Spatial reason of the state: the role of space in protest repression in Turkey

Abstract

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.