Surviving ‘Emergency Politics’ in the Turkish Higher Education Battlescape

By: Lakshmi Bose

In late 2019, I sat with four young female student activists in the Feminist Club’s main room in Bogazici University discussing the precarious state of the young Leftist in contemporary Turkey. According to them, Bogazici was still a safe place – what Turam (2021) would refer to as an “island of freedom” in a wider sea of authoritarian and emergency politics (Honig, 2014). Yet despite this layer of protection afforded to students by Bogazici’s liberal orientation and history, they maintained that to be a politically active student was a risky and exhausting practice. Ceyda, a twenty-one-year-old literature student explained: 

In Turkey […] it’s always changing so quick that you can’t keep track of anything. One day somebody gets arrested and the other day, some environmental crisis goes on […] Another day something else happens and you should be sad about it, and you forget the other thing. […] there are lots of murders, there are lots of rapes, and sometimes it just like makes you … feel like an outsider to things like, there are SO many things happening at the same time and you just don’t know how to react after some point because you don’t want to get used to them, but YOU ARE getting used to them because the system makes you do that. So it’s hard to live in Turkey and try to stay political (in Bose, 2021: 121).

What Ceyda describes is a type of emergency politics, by which a series of “small emergencies” (Scheppele, 2005) cumulatively add up to a political culture of “permanent emergency” and constant crisis (Levinson, 2005) that become nearly impossible to combat. Particular to the realm of student activism, the constant encroachment of authoritarian controls, surveillance and security measures, and legislative attacks on civil freedoms within  HE spaces forced students into a defensive position. Most began to notice this shift in governance after the 2013 Gezi Park resistance, and more intensely after the 2016 State of Emergency which led to the codification of the ‘state of exception’ into law and the retention of presidential emergency powers (Gökarıksel and Türem, 2019; Shaheen, 2018). For example, following the State of Emergency, over 100,000 public officials were dismissed, 1,700 civic organisations shut down, 166 media outlets forcibly closed, and thousands of academics were placed under investigation (HRW, 2019; Morris, 2018, OHCHR, 2018). More recently, hundreds of academics have been put on trial or dismissed for signing the Peace Petition, a document that called for the regime to end the massacres of Kurdish peoples in the South-eastern region. Together, these shifts and illiberal precedents laid the groundwork for successive emergency measures and authoritarian attacks by diminishing civil and public spaces and eroding social structures as well as restricting the scope for permissible political expression.

Additionally, many students and academics highlighted smaller and less noticeable securitisation measures on campus that further enhanced the control and reach of the state. For example, a few years earlier, security turn stalls were installed at Bogazici’s campus. In Istanbul University, a room was allocated solely for police usage – essentially cementing state presence on campus. A young militant activist lamented that students used to protest police infiltration in HE spaces, but now “such reactions are […] like whispers” (in Bose, 2021: p.193). Students also joked about the ‘undercover’ police that frequented their classes and campuses – often giving them nicknames and mocking them on their Whatsapp group chats. Whilst this was discussed with levity, largely due to the perceived incompetence of the undercover police, these moments served as constant reminders of the reach and potentially violent nature of the state. Together, these ‘small emergencies’, understood as banal attacks on civil freedoms, become overwhelming and place the student activist in impossible and highly tenuous positions that they are forced to simultaneously fight too many battles and on too many fronts. Susan, A PhD student and activist in her late 20s, explained that the urgency of these persistent authoritarian attacks pushed much of their activism into singular defence campaigns, often at the expense of larger and more radical movements. In short, there were too many emergency decrees enacted by the regime, and not enough time or resources to address each of them in a way that targeted the broader and interconnected authoritarian structures.

Accordingly, student activists regularly admitted to feeling both emotionally and physically burnt out from the constellation of stresses associated with confronting an authoritarian culture of ‘permanent emergency’, encroaching surveillance, and the sheer amount of political work required to defend their diminishing freedoms. For example, two PhD students went to the courthouse between two and five times a week to document the trials of the Peace Signatories whilst managing their own full-time workloads. Others referred to the long-lasting traumatic effects of seeing their classmates and friends brutalised by the police during protests. An academic at Bogazici University reported that after a police attack on campus, “the face of those students, like messed up all in blood” haunted her, leaving her in tears for weeks following the attack, as if she was in shock. Ceyda explained that the worst part of the state crackdowns was the ‘ambiguity factor’ – the reality that they could never predict how harshly the state would respond, if it all, to their activism. Would a small protest be ignored, or would it result in detention, expulsion, or perhaps even structural shifts to the security infrastructure on campus?

Here, the HE campus becomes a ‘battlescape’ (Gregory, 2011) layered over the space of diminished politics, fought on the terrain of emergency and shock (Klein, 2007). The students are forced to operate under conditions of ‘biomilitarisation’ (Mohanty, 2011) and ‘bioderegulation’ (Brennan, 2003), which respectively highlight the consequences of undergoing sustained states of stress, fear, shock, and the disruption of the body’s normal rhythm due to precarity or excessive work, for example. The Turkish HE landscape, as a historic target of state infiltration and control, then becomes a site of systematically produced security biopolitics, enacted upon the bodies of those willing to risk political expression. 

