Activating Ertuğrul

In the referendum ad, Ertuğrul is not one of the primary characters. He is referenced textually, appearing amidst a list of the great leaders of the past, and inferentially, through the inclusion of the unmistakable early audio cue. By comparison, the various evocations of his son, Osman Gazi, the eponymous founder of the Ottoman dynasty, suggest a far higher level of historical importance. (Osman is quoted, represented twice visually with the image of a statue, and included in the list of heroes towards the end of the ad.) Though Ertuğrul receives neither image nor quote, his inclusion here is powerful and perhaps even necessary, because the government had put forth great effort to create and then capitalize on the character and the greater world in which he moves.

I have elsewhere discussed the considerable lengths to which Turkish government broadcaster TRT and others went to produce Ottoman costume dramas following the success of and controversy surrounding private serial Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl, 2011–14), which then Prime Minister, now President, Erdoğan, detested.Footnote ³ The ill-fated Rebellion (Kıyam) project provides the best example, as it underwent three reboots between 2012 and 2013, after an abortive premier set for 2011, and still never managed to attract an audience. I attribute this failure in part to the difficulties of presenting a version of the past that accords with what Svetlana Boym terms “restorative nostalgia” over the extended playtime of a Turkish serial.Footnote ⁴ In particular, I think it is difficult to create long-term interest in characters who are deemed sacred by many in society without breaking taboos around their human traits such as romantic interests or moral quandaries. Century broke these taboos; Resurrection managed to walk the tightrope by focalizing a lesser known figure and era, leaving a relatively blank slate upon which to create an exciting and relatable character that still channels a restorative version of the past.Footnote ⁵ This freedom was coupled with marked improvements in creative team, cast, and crew to make Resurrection a notably stronger all-around production than previous efforts. Such investment lead the serial to a solid premiere season in 2014–15, and to runaway success in subsequent seasons, where it topped ratings, regularly earning a market share of over 30 percent, and even breaking a record with a 40 percent share in 2017.Footnote ⁶

This investment is not merely financial, nor is the effort to promote and exploit Resurrection limited to the realm of popular culture. Indeed, evoking Resurrection for political purposes began soon after the series premiered. In January 2015, for example, when President Erdoğan greeted Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev outside the newly constructed presidential palace in Ankara, the president's band played the Resurrection theme song, which was thence dubbed “Resurrection March” (Diriliş Marşi).Footnote ⁷ Also present at this greeting were costumed soldiers representing the so-called “sixteen Turkish states” that are conceived of by some as a Turkic lineage running from the third century BCE through to the present Turkish Republic.Footnote ⁸ The upbeat theme has since become ubiquitous at both government- and AKP-sponsored events, where it is used repeatedly alongside folk singer and AKP politician Uğur Işılak's Erdoğan-praising anthem “Dombra” to rally crowds.

But music is far from the only use of Resurrection at government-sponsored events. On 29 May 2016, for example, Turkey celebrated the 563rd anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul with a ceremony attended by President Erdoğan. The theme for the event “Resurrection Again, Rising Again” (Yeniden Diriliş, Yeniden Yükseliş) evoked the serial's name, and two of the special guests were actors from the show. Cengiz Coşkun and Nurettin Sönmez took the stage in full costume to reprise their roles as Turgut Alp and Bamsı Beyrek, respectively, two of Ertuğrul's closest confidants in the serial storyline.Footnote ⁹ The anachronism of thirteenth-century characters on parade at the celebration of a fifteenth-century conquest may be striking from a historical perspective, but it is entirely in keeping with a restorative nostalgic outlook that partakes of what Edward Said has identified as one of the preeminent tropes of orientalism: the notion of the timeless East.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, the message Coşkun and Sönmez delivered was, much like the political ad which opened the essay, one of continued Turkish dominance from the ancient past to the present.

These examples provide some taste of how Resurrection is used by the government for purposes well beyond the realm of entertainment. How can one best characterize this would-be repurposing of popular culture? And, given the close proximity of the serial's creation and its exploitation for politics, is this even a case of repurposing or, rather, one of politics on the sly?

