The Absent Present Law: An Ethnographic Study of Legal Violence in Turkey

This article, which draws on the case of 10 young socialists from the urban margins of Istanbul, who were arrested as the result of an anti-terror operation in 2007, provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of Turkey’s anti-terror law by examining the threat it poses for the population. Contrary to widespread complaints about a supposed state of lawlessness in Turkey, the article suggests that law, indeed, exists as an overwhelming and ever-present force in the lives of country’s alleged internal enemies (i.e. Kurds, socialists, Alevis, non-Muslims), hanging over their lives like the sword of Damocles. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s debate on the similarities between law and myth, the article demonstrates that the ambiguity, illegibility and unpredictability of Turkey’s anti-terror law bestows upon the law a mythical and/or sovereign force that controls one’s present and future, and hence one’s fate. The article also argues that the anti-terror operations that started to take place in the urban margins against Kurdish activists and socialist Alevi youth as early as 2007 were harbingers of a growing lawfare in Turkey, which gradually shifted to the center over the course of years.