ABSTRACT
Would it be too dramatic to say that Turkey is turning into a necropolis, a state of the dead, for the Kurdish, the Alevi, 1 workers, leftists, the LGBTI community, students, women, and children? Hundreds of occupational deaths of workers, murders of women and trans people, suicide bombings, and the curfews and special force operations in the Kurdish cities and towns in southeast Turkey exemplify how the state jeopardizes and exterminates the lives of its citizens. Through territorialized violence, the prevalent necropolitics renders these appalling deaths acceptable, ordinary, and in certain cases even enjoyable for the “common citizens.” This morbid production of and regulation over death strikingly reveals the necropolitical character of state power. The spectacular dimensions of this power to kill and reign over the protocols of burial attest to the systematic elision of the possibilities of collective life and democratic politics in Turkey.