I am not here addressing the kind of political message contained within the text. Like most popular serials in Turkey (and, indeed, probably to a far greater extent than many), Resurrection is rife with political commentary on contemporary Turkey. For example, much of season two (episodes 27–61), which aired from September 2015 to June 2016, deals with the theme of brother being turned against brother in the Kayı Obasi (nomadic camp) due to the meddling of outside forces. This includes betrayal of Ertuğrul and his family by those assumed to be friends, as well as trials based on falsified evidence. These plot twists and the numerous didactic speeches on the importance of brotherhood and the danger of outside interference delivered by Ertuğrul and his mother, Hayme Hatun, can be read as commentary on the contemporary breakdown in order brought about by fallout between the Gülen Movement and Erdoğan's AKP. Such messages are certainly worthy of their own critique, but they fall outside the scope of my present interest. I am, instead, intent on the extra-textual ways that Resurrection is brought forth to engage the public, because I believe they may shift the affective relationship people have with a text to other purposes.

Guy Debord's notion of the society of the spectacle approaches my field of interest in a broad sense.Footnote ¹¹ For Debord, various aspects of our everyday lives are increasingly overtaken by spectacles, leading to questions about the nature of reality and political theater. While Debord's spectacle was preoccupied with “eradicat[ing] historical knowledge in general,”Footnote ¹² we might, with reference to Andreas Huyssen'sFootnote ¹³ notion of a rising “culture of memory” based on media representations of the past, consider the ways in which history is subsumed rather than eradicated by the spectacle. Following Debord, Jonathan Crary has traced the historical rise of the spectacle to the dawn of television and of sound film, highlighting the role of media in this social shift.Footnote ¹⁴ Crary also provides an important corrective to Michel Foucault, who famously claimed that, “our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Crary notes:

The present ubiquity of screens that look back at us notwithstanding, there are various ways in which media spectacles serve disciplinary roles. One such role is what I call prescriptive activation. I derive this concept from Tony Bennett's notion of the productive activation of a text.Footnote ¹⁷ Bennett offers this understanding of the many ways readers might approach texts as an alternative to the notion of interpretation, which he sees as tied to the academic tradition and to academic textual scholarship. For Bennett, productive activation takes place in an overtly intertextual world and, thus, the way people approach and understand texts will vary according to myriad factors including social and educational status as well as the political environment of the moment. Texts may thus be activated in a multitude of ways, and we may be able to triangulate these activations by looking beyond the text to a range of factors. The kinds of questions posed in such analysis include: What is a reader/viewer's social class, gender, educational level? What celebrities and leaders are popular at the time of the reader's activation of the text? How do others interact with the text and how widespread is knowledge of this broader interaction? While Bennett's productive activation is particularly useful in ethnographic work with viewers, I use it here at a tangent. Rather than looking at productive activation, I focus on the government's purposeful use of the text and offer the concept of prescriptive activation. Prescriptive activation is the extra-textual attempt by a producer to activate the text among its public in particular ways.Footnote ¹⁸

Events at the rallies mentioned above are useful to provide some clarification. When the Turkish government sponsors a rally that includes the Resurrection theme song and actors who make clear reference to their roles in the show, this is a prescriptive activation because the government is guiding members of the public towards an understanding of the text and its greater social significance. When fans at these rallies bring and wave cerulean blue flags bearing the “IYI” symbol ascribed to the Kayı tribe in the text,Footnote ¹⁹ as countless members of the crowd tend to do, this is in line with Bennett's productive activation, because the agency rests with the viewer/participant. Both of these activities can be said to blur some of the lines between entertainment, history, and politics, partaking in the society of the spectacle described by Debord. Likewise, they both contribute to what Raymond Williams has described as a structure of feeling, a “social [experience] in solution.”Footnote ²⁰ Both also take place in an overdetermined, intertextual world where popular and political discourses crosscut and influence one another. For this reason, neither approach can hope to pin down meaning definitively; they can, at best, guide it. The question, particularly in the case of prescriptive activation, is what direction does this guidance take? What is the government doing by foisting this show into the public well beyond the purview of its primetime TV slot?

