Repression without Exception: A Study of Protest Bans during Turkey’s State of Emergency (2016-2018)

ABSTRACT

Following the coup attempt of 15 July 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that would last for two years. In this paper, we focus on an understudied aspect of this period, protest repression during the state of emergency, using an original dataset of protest bans issued in 2007–2019. Engaging with the theoretical claims of emergency scholarship, our paper demonstrates that emergency powers were used to target areas, groups, and issues that were not related to the ‘urgency’ underpinning emergency rule. Moreover, such derogations of rights were perpetuated after the termination of the state of emergency within so-called ordinary legality. These practices were nevertheless embedded in the already authoritarian political-institutional context of Turkey and its layered history of emergencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Political protests
• protest repression
• emergency rule
• competitive authoritarianism
• autocratisation
• democratic backsliding
• democratic rights

Acknowledgments

This article was supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 13661, Özyeğin University, and an IPC-Mercator Fellowship in Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. We would especially like to thank the two anonymous reviewers; the Editors of South European Society and Politics; Senem Aslan and the participants in the panel ‘Turkey’s Authoritarian Shift: Causes and Consequences’ at the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) Annual World Convention (05/2019) for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research would not have been possible without the assistance provided by Elif Ünal, Eda Canımana, Elif Buse Doyuran, Melis İnce, Ural Berk Karaoğlanoğlu, Seren Selvin Korkmaz, Özlem Tunçel, and Ulaş Erdoğdu. We are grateful for their work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The Gülen movement refers to an extensive religious community, also referred to as Hizmet, organised under the leadership of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric who has been living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Focusing on the Islamisation of society, the movement established a network of private educational institutions, commercial enterprises, media corporations, and charity organisations, inside and outside Turkey, and began to infiltrate the state bureaucracy from the 1980s onwards. Gülenist clout within the police, judiciary, and military expanded dramatically under AKP governments, which considered them allies in their struggle against Kemalist cadres. Using their state, media, and financial power, Gülenists were complicit in many of the developments that constituted Turkey’s recent autocratisation. For a comprehensive discussion of the history, ideology, and actions of this multifaceted movement see Seufert (2014). Also see Çakır and Sakallı (2014) on the Gülen-AKP conflict.

2. See for example the cases against journalists from the secular mainstream opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, the case against Academics for Peace, and the detention and imprisonment of Osman Kavala and executive board members of the Anadolu Kültür Association. Moreover, the alleged links to the Gülenist organisation were not individually and explicitly demonstrated and in the case of purges ordered by emergency decrees, there was no legal recourse to challenge or seek redress against these dismissals until a State of Emergency Proceedings Investigation Commission was created in January 2017.

3. Curfews imposed on cities as well as rural areas in the region lasted from a few hours to a couple of weeks. They were sometimes declared with no endpoint in sight, or renewed multiple times, thus resulting in cases where entire towns remained under curfew for extended periods, such as the cases of Sur (93 days), Cizre (79 days), İdil (44 days), and Silopi (37 days). See the TİHV (2018) brief on curfews. As mentioned above, gross violations of human rights, including civilian deaths, have been reported from the region during this period (OHCHR, 2017).

4. This expectation is based on our observations on the ground, but also on prior studies. Using police archives, Uysal (2016, pp. 50–55) reports that during the 1990s, there were almost no protest events in Kurdish Southeast Turkey under the state of emergency in the region. Once the state of emergency was lifted, many regional cities, such as Diyarbakır and Mardin, became host to the highest number of protests in Turkey, revealing emergency rule’s dampening effect on protests. We expect a similar effect of the state of emergency on the total number of protests in other regions of the country as well, even though this effect is probably more pronounced in Kurdish cities where historically more violent methods of repression have been used.

5. See for example the cases of Gülmen, Özakça, and Saçılık: https://www.ihd.org.tr/?p=7419.

6. The State of Emergency Law unequivocally endows governors with the power to require permits, to ban, defer, monitor, and disperse protests, and to enforce curfews and mobility restrictions if they are deemed necessary for public order and security.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mert Arslanalp

Mert Arslanalp is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research interests include comparative urban politics, contentious and legal politics, and democratisation with a regional focus on Latin America and the Middle East. Mert has conducted research on the politics of urban citizenship in Turkey, Argentina, and Mexico. His recent publications include ‘Mobilization in Military-Controlled Transitions: Lessons from Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt’ (with Wendy Pearlman) Comparative Sociology (2017) and ‘Coalitional Politics of Housing Policy in AKP’s Turkey’, POMEPS Studies 31 (2018).

T. Deniz Erkmen

T. Deniz Erkmen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boise State University. Her teaching and research fields are comparative politics and political sociology, transnationalism, new middle classes, and authoritarian consolidation. She has ongoing research projects on neoliberal subjectivities among new middle classes in Istanbul as well as protest repression in contemporary Turkey. She has published in Current Sociology, and in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.