International Relations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10679/714

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Browsing by Author "Arslanalp, M."

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    Mobile emergency rule in Turkey: legal repression of protests during authoritarian transformation
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-05-17) Arslanalp, M.; Erkmen, Tülay Deniz; International Relations; ERKMEN, Tülay Deniz
    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 potentially used to hollow out citizens' rights. But the study of emergency rule is often limited to its enactment under extraordinary situations. This article takes the crucial case of Turkey's authoritarian transformation and develops the concept of mobile emergency rule to argue that emergency-like suspensions of rights also occur in highly localized and temporary forms in the absence of an officially declared state of emergency. Based on an original dataset, it examines all legal bans on protests issued by authorities between 2007 and 2018 in the name of maintaining order and security. The results illustrate how the use of this tool dovetailed with key turning points of authoritarian transformation in Turkey and reflected the changing needs of the regime as it tried to build and sustain a new hegemonic project. In effect, mobile emergency rule created a highly ambiguous terrain for protest rights even before the declaration of state of emergency in July 2016.
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    Repression without exception: A study of protest bans during Turkey’s state of emergency (2016-2018)
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-01-02) Arslanalp, M.; Erkmen, Tülay Deniz; International Relations; ERKMEN, Tülay Deniz
    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.
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    Spatial reason of the state: the role of space in protest repression in Turkey
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023) Arslanalp, M.; Erkmen, Tülay Deniz; International Relations; ERKMEN, Tülay Deniz
    Between 2007 and 2019 the Turkish regime used protest bans extensively in order to impede collective mobilization. In this paper, drawing on Michel Foucault’s discussion of raisond’état and an original dataset of protest bans, we examine these legal practices as part of the state’s repertoire of protest repression. We point to two limits against the indefinite extension of state regulation that Foucault identifies: an external limit posed by public law and regime of rights, and an internal limit that questions the effectiveness of ‘too much’ government. We argue that authorities use spatial control as a technology to negotiate these two limits. Specifically, authorities deploy the state’s prerogative of regulating public space as a ‘politically neutral’ legal technology to reconcile the banning of protests with the external limit posed by freedom of assembly. Spatial control also works as an effective form of government to negotiate the internal limits of raisond’état. We use illustrative examples to unpack the mechanisms of how spatial technologies neutralize protests to bolster an authoritarian regime. The study contributes to empirical research on protest repression as well as theoretical discussions on the rationalities of government by expanding the geographical scope of existing research to an autocratizing context.