Erecting Necropolitics

The title of the series is an indicator: Resurrection.Footnote ²¹ Before tackling the broader significance of this title for my argument, it is worth noting a paired set of meanings that are clear to those viewing the serial in Turkey. First, the title is a reference to the story arc of the central character. Though relatively little is known about the historical Ertuğrul, the serial's plot includes the near complete destruction of the Kayı tribe by Mongols, and Ertuğrul's subsequent rise to leadership. This is just one of numerous “resurrections” that Ertuğrul and his people go through over the course of the serial. In a similar vein, the slogan from the 29 May celebrations cited above, “Resurrection Again, Rising Again” (Yeniden Diriliş, Yeniden Yükseliş), as well as the actors that accompanied it, suggest that the show somehow parallels the rise to power of the AKP and Erdoğan. The resurrection here is thus intertwined with contemporary politics: specifically, the idea that the AKP represents the resurrection of Turkish greatness; that Erdoğan is Ertuğrul.Footnote ²²

Calling attention to such a discourse about the party is far from original. Indeed, in January 2015, AKP MP Tülay Babuşçu declared via Twitter that the 90-year “commercial break” (the Republic) in the 600-year-old empire had ended,Footnote ²³ her word choice likening history to a TV show. The referendum ad with which this paper began attests a similar message. It includes only two leaders from the Republican era—Atatürk and Erdoğan—and the former is arguably given short shrift, featured alongside a quote that negates his own role in the history of the nation only to have his face superimposed by a far lengthier quote from Erdoğan. Erdoğan himself has long been championed with reference to the Ottoman past, most notably when his 1994 victory in Istanbul's mayoral elections was heralded as a “second conquest” of the city. Indeed, the notion of a return to Ottoman (read in the broadest of terms as pre-Republican Turkish) greatness is so closely identified with the AKP in Turkey, and the government investment in the serial at all levels is so clear, that we might reverse the notion of history repeating itself and speak, in the case of Resurrection, of a text where history is made to echo the present. That is, to adjust the statement from before: Ertuğrul is Erdoğan.

While it is helpful to recognize these intertwined meanings of “resurrection” in the serial title, the broader question remains: why is resurrection the key process at work? Both the serial and the government stand resolute in their use of this terminology, ignoring alternative phrases with similar meaning such as “rebirth” (yeniden doğuş).Footnote ²⁴ I believe that the frequent and public use of both the term (“resurrection”) and the serial (Resurrection) by the AKP regime is symptomatic of a broader necropolitics in Turkey: a fascination with and championing of death on behalf of the nation that has stark implications for everyday life, politics, and even the nature of democracy practiced there.Footnote ²⁵ In his pioneering theorization of necropolitics, Achille Mbembé draws on Foucault's biopower to offer an understanding of politics, sovereignty, and subjectivity that differs markedly from the reason-based model of modernity, looking instead to the poles of life and death, and who wields the power to determine them, for its key principles.Footnote ²⁶ As he puts it:

For Mbembé, slavery and colonialism are key instances of historical necropolitics, while the occupation of Palestine, characterized by territorial fragmentation and siege (infrastructural) warfare, is the preeminent contemporary example.

Mbembé is concerned with a literal politics of physical death, and this is a point that I will return to in the final section, but my interest at the moment is a representational politics of death. A normalization, spectacularization, and even celebration of death in everyday life, chiefly by means of media. These ultimately serve to foster what Williams calls a structure of feeling, a kind of emergent “culture of a period.”Footnote ²⁸ Though I am interested here in a structure of feeling specific to Turkey and its politics, it is worth noting that some work has been done with more general reference to representational necropolitics. Rosi Braidotti,Footnote ²⁹ for instance, remarks on the role of media in fostering a familiarity with and sensationalization of death, killing, and corpses. And on a somewhat different note, Mike Dillon explores how Mbembé’s necropolitics shed light on the figure of a suicide bomber in Santosh Sivan's film, The Terrorist (1999).Footnote ³⁰ I argue below for the particular case of necropolitics in media from Turkey, emphasizing the role of Resurrection with two examples.

