CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Akin, Cihan Erdost |
|---|---|
| Title | Kill Once, Dead Twice: Dead Body Management and Power in Turkey's Counterinsurgency Against the PKK |
| Summary | This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between the state and the enemy Other’s dead bodies in the context of (counter)insurgency. Particularly, it investigates how the Turkish state manages the dead bodies of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) fighters, and traces the journey of the dead from killing to burial. While making sense of “dead body management”, it analyzes the power relations dead body management entails, and it theorizes about how power operates in the realm of the dead. Following the existing literature on power and the body, we can make sense of parts of dead body management through sovereign, bio-, necro-, and normative power. However, dead bodies slip from an analytical grip. No theory alone can explain the complex power relations dead body management entails. I argue that various forms of power interplay in dead body management. Although disentangling is not always possible, I propose using assemblages and machines as metaphors to make sense of this interplay. I demonstrate how necro/normative, necro/sovereign, and sovereign/normative power assemblages operate, and what their components and technologies are in three stages of dead body management in Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaigns: postmortem violence, pre-burial processes, such as transportation of dead bodies and forensic autopsies, and funerals. Dead body management does not only happen within the context of counterinsurgency; it is a part of counterinsurgency. It is a product and productive of the social order. I argue that dead body management performatively produces the state of exception, disciplines and subjugates the Kurdish population, (re)produces Kurdistan as an internal colony, where death lurks in the background and law is suspended, and discursively constructs the Self as biopower guided by care while violently managing populations. Security is an indispensable element of dead body management. First, it has an explanatory value; the ontological insecurities insurgents pose help us make sense of dead body management. Second, security discourses and practices bring a certain reality into life; the colonial administration of Kurdistan was made possible by the securitization of funerals. Third, dispositif de sécurité, built on the logic of risk, is insufficient to make sense of the case at hand as it fails to account for the colonial and colonizing violence. We can observe a particular logic of security that goes beyond the conventional understanding of eliminating a physical threat. As a technology of necro/normative power, this logic is an extreme form of elimination that not only kills but seeks to destroy any trace of the subject’s existence, as if they have never lived. In this regard, this dissertation contributes to Critical Security Studies by enriching our empirical and theoretical understandings of dead bodies as an oft-overlooked area and to the literature on power and the body. |
| Supervisor | Roe, Paul |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/akin_cihan-erdost.pdf |
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