In November 2017, a family of five – two purged teachers and their three children – drowned after their boat capsized in the Aegean Sea. The children’s dead bodies are discovered on the Greek island of Lesbos. The death of these former teachers by drowning sparked outrage over the mass political purge taking place in Turkey. Beginning on 20 July 2016, just one week after an attempted coup d’état, some 152,000 people across the country – those known in Turkish as KHK’lı, Kanun Hükmünde Kararnameli, the ‘emergency decreed’¹ – were purged by the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) government from their positions as public servants, banned for life from public service, consigned to a state of outlawry, and excluded from benefit or protection of the law (European Commission 2019, 4). The couple’s sudden criminalisation as ‘traitors’ and ‘terrorists’, their relegation to the status of ‘civic death’ in their own country (Sertdemir Özdemir Reference Sertdemir Özdemir2021b; Sertdemir Özdemir and Özyürek Reference Sertdemir Özdemir, Mutluer and Özyürek2019), warrants issued for their arrest and imprisonment, and the removal of the state’s protection of their rights as citizens had made their life in Turkey unliveable, compelling the couple to risk placing themselves and their children in harm’s way in the middle of the Aegean Sea.

Since those fateful events of 2016, Turkey has established itself as a global innovator in the practice of authoritarian citizenship deprivation. State of emergency decrees were used to facilitate the country-wide purge of more than 152,000 public servants (European Commission 2019, 4), including politicians, government and military officials, judges, teachers, journalists, writers, media workers, teachers, and academics. Newspapers, television channels, civil society organisations, charitable organisations, private health centres, private education and tutorial centres, private universities, trade unions, TV channels, journals, publishing companies, radios, and news agencies where closed, the assets of private companies were seized, academics were purged, elected Kurdish mayors and political party members were arrested, and new laws were enacted. In an era marked by growing authoritarianism around the globe, Turkey’s subjection of so many of its citizens to civic death via authoritarian securitisation technologies remains conspicuous in its cruelty. Even after the state of emergency was lifted in 2018, this new form of punishment and repression continued.

Although the AKP’s new form of civic death punishment is known popularly in Turkey as ‘civil death’ (sivil ölüm), the classical penal institution of civil death is different. An older, well-established form of punishment, civil death has been used both as a legal status in the USA that allows states to revoke the civil rights of convicted felons (Chin Reference Chin2012; Harvard Law Review Association 1937) and as a tool of mass persecution in concentration camps used by totalitarian regimes designed to transform citizens into ‘living corpses’ (Arendt Reference Arendt1976, 447, 453). To distinguish the AKP’s post-2016 extra-legal use of the law to punish dissidents and irrevocably expel them from the social, economic, and political realms from these other penal institutions, I argue that this post-2016 form of punishment should be properly termed ‘civic death’ (Sertdemir Özdemir Reference Sertdemir Özdemir2021b; Sertdemir Özdemir and Özyürek Reference Sertdemir Özdemir and Özyürek2019). Unlike civil death in the USA, in Turkey, civic death by emergency decree and security clearance failure continues to deprive persecuted citizens of their fundamental rights even in the absence of evidence or conviction in a court of law, and even after the state of emergency has been lifted and their purge by emergency decree has been ruled unlawful. What distinguishes civic death from civil death is the extra-legal (mis-)use of the law as a new form of securitised punishment designed to subvert formal rule of law in favour of informal rule of law.