Tomb Raiders

In late February 2015, just over two months after Resurrection premiered, Turkish troops crossed the border into Syria in an overnight operation to recover personnel and artifacts from the tomb of Süleyman Şah. One soldier was killed in the operation. Süleyman is Ertuğrul's father in the serial, and perhaps also historically, though this is less clear. In the TRT version of history, he is the chief patriarch of the Kayı tribe, a key figure of reverence and, though he dies towards the end of season one, he continues to visit characters in memories and visions in subsequent seasons.

The raid on the tomb was highly controversial, and deeply imbricated with the Turkish election season of the time, but it was also the culmination of a unique set of geopolitical circumstances. The grave belonging to a Süleyman Şah, who had died in 1236 near or in the Euphrates, had been recognized as the resting place of one of Osman's ancestors since the fifteenth century.Footnote ³¹ This tomb was rebuilt and aggrandized by Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1886. In the aftermath of World War I, a nascent Turkey fought for territory ceded by the Ottoman government in the Treaty of Sevres, including a struggle with the French over Syria. This war ended in 1921, when the Grand National Assembly of Angora (Ankara), a predecessor to the Turkish Republic, reached accords with France. Article 9 of the resultant “Franco-Turkish Agreement” established that:

The status quo established by this agreement remained even after Syria gained independence in 1946, though not without protest from the Syrian government.

With the onset of the civil war in Syria, the tomb became a source of increasing concern for and rhetoric by the Turkish government. In 2012, for instance, then Prime Minister Erdoğan warned that any attack on the tomb would be considered an attack on Turkish territory.Footnote ³³ With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), these concerns both grew, and presented political opportunities for the AKP. One modus operandi quickly established by the IS was the destruction of historical tombs, which the group deems potentially idolatrous due to the pilgrimages and other practices often associated with them.

When the IS threatened to attack the Süleyman Şah tomb in mid March 2014, there is some evidence that the Turkish government sought to seize on the opportunity for political theater. In late March, audio recordings of a purported meeting between Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and the heads of the military and intelligence were leaked to YouTube.Footnote ³⁴ The recordings and accompanying transcript suggest that the participants considered a false flag operation involving attacks on the tomb and/or Turkey. Such an operation never took place, perhaps because the recordings were leaked just over a week after the purported meeting, but Turkey did engage in another form of theater, shooting down a Syrian jet in this same period.

The latter action was announced by Prime Minister Erdoğan at an election rally, and both the false flag meeting and its leak must be read in light of the complicated political maneuvers that were ongoing at the time. Municipal elections were a normally sedate affair in which citizens choose mayors and other local officers. However, the 2014 elections had been weighted with significance due to a corruption investigation that began in December 2013. The investigation, which implicated various AKP leaders (including Erdoğan), in a variety of unethical practices, had been largely thwarted on the legal front by the government's crackdown on the so-called “parallel state” deemed responsible for it. The “parallel state” is a euphemism for the Gülen Movement, a purportedly faith-based organization with roots permeating the social, economic, and political sectors in Turkey.Footnote ³⁵ Though Erdoğan and Gülen had been allies throughout the rise of the AKP, the ties strained and ultimately frayed in 2013, making them bitter rivals for power. And while the legal front of the investigation crumbled with the mass dismissal of police officers and prosecutors deemed pro-Gülen, the struggle for social and political supremacy continued, as the Gülen Movement used its considerable media empire and its apparent wealth of secret recordings to tarnish the reputation of the AKP. Against this backdrop, the 30 March elections were seen as both a referendum on AKP rule and a precursor to the August presidential elections, in which Erdoğan would vie to become the country's first president chosen by popular vote.Footnote ³⁶

While Süleyman Şah's tomb was only a footnote to the 2014 municipal ballot, it was front and center a year later, as the AKP faced its most serious political challenge to date in the June 2015 parliamentary vote. On the night of 21 February close to 600 Turkish troops entered Syria through the Kurdish-held town of Kobane with tanks and other armored vehicles. They evacuated the Süleyman Şah enclave, which housed thirty-eight Turkish soldiers, took all articles of historical interest, and destroyed the remainder of the site to prevent its use by the IS. One soldier died in the operation under circumstances that are still unclear, though there has never been a suggestion of hostile fire. A new tomb was constructed just across the border from Turkey, near the Syrian village of Ashme. The pro-AKP media declared operation “Shah Euphrates” a stunning success with such fanfare that some media critics compared it to a Hollywood production.Footnote ³⁷ Main opposition parties, however, critiqued both the loss of territory and the cooperation with Syrian Kurdish forces that the operation presumably entailed.