Less than two years after my conversation with the four young student activists, Bogazici was transformed into a target of regime infiltration. In 2021, a regime-appointed rector was instated leading to widespread faculty and student resistance and violent police crackdown, placing the institution in another condition of emergency politics. Within the confines of the institution is the long tradition of democratic and agonistic cultures, that since the 1980s, had largely withstood the onslaught of wider authoritarian attacks in Turkey. Indeed, as Ceyda predicted, “[Bogazici], it’s a safe place, and we want to keep it safe, so we are working hard for it. […] Especially for women, for minorities, for political students. So I think its important to keep on doing it because we should always imagine that it can always get worse.” Whilst an accurate assessment of the future, this reflection of living within a culture of ‘permanent emergency’ is both real and highly disconcerting. In such conditions, political action is oriented towards the notion of self-protection whilst striving for radical hope in the face of never ending emergencies. 

How does this frame of emergency, shock, defense and protection – in short, a battlescape of and over HE and its public worth and value – shape the possibilities for student political action and expression? How are securitised biopolitics and notions of political risk and reward reflected in political expressions? How do emergency politics shift the meaning and value of HE as a ‘good’ across and within different institutions? How do historic HE political cultures and varying intensities of exposure to emergency politics shape the possibility of solidarity across HE institutions? Finally, how do emergency and shock politics shape HE inhabitants’ understanding of the value of popular power and political aspiration as it is lived out on the battle over HE and freedom?

References:

Bose, S. (2022). Call it a Revolution: Paradox, Politics and Security in the Urban Frontier An intergenerational narrative on the young female comrade’s resistance, political action and civil death in South Africa and Turkey [Thesis, University of Cambridge]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80270

Brennan, T. (2003). Globalization and its terrors: Daily life in the West. Psychology Press.

Gökarıksel, S., & Türem, Z. U. (2019). The Banality of Exception?: Law and Politics in “Post-Coup” Turkey. South Atlantic Quarterly, 118(1), 175–187. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-7281684

Gregory, D. (2011). The everywhere war. The Geographical Journal, 177(3), 238–250. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00426.x

HRW. (2019). Turkey Events of 2018 (World Report 2019). Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/turkey

Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Macmillan.

Levinson, S. (2005). Constitutional Norms in a State of Permanent Emergency. Sibley Lecture Series, 11. https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/lectures_pre_arch_lectures_sibley/11

Mohanty, C. (2011). Imperial Democracies, Militarised Zones, Feminist Engagements. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(13), 76–84.

Morris, C. (2018, June 18). Reality Check: The numbers behind the crackdown in Turkey. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44519112

OHCHR. (2018). Report on the impact of the state of emergency on human rights in Turkey, including an update on the South-East January-December 2017. Office of the High Commission of Human Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/TR/2018-03-19_Second_OHCHR_Turkey_Report.pdf

Scheppele, K. L. (2005). Small Emergencies Symposium: Emergency Powers and the Constitution: Comment. Georgia Law Review, 40(3), 835–862.

Shaheen, K. (2018, July 19). ‘Suffocating climate of fear’ in Turkey despite end of state of emergency. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/turkeys-state-of-emergency-ends-but-crackdown-continues

Turam, B. (2021). Turkey’s Final Exam on Freedom: Boğaziçi University Fights the Authoritarian Regime. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 88(2), 587–618.

Bacevic, J. (2021). No such thing as sociological excuses? Performativity, rationality and social scientific expertise in late liberalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 24(3), 394–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310211018939

Bose, S. (2022). Call it a Revolution: Paradox, Politics and Security in the Urban Frontier An intergenerational narrative on the young female comrade’s resistance, political action and civil death in South Africa and Turkey [Thesis, University of Cambridge]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80270

Çapan, Z. G., & Zarakol, A. (2017). Postcolonial colonialism? The case of Turkey. Against International Relations Norms. London; New York: Routledge, 193–210.

Curriculum Change Working Group. (2018). Curriculum Change Framework. University of Cape Town.

Cini, L. (2019). Disrupting the neoliberal university in South Africa: The #FeesMustFall movement in 2015. Current Sociology, 67(7), 942–959. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119865766

Heever, G. van den. (2016). Naming the Moment: #ScienceMustFall, Power-Discourse-Knowledge, and Thinking Religion as Social Definition. Religion and Theology, 23(3–4), 237–273. https://doi.org/10.1163/15743012-02303009

Henderson, R. (2016). UCT student upsets Newton’s apple cart with her demand that #ScienceMustFall. TimesLIVE. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2016-10-14-uct-student-upsets-newtons-apple-cart-with-her-demand-that-sciencemustfall/

Hull, G. (2018). Comments on Curriculum Change Working Group Framework document. http://www.news.uct.ac.za/downloads/reports/ccwg/2018-12-11_CCF_Comment_GeorgeHull.pdf

Kamga, E. K. (2019). The #FeesMustFall protest: When the camp(u)s becomes the matrix of a state of emergency. Acta Academica, 51(1), 89–109. https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa51i1.5

Kessi, S., Marks, Z., & Ramugondo, E. (2020). Decolonizing African Studies. Critical African Studies, 12(3), 271–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2020.1813413

Naidoo, L.-A. (2016). Contemporary student politics in South Africa: The rise of the black-led student movements of# RhodesMustFall and# FeesMustFall in 2015. Students Must Rise, Youth Struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto, 76, 180–190.

Walker, S. (2020, June 15). COVID-19 and the stubbornness of ‘race’. Centre for Education and International Development (CEID), IOE. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ceid/2020/06/15/walker/