As a contemporary form of citizenship deprivation, current civic death practices are inextricably linked to democratic principles: because they disproportionately deprive politically targeted citizens of their basic rights; and they raise concerns about citizen equality, democratic participation, the rule of law, and human rights. They can also undermine democratic principles by establishing a system in which some people are treated as second-class or even stateless citizens who enjoy fewer rights and legal protections or for whom such rights and protections are withdrawn. It is for this reason that my analysis of the new forms of authoritarian securitisation in today’s AKP-ruled Turkey draws on the work of contemporary political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, Miguel Abensour, and Jacques Rancière on the meaning of politics in society and the paradox that comes along with democracy. On the one hand, if we do not share a clearly defined set of shared ideas and principles concerning democracy, our understanding of democracy and our ability to coexist in freedom and equality can be clouded by contrasting meanings (Finley Reference Finley1996, 11). On the other hand, because democracy was unable to prevent the twentieth century’s most horrific disasters – among them, totalitarianism, described by Hannah Arendt as ‘radical evil’ (Arendt Reference Arendt1976, ix, 459) – we also have many reasons to criticise, reject, and even ‘hate’ democracy (Rancière Reference Rancière2005). To overcome this democratic paradox, contemporary political thinkers address democratic principles without reducing them to a specific type of regime or government, and without turning democracy into a specific doctrine or political system (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2005, Reference Mouffe2009, Reference Mouffe2013). By conflating the implementation of democracy with the principles of human rights, they eschew more conventional adjectives for democracy such as ‘modern’, ‘direct’, ‘representative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’, ‘neoliberal’, ‘procedural’, ‘real’, or ‘formal’ in favour of new adjectives: ‘radical’ (Laclau and Mouffe Reference Laclau and Mouffe1985), ‘savage’ (Lefort Reference Lefort1986), ‘insurrectional’ (Abensour Reference Abensour2004), and ‘anarchic’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2005).

Since my earliest days of teaching political philosophy at Galatasaray University, Istanbul, in the 2010s, I have been haunted by the global rise of authoritarian regimes and their overthrow of democracies that were already struggling to survive. My comprehension of the anarchic idea of democracy has since centred on what distinguishes democratic forms of government from monarchies, totalitarian and fascist regimes, and authoritarian states. Armed with the conviction that meaning of democracy cannot be reduced to majority rule, consensual decisions, or the rule of law, I groped around in the dark to understand the political conditions that give rise to anarchical or agonistic democracy.

In 2016, academia and history collided, flavouring my academic work on the idea of democracy with my first-hand personal and professional experiences under an increasingly authoritarian Turkish state. Along with other signatories to the January 2016 Academics for Peace (Barış İçin Akademisyenler) petition, I was targeted by the AKP state’s emergency decree purges after the July 2016 attempted coup; my personal and professional life became a testing ground for the at times stark, at times subtle differences between democratic and authoritarian forms of government. It was then that my research focus shifted from questioning the ideals of anarchic democracy to understanding the characteristics of the new Turkish authoritarianism: its excessive use of power; its abuse of the rule of law; and its reach beyond traditional authoritarian rule via new technopolitical and biopolitical securitisation methods.

The abandonment in 2015 of the AKP government’s on-again, off-again peace process with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê)) was a watershed moment. In the last days of 2012, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that in an effort to end the long-running conflict between the Turkish government and the PKK, the National Intelligence Service (MİT) had met with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK. This was confirmed when, on 21 March 2013, Öcalan’s Newroz letter was read to the press in both Kurdish and Turkish, declaring a ceasefire and calling for disarmament and the end to armed struggle. In return, the AKP government passed several laws meeting Kurdish demands, including changes to anti-terrorism laws and the removal of legal barriers to Kurdish-language education. Hostilities ceased. During the first year of the peace process, no one was killed. There was political progress, hope, an air of optimism. However, when fighting again broke out in 2015, the peace process began to fall apart (Hafıza Merkezi 2015; Tekin Reference Tekin2019). In October 2015, the AKP government imposed curfews in several Kurdish cities, including Diyarbakır, Şırnak, Mardin, Hakkâri, Muş, Elazığ, and Batman. In some cases, human rights violations against civilians accompanied twenty-four-hour curfews (BirGün 2016b). On 28 November 2015, Tahir Elçi, the President of the Diyarbakır Bar Association and a human rights activist, was killed while giving a press statement calling for an end to security operations and a return to the peace talks (Kamer Reference Kamer2022): his murderer has not been found. Between 16 August 2015 and 21 January 2016, some 198 civilians died, including 39 children, 29 women, 27 people over the age of 60, and one stillborn baby whose mother was shot in the abdomen (BirGün 2016b). According to a report of the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, violations during the AKP government’s July–December 2016 security operation in the south-eastern Kurdish region of Turkey (UN Human Rights 2017), 2,000 people were killed, including 800 security forces and 1,200 civilians.