The latter claim is of interest not only because it was likely true, but also due to heightened tensions surrounding the Kurdish issue at the time. From roughly 2008 through 2014, the AKP pursued a rapprochement with the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê/Kurdistan Worker's Party) to end the thirty-plus-years armed struggle for Kurdish rights. A host of pro-Kurdish political parties had supported this process in an extremely challenging environment that saw a ban on each successive party every two to three years. The most recent of these parties, the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi/People's Democratic Party), had walked a political tightrope marked by three key challenges: it had to overtly distance itself from the PKK so as not to be seen as supporting terrorism; it had to provide tacit support to the AKP's peace efforts, because these were the country's best shot at peace in years; and it had to simultaneously offer a political alternative to the AKP. The detente between the latter two goals had always been difficult, but it was particularly so in the wake of the Gezi Park protests of 2013, when the shift to an overtly authoritarian Erdoğan-led brand of politics became clear.

The 2014 presidential election campaign witnessed an obvious break between the HDP and the AKP, as Kurdish MP Selahattin Demirtaş rose to challenge Erdoğan for that position. And though Demirtaş never really stood a chance of winning the election, his charisma and wit made him a popular figure, not only among the HDP's Kurdish base, but also among a growing coalition of leftists, minorities, and those dissatisfied with both the AKP and other opposition parties. Riding the wave of Demirtaş’s powerful 2014 campaign, the HDP decided to brave a daunting ten percent all-or-nothing electoral threshold and run as a party in the 2015 parliamentary elections for the first time in history.Footnote ³⁸ They stood a real chance of entering parliament and changing the entire calculus of the political map in the process. In reaction to this new electoral landscape, Erdoğan, nominally impartial in his role as president, but clearly an AKP advocate at every step, turned the government's Kurdish policy on a dime, bringing the peace process to a halt and using military as well as political means to antagonize both PKK and HDP supporters. The AKP subsequently adopted a more overtly nationalist stance in its 2015 parliamentary campaign.

If this was the political staging from which Turkey undertook operation “Shah Euphrates,” the media backdrop included an important shift as well: by February 2015, Süleyman Şah had become a household name in Turkey thanks to the popularization of the character on Resurrection. Veteran Turkish actor Serdar Gökhan, known for countless roles in both film and television, plays the role of chief patriarch with charisma, authority, and kindness. Resurrection had been on the air for just over two months, and Süleyman was still the clear figure of authority in the serial. His character would die by the end of the season (June 2015), passing away at a river crossing, where he is buried by Ertuğrul. This end is in keeping with the legends linked to the tomb that has been the source of so much strife and posturing in recent years.

The conjunction between Resurrection and the political agenda of the moment here is striking, as the serial's focus on Süleyman Şah and the government's focus on his tomb appear well coordinated. The tomb and its “defense” become increasingly relevant at a popular level when the ancient character associated with them is fleshed out and brought to life on a weekly basis. The spectacle here is twofold—popular TV serial on the one hand, media frenzy over a military operation on the other—all in the midst of an election season.

At the level of necropolitics, it is not simply the focus on a long-dead hero and his resting place that are of interest. These are in keeping with a baseline nationalism that is common to many countries. Rather, the apparent willingness to consider attacking one's own country and, excluding that, the theater of putting 600 lives at risk for a tomb to literally raise this person's remains from the ground attest to a politics steeped in death on both ends of the historical divide. I use the term “theater” primarily in the sense of political posing, but with obvious reference to the theater of war as well. While the official Turkish narrative admits no coordination with Kurdish forces in Syria or the IS, both of which are decried overtly as enemies by the Turkish government, it is all but certain that Turkey did coordinate with the Kurds, given that the operation went directly through their territory. It is possible that Turkey coordinated with the IS as well. Ultimately, the government either put the lives of many soldiers at risk for negligible gains, or pretended to do so while denying political coordination and touting the danger and bravery of the operation. We are faced with a necropolitics that is either representational or literal in terms of the present danger, and grave-diggingly real in terms of the past. Regardless of intention, one soldier died in the operation, making the theater of death quite concrete for at least one family. This was not the only case where Resurrection would be called upon to mediate necropolitics.

