The Use of Blood Money in the Establishment of Non-Justice: Necrodomination and Resistance

Abstract

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.

Money As Justice: Work-Related Deaths, Victim Workers’ Families, and Injustice in Turkey

“…They occurred primarily in workplaces (construction sites, industrial workshops, mines) where a lack of investment in workers' safety (for example, long work hours, contract-based socially insecure employment, lack of safety devices on fall protection and machinery) was evident (see also Kulinski 2016;Saymaz 2016;Adalet Arayana Destek Grubu 2017;Makine Mühendisleri Odası 2018). Thus, employers' gross disregard, together with an apparent lack of due diligence on the part of the state, has led us to conclude, with other scholars (Mütevellitoğlu 2009;Özveri 2015;Buğra 2017;Adaman, Arsel, and Akbulut 2019;Özatalay, Nüfusçu and Zeren 2019), that the ever-present possibility of injury is prevalent in the contemporary Turkish labor regime.…”