historical record.…”

Making and breaking alliances: on valuation in hegemonic projects

“…The Kemalist state, despite its secularism, had in fact long promoted a version of national identity that was built on ethnic Turkishness and (Sunni) Islam, with minorities and other groups that did not conform to this synthesis being denied full belonging and entitlement in the state (Tambar 2016;Ince 2012). Much of this hinged on particular aspirations of modernity (Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997), including both assimilationist and exclusionary logics of modern nation-building.…”