Watching (for) Democracy, Screening the Dead

Starting the day after the 15 July coup attempt in 2016, and continuing for 23 days, the Turkish government sponsored a series of events that it called democracy watches (demokrasi nöbetleri): nightly public rallies in squares across the country where citizens would gather to demonstrate in support of democracy, and to honor those who had died thwarting the coup. The timbre of these watches ranged from solemn to festive, but with greater emphasis on the latter end. Lively music, flag waving, vibrant emcees, myriad politicians, and celebrities were all part of the mix. Many of the events were staged for camera and broadcast across Turkey. They featured large crews and an infrastructure that included multiple stages, numerous giant screens, and camera cranes. The “Resurrection March” and Erdoğan anthem, “Dombra,” were the repeated soundtracks of these events—each played well over ten times per night. Resurrection was also present in the form of myriad blue “IYI” flags, which overlooked the crowd alongside Turkish flags, Erdoğan flags, Azerbaijani flags and, occasionally, Atatürk flags.

The serial was further represented by its actors, who made frequent appearances at these events, exciting the crowd with messages about sacrifice and the honor of the nation. Lead actor Engin Altan Düzyatan, for instance, returned from vacation abroad to address a crowd in Üsküdar, Istanbul, on 25 July, where he appeared alongside four other cast members and the writer for the show to assure those assembled that he never had and never would lose faith in his “homeland, nation, or government.”Footnote ³⁹

Mehmet Çevik, who plays the “Crazy Ironsmith” (Deli Demirci) on the show, appeared in at least two watches in the weeks after the coup to deliver long speeches about his sense of honor at seeing how the nation had responded.Footnote ⁴⁰ In both speeches he references the plotting from outside that Turks have faced throughout history, tying the travails of the Kayı tribe to the greatness of the Ottomans and the challenges of Çanakkale (Galipoli), and linking all of these to the moment of the coup. Çevik uses his role as actor playing a key (fictional) figure in the Kayı tribe to speak with a kind of popular authority on the history of the Turkish past. His register is highly dramatic when doing so, and the appeals of this unique blend of celebrity/character/citizen blur to some degree what might otherwise be more distinct lines between history and present, fiction and fact, politics and patriotism. He uses his stage to call out the bravery of those who jumped in front of tanks and, in a clear reference to those killed in the coup, he notes in one speech that graves in the ground are what define a homeland. It is in remarks like these that we see most clearly the valorization of death and its ties to the greater national project.

Though graves had not even been dug at the time of the first democracy watch, a symbol of the dead was incorporated very quickly into the architecture of the squares. In at least two of the venues—Taksim in the center of Istanbul, and the Yenikapı Assembly Field, where the final watch took place—a giant billboard listing the names of those killed in the coup—martyrs (şehitler) as they are referred to in Turkey—was positioned alongside the stages and screens. In the government narrative, the names are there to be honored, and also to serve as a reminder of the costs of democracy. Various speakers evoked the martyrs, often tying them, like Çevik, to other historical sacrifices made by Turks.

And yet the overriding tenor of the watches was not one of sombre reverence for the dead but, rather, celebration and solidarity. Nor were these dead, ever-present in name, long the center of attention. In each of the cases I have mentioned, the wall of martyrs was positioned near the center stage, but its static list of names in text was no competition for contemplation next to large screens and the host of celebrities occupying center stage. Both in terms of architecture and ceremony, then, the dead were brought next to the living and made part of everyday life. Their memory was present but, in this setup, it was the likes of Çevik who prescriptively activated this memory as part of a greater Turkish story. At the watches, the dead were collectively narrativized by the living—they were used in a theater that had far more to do with politics than individuals and remembrance of their lives. This is not to suggest that the dead were denied ceremonies of memorial, it is simply to note how they were used at the watches, and the screening out of the personal that took place as a result. The role of Resurrection in this theater is not subtle: its ever-present music lent to the festive feel, its flags waved energetically amidst the crowd, and its actors told stories that shaped the deaths into meaning.

