“Legal exhaustion” and the crisis of human rights: Tracing legal mobilization against sexual violence and torture of Kurdish women in state custody in Turkey since the 1990s

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kurdish women reported sexual violence in state custody during intense conflicts between the Turkish military and the guerrilla organization PKK. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with lawyers and activists in Turkey, we trace the development of legal mobilization by human rights lawyers and activists who characterized state-led sexual violence in the Kurdish region as a war crime against women and brought cases before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Inspired by the work of Kerem Altıparmak, we develop the concept of “legal exhaustion” to characterize the emotional and relational aspects of legal mobilization in the context of war and counterterrorism politics. Bringing together scholarship in sociolegal studies and critical approaches to human rights, we argue that legal exhaustion is productive—not just an unproductive and constraining state—prompting human rights lawyers to sustain legal mobilization in/outside courts and critique national and international laws.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and the editors of this special issue, Heather Smith-Cannoy and Tricia Redeker Hepner, for their insightful and encouraging reviews. We would like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference titled, Human Rights on the Edge: The Future of International Human Rights Law & Practice, organized in 2021 by the ASU’s Global Human Rights Hub. The conference was funded by the National Science Foundation. Special thanks to our discussants, Malay Firoz and Genevieve Bates, for their valuable feedback. We are also grateful to Caroline McKusick and Imge Oranlı for commenting on drafts of this article. We would also like to thank John Hagan for supporting this project as faculty sponsor for the MacArthur Summer Research Grant that funded our fieldwork.

Notes

1 Chua (2019) argued that democratic states may have regions or territories of authoritarian rule. For this reason, she included early scholarship on legal mobilization during the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States in her review of legal mobilization in authoritarian regimes.

2 In order to protect the confidentiality of interviewees, we use pseudonyms throughout the article for participants, except for Eren Keskin, whose written permission was obtained. The research protocols were approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board.

3 For a detailed account, see Babül’s works (2017, 2020).

4 For the detailed accounts of other victims and lawyers, see Keskin and Yurtsever (2006).

5 In 2015 and later, human rights violations have surged in Turkey after the PKK-state peace process collapsed and the 2016 coup attempt, along with renewed wartime conditions in the Kurdish region and government authoritarianism (see Darıcı & Hakyemez, 2019; Göksel, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the MacArthur Summer Research Grant by Northwestern University Sociology Department.

Notes on contributors

Nisa Göksel

Nisa Göksel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University, with a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her areas of research are gender and sexuality; feminist and women’s movements in the Middle East; war, violence, and peace-making; human rights movements; and migration, displacement and diaspora studies.

Jaimie Morse

Jaimie Morse, Ph.D., MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of medicine, law, culture, and science and technology studies (STS). Broadly speaking, her work examines the politics of knowledge in biomedicine and global health, with a focus on the interplay between law, health, and human rights advocacy in processes of policy change.