Having followed the daily deterioration of the peace process into violence and the increasing seriousness of human rights violations in Turkey’s south-east, a large group of scholars issued a press statement on 11 January 2016 in Istanbul and Ankara demanding that the Turkish government put an end to rising levels of violence in the Kurdish region and resume peace negotiations with the Kurdish political movement in accordance with all applicable national and international laws (Tekin Reference Tekin2019). The petition, ‘We will not be a party to this crime!’ (Barış İçin Akademisyenler 2016), came under swift AKP attack. The following day, then President Erdoğan gave a vitriolic speech attacking the 1,128 academics and researchers from eighty-nine Turkish universities and 355 academics and researchers from other countries who had signed the peace petition on behalf of Academics for Peace. The general lynch campaign launched against Academics for Peace signatories exemplifies the AKP’s pre-2016 coup attempt securitisation practice of accusing those targeted of supporting ‘terrorism’.²

Following Erdoğan’s call to actively target the signatories, various government officials, politicians, pro-government newspapers, and even a mafia leader joined him in an effort to criminalise academic signatories. Ahmet Davutoğlu, then prime minister and leader of the AKP, stated that ‘the provocative language reflected in this petition cannot be evaluated within the scope of freedom of opinion … I felt great sadness and shame’ (Tekin Reference Tekin2019, 7). Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, hereafter MHP), accused the academic petitioners of being traitors (Tekin Reference Tekin2019, 6). Mafia boss Sedat Peker threatened the petitioners with the words ‘We will bleed you to death. We will bathe in your blood’ (Gökşin Reference Gökşin2016). A number of universities took immediate disciplinary actions against the petitioners, firing academics under their employ who had signed the peace petition. As part of the criminalisation campaign, four academics were imprisoned for spreading ‘terrorism propaganda’. On 16 March 2016, Assistant Professor Esra Mungan, Associate Professor Kıvanç Ersoy, Assistant Professor Muzaffer Kaya, and Assistant Professor Meral Camcı, who had read the peace petition to the press on 12 January 2016, were arrested on charges of ‘spreading propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ as per Article no. 7/2 of Law no. 3713 on Anti-terror and charged with seven and a half years in prison (Pişkin Reference Pişkin2019). Abroad when the arrest order was issued, Camcı willingly returned to Turkey, where she was referred to the court and arrested on 1 April 2016. All four were released on 22 April 2016, pending trial, and then more than three years later, acquitted from all charges on 30 September 2019 (Bianet 2019).

After the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, the atmosphere of fear and intimidation surrounding the petitioners deepened and spread throughout society. During the attempted coup d’état, government buildings, including the Parliament and the Presidential Palace, were bombed from the air, and clashes broke out between soldiers and civilians, resulting in the deaths of over 300 people and leaving over 2,000 injured. Following the quelling of the attempted coup, the government declared a nationwide three-month state of emergency (Olağanüstü Hal, popularly referred to as OHAL) on 20 July 2016, and then proceeded to systematically purge more than 152,000 public servants using the technology of emergency decree. The state of emergency was extended several times by Parliamentary Decisions until its end on 19 July 2018 (Parliamentary Decisions no. 1130, 1134, 1139, 1154, 1165, 1178, and 1182).

Different emergency decrees resulted in the dismissal and exclusion from public service of 549 academics who had signed the peace petition. Many other signatories were ordered to retire, forced to resign from their positions or to withdraw their signatures, or were detained by the police and indicted for spreading terrorist propaganda. Akdeniz University required that academic signatories denounce the petition by signing the following pre-written statement, a condensed version of the AKP government’s nationalist securitisation narrative, thereby placing academics in the awkward position of having to state that they had not read the Academics for Peace petition before they signed it:

In total, 822 academics were made to testify in criminal courts against the indictment of ‘terror’ as a result of having their national identification number tagged with codes 36 or 37, codes assigned after the attempted coup by the Social Security Institution (Sosyal Güvenlik Kurumu) to those who had been fired from public service by government decree. Many academics left the country and went into exile.