What I see with these activations of Resurrection is an extension of necropolitics into the realm of popular culture. This could be, and most likely is, in the Turkish case, indicative of a greater structure of feeling that valorizes sacrifice for the nation—the hallowed and much used category of martyrdom suggests as much. But the AKP's necropolitics may be more than this. Returning to Mbembé’s formulation, a state of exception is key to the necropolitical order, and the democracy watches were part of the greater theater that was used (and continues to be used as of February 2018) to justify a literal state of emergency in which laws are suspended and power is further concentrated under President Erdoğan. The political ad with which this paper began was released amidst this state of emergency, and the constitutional referendum it supported was, likewise, voted under the same conditions. Erdoğan has reaped heretofore unprecedented powers as a result of his victory in that referendum, and the state of emergency shows no sign of abeyance.

Resurrection and its representational necropolitics had a role in “easing in” this regime. Characters, music, actors and other elements from the serial are held up as idealized history on the one hand and brought immediately into everyday life and politics on the other. The generalized message here is of a great nation—but one sinister undertone of this is the continued prevalence of and praise of death in the service of this nation.

Activating Necropolitics, Or: Killing for Ertuğrul

In February 2016, five months before the coup attempt, and just over a year after Resurrection’s premiere, Turkish soldiers left two notes and a five-lira bill taped to a cabinet in a house they had occupied during the siege of Cizre, a Kurdish majority town in the southeast of Turkey. One of the notes explained, amidst forays into nationalistic and Islamist chauvinism, that the five lira was compensation for the use of the house. (The house had been trashed.) It was signed Sungur Tekin, which may have been a soldier's name, but also happens to be the name of Ertuğrul's older brother in the serial.Footnote ⁴¹ The other note simply read, “Greetings from the descendants of holy warrior Ertuğrul.”

The context for the Turkish Government operations in the Kurdish southeast in 2015 and 2016 was complex, as the government was concerned by the rising influence of YPG (Yekineyen Parastina Gel/People's Protection Units) forces across the Syrian border as well as an ad-hoc “autonomy” that had been declared by Kurds in various towns in the region in 2014.Footnote ⁴² The greatest factor, however, was probably electoral defeat. In the hotly contested parliamentary elections of June 2015, the Kurdish-focused HDP overcame a daunting election threshold to enter parliament as a party for the first time, dealing a serious blow to the AKP in the process by eliminating the governing party's outright majority. Rather than form a coalition government, as dictated by law, President Erdoğan and the AKP decided to up the ante of nationalist politics, aiming for another vote in November. The Kurds were the go-to enemy.

It was in July, then, that the government began security operations in a number of regions in the southeast that had declared autonomous rule the previous year. In August, a provincial administrative law was re-interpreted by the government to allow harsh, blanket “curfews,”Footnote ⁴³ which effectively meant people could be trapped in their houses without food, water, or electricity for weeks on end. In numerous cases documented by Human Rights Watch and others, those who ventured outside were shot and killed.Footnote ⁴⁴ These curfew areas (Diyarbakır, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silopi, Dargeçit, Yüksekova, and Derik) thus became siege zones in which an extreme state of exception was the imposed order.Footnote ⁴⁵

While detailed accounts of the atrocities that occurred are available elsewhere, some key moments will provide a sense of the operation's macabre nature. In October 2015, Hacı Lokman Birlik, a 24-year-old actor and brother-in-law to HDP MP Leyla Birlik, was summarily executed by police under circumstances that are contested. His body was then tied by a rope to the back of an armored police vehicle and dragged through the streets of Şirnak as a warning to those who might collaborate against the security forces, with images and videos taken by the officers involved shared widely on the internet.Footnote ⁴⁶

