Political Theology and Sovereignty

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to…

Since the late 1970s, the focus on the “urban question” has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to “postpolitical” risk management. In this context, the city is increasingly transformed into a “network city”: fragmented space held togeth…

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rat…

This article focuses on party tourism as a kind of hedonism enjoyed on a massive scale in which the citizen is transformed into a ‘party animal’, a reduction which is experienced as a liberation from the daily routine of the ‘city’ or civilization, and in which the pursuit of unlimited enjoyment creates an exceptional…

This article aims to understand the ‘non-Western self’ and the different ways its ontological insecurity can manifest, through the example of Turkey, by contrasting Kemalism’s modernizing vision with Erdoğan’s current populism. We argue that the constructions of political narratives in Turkey (and by implication in ot…

• AYŞE ZARAKOL JAJICH

One of the challenges of autocratizing governments in regimes with nominally democratic institutions is how to repress fundamental democratic rights while claiming to uphold the rule of law. Post-9/11 socio-legal debates point to the emergency rule as a legal framework within democratic constitutions that can be poten…

• MERT ARSLANALP

Abstract In June 2013, Istanbul and many cities across Turkey became stages of massive demonstrations and occupations, which were sparked by a conflict over Gezi Park in central Istanbul. For many, the ‘park issue' was simply the last straw, and it led to unprecedented revolt, reflecting a huge number of grievances ag…

• SİNAN ERENSÜ

Abstract Twenty-first century Turkey has been shaped by two conflicting trends: all-encompassing reform in almost all aspects of law that were transformative if not altogether progressive, and an increasing erosion of the rule of law, which finally culminated in a nation-wide emergency regime and the April 2017 consti…

• SİNAN ERENSÜ

Summer 2013 was a historic period in regards to political activism in Turkey. Commonly referred to as ‘the Gezi Resistance’, the grass-roots mobilisation caught the rather self-assured AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) government off guard as hundreds of thousands rushed to the streets, squares and parks to reclaim tho…

• İREM İNCEOĞLU

To be sure, the techniques of total exclusion from human togetherness were first developed in the colonies. However, once invented and perfected, they did not cease to come back to Europe; indeed, what the European Christian bourgeois could not truly forgive and forget regarding Hitler was “not the crime of genocide,…

Bu çalışmada, trans-hümanizm hareketi temelinde ortaya çıkan ölümsüzlük, yapay zekâ bağlamında yeni bir varoluş aşamasına giren insanın durumu incelenip, gelecekte yeni insan varoluşunu nelerin beklediği, devlet yapısı ve siyasetin bu insan varoluşunu nasıl kullanacağı hümanizm, trans-hümanizm ve post human insan sonr…

This article attempts to provide a correction to the exclusive realist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes. It makes the point that Hobbes is not as close to a realist understanding of international relations as has been prevalently held. Given Hobbes's conception of man and the state of nature, the formation of Leviatha…