As one of the peace petition signatories, I got lucky: although I was forced to resign in December 2016 from my assistant professorship at Galatasaray University, a public university whose employees are public servants, I was neither purged for life from public service nor was my passport revoked. But my targeting by the AKP government as a ‘terrorist’, forced resignation from Galatasaray, and eventual exile did change the course of my life and research. During my time as an academic at Galatasaray, I had led research in the Department of Philosophy on the politics of inclusion/exclusion, conceptions of democracy, contemporary modes of governance, violence, politics, and exile. Ironically, in 2014, I co-organised with the College International de Philosophie in Paris an international conference on ‘Violence, Politics and Exile’. Little did I know that only two years later I would find myself exiled as a visiting research fellow in the United Kingdom, first at the Centre for Research on Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, and later at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, feeling like I had become the subject of my own research topic.

In late 2017, I was prosecuted alongside many other petitioners for the charge of ‘producing propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ (Law no. 3713 on Anti-terror, Article 7/2). The 33rd Criminal Court deferred the announcement of my verdict, so my attorney submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Court on 13 June 2019. Approximately six weeks later, on 26 July 2019, Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled with a razor-thin majority that the Academics for Peace petition signatories had not committed the ‘crime of propagandising for a terrorist organisation’. By the time my case reached the Constitutional Court, I needed to submit an application for a visa to enter the USA so I could take part in an academic conference. The visa application form included a particularly vexing question: ‘Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offence or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty, or other similar action?’ I had to answer ‘yes’ to this question. Despite explaining my court proceedings in detail and providing evidence for each step along the way, when I went to the USA Embassy in London for an interview and to have my biometrics taken, I was questioned about the allegation of ‘terrorism’ against me.

At the end of the interview, the consular officer’s final question was, ‘Why was your special passport not cancelled despite your having been accused of terrorism propaganda?’ In Turkey, a special passport (yeşil pasaport) is a passport type with a few extra privileges, including visa-free entry to many countries, issued by the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü) to public servants working in first-, second-, and third-degree positions. The consular officer’s question was therefore reasonable: she did not understand how Turkish laws and regulations could be arbitrarily applied or how some targeted academics could be purged for life and some not, even though they had been charged with the same indictment. This arbitrariness points to a distinguishing aspect of the authoritarian securitisation regime’s exertion of pressure on its citizens by securitising them. Many of those purged and now in exile face a high risk of becoming stateless and/or stuck in their host country because their passports have been revoked by the AKP government, forcing them to seek asylum in their host society or to subsist on temporary work permits.

An academic in exile, my research was now squarely focused on the conditions under which thousands of Turkish scholars have been forced to leave Turkey to rebuild their academic lives in Western Europe. In the terms of political philosophy, the task was to re-analyse the concept of exile, long a subject of literature, that could weave political theory into the qualitative empirics of anthropological interviews with those affected by the purges and historical analysis of causative shifts in government and society (Sertdemir Özdemir Reference Sertdemir Özdemir2021b; Sertdemir Özdemir, Mutluer, and Özyürek Reference Sertdemir Özdemir, Mutluer and Özyürek2019). One of the most striking findings of the interviews undertaken was that all at-risk scholars carried the heavy weight of securitisation on their shoulders, as a result of their stigmatisation with code 36 or 37. Having been blacklisted, they felt that the stigma would be with them forever and that they would be unable to return to work in Turkey. Because Turkey instrumentalises the label of ‘terrorism’ through the overuse and abuse of Interpol red notices (France24 2019; Topcu Reference Topcu2019), and because even unsubstantiated terrorism labels are treated as highly dangerous in the Global North, in some cases the consequences of having been purged and blacklisted on the basis of terrorism allegations extend beyond Turkey’s borders.