In December of the same year, President Erdoğan said that Kurdish militants would be “annihilated” and that operations would continue until the areas were “completely cleansed and a peaceful atmosphere established.”Footnote ⁴⁷ December and January 2016 were indeed the months of heaviest operations, with numerous accounts of unprovoked killings of civilians, often mediated in highly counterfactual ways by state media.Footnote ⁴⁸ Throughout January, a crisis had been building with numerous people holed up amongst three basements in Cizre. HDP MPs and others attempted to intercede with the government and believed they had brokered a deal when, on 30 January, Turkish forces attacked the basements, killing between 130 and 189 people, many of whom appear to have simply been fleeing other areas of struggle.Footnote ⁴⁹

On 11 February the government declared the operation a success, but the curfew remained in effect while the government bulldozed buildings throughout the area. The curfew was then lifted on 2 March. The following month, the government issued an expropriation ruling that allowed it to seize property and rebuild large areas in multiple cities through the Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ, Toplu Konut İdaresi), including over 30,700 houses, as well as numerous factories, hospitals, and sports stadiums.Footnote ⁵⁰ These moves are likely to eliminate pro-Kurdish political support from key areas while also providing lucrative contracts to government allies.

As a final measure, the government passed a retroactive impunity law (6722) in June 2016, making security officers and public officials immune from prosecution for crimes committed under the aegis of counterterrorism unless such prosecution is specifically approved by political authorities.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, approximately 2,000 people were killed in the operations between July 2015 and December 2016, of whom 1,200 were locals and 800 were security forces.Footnote ⁵¹ According to The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, at least 338 civilians, including children, elderly and women, had been killed during the curfews by April 2016.Footnote ⁵² The number of those injured is estimated to be over 6,000. In addition, numerous cases of torture, rape, and forced disappearance have been documented, and journalistic organizations not closely aligned with the government have been forcibly closed.

The key elements of Mbembé’s necropolitics are the siege and the state of exception,Footnote ⁵³ both of which clearly pertained in the southeast. Likewise with territorial fragmentation, vertical sovereignty, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare, all detailed by Mbembé. His ultimate conclusion that the state of siege, “allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and internal enemy” in which “entire populations are the target of the sovereign” is equally applicable.Footnote ⁵⁴ The siege in the southeast took place before the coup attempt facilitated a country-wide state of emergency, exponentially expanding the number of those labeled enemy by the sovereign state, and giving, for those able to and interested in accessing the news, a preview of the lengths to which the AKP would go to maintain sovereignty.

The question of who was interested, however, is not an idle one, because concern over operations in the southeast was constructed as a marginal viewpoint, and Resurrection may have had a role in this. The notes that lead this section were left by soldiers almost a year after operation Shah Euphrates and, because they presumably came from soldiers acting on their own accord, they might be termed productive rather than prescriptive activations of the Resurrection text. But the lines here blur because this was just one instance among many. It had been preceded by security forces posing with “IYI” graffiti in Cizre in December 2015, and similar pictures of forces next to Resurrection related graffiti appeared in other locations in February and May 2016. The notes and five-lira bill, however, became a news item, as they were covered and commented on by reporter Nurcan Baysal in March 2016. The following month, Resurrection actor Nurettin Sönmez used the web site of Islamist daily Yeni Şafak to deliver a video message to security forces in the southeast in which he praised their work and said that the serial was trying to reflect both the brave hearts of the soldiers and the shared Turkish ancestors via the TV screen.Footnote ⁵⁵ He also offered prayers and blessing for their safety. Given the coverage of and liberal outrage generated by Baysal's story, Sönmez's video may have been intended as a direct reply. Whether this is the case or not, the message is striking in the context of what occurred in the southeast: once again a figure from the serial was used to make direct comment on the politics of the moment, but in this case to sanction and praise a freshly completed siege of fellow citizens.

In the context of a harsh media crackdown, it is plausible that neither Sönmez nor his viewers were aware of the extent of human rights violations perpetrated by those he praised. But it is by no means clear that this would have made a difference, given the extent to which pro-government media had worked to construct Kurds as a terrorist enemy in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2015 parliamentary election. As Debord has noted on the link between spectacular democracy and terrorism:

And it is in the spectacular mediation provided by Sönmez that we see the dawn of a full-spectrum necropolitics: a moment in which productive and prescriptive activations of the text merge, ultimately leading to a collapse of the distinction between representational and literal necropolitics.