Turning from the questions of democracy and exile to an inquiry into how newly available and improvised securitisation practices, technologies, and laws feed authoritarianism and contribute to the consolidation of a new type of authoritarian regime, I became empirically interested in how these new AKP authoritarian securitisation practices shape and reshape the daily lives of people purged by emergency decree: not just academics, but teachers, physicians, public servants, and nurses. In this book, I ask how the new authoritarian securitisation technologies of civic death that have emerged over the past two decades in Turkey – technologies that build on and take to new extremes a number of highly invasive surveillance technologies, control mechanisms, and penal systems – have reshaped the lives of those targeted for securitisation. Bringing together approaches from political philosophy, social anthropology, and history, I delineate the new securitisation technologies used by the AKP to punish political dissidents (individuals who oppose and actively challenge the government’s decisions and policies) and the opposition, banish them from the public sphere, consign them to the status of ‘outcasts’ and ‘outlaws’, and transform them into disposable citizens who are dead to the law even after their purge has been ruled unlawful and the state of emergency has been lifted. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines empirical ethnographic and historical research with theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the political, I highlight the new forms of citizenship deprivation, security, and punishment that have emerged under the AKP.

My argument in this book is that with the post-2016 state of emergency, a new form of authoritarian securitisation was born in Turkey, one that relies on the logic of repressive protection of the state in lieu of citizens’ rights, freedoms, and lives (Chapter 1); the cruel retributive punishment of civic death (Chapter 2); centralised and peer-to-peer lateral control designed to anticipate all potential future security threats (Chapter 3); securitised regulation that establishes informal rule of law, radical uncertainty, and atmosfearic self-regulation (Chapter 4); and the biosecuritisation of women, LGBTQ+, and disabled people so as to extend the reach of civic death into citizens’ bodies, kinship relationships, and reproductive systems (Chapter 5). Together, the new practices of the AKP authoritarian securitisation state threaten, permeate, and surround the citizenry, inducing individuals to denounce others and regulate themselves.

I argue that the post-2016 the changes and additions to Turkey’s earlier surveillance and securitisation technologies indicate not an intensification of these methods, but instead a transformation of governance modes from state of emergency rule to what I call authoritarian securitisation state. I conclude that because these new methods of securitisation are designed to reduce those targeted to civic death as disposable citizens who are deprived of the opportunity to reclaim their social, economic, and political rights even after they have been acquitted or the state of emergency has been lifted, this new turn in Turkey’s politics of securitisation has produced not (merely another) form of one-party rule or a state of emergency, but an authoritarian securitisation state.

Authoritarianism

While the concept of authoritarianism³ and the rule of ‘the One’ has been critically challenged by a large body of work, philosopher Étienne de La Boétie’s ([Reference La Boétie1577] 2002, Reference La Boétie1975) influential rebuttal to Machiavelli’s The Prince, Discours de la servitude volontaire, pioneered a new approach to examining despotism by providing valuable insight into ‘voluntary servitude’. Examining the relations of domination and exploitation between the ruler and the ruled, La Boétie imagines the tyrant as passive and the people as active rather than the other way round. He suggests that people may be able to win their freedom by simply refusing to give their consent to the tyrant:

According to La Boétie, people are willing to live under tyrannical regimes because the tyrant promises them safety and social unity (43). He critiques not only the One’s rule, but also the mechanisms of dominance between the One and the multiple and the melting down of everyone’s power into the power of the tyrant’s rule in the name of the formation of unity (41–42; see Lefort Reference Lefort2002, 284). With his early analysis of tyranny, La Boétie identified civil obedience as one of the fundamental problems of political theory: Why do people submit to and consent to a single sovereign? Why do they give their consent to serve the One of their own free will? By identifying individual freedom as disobedience, his analysis addresses the question of political freedom from the perspective of individuals and citizens rather than from the perspective of the political system.

Unlike the despotic prince of the 1500s, however, today, all authoritarian governments stifle all political action and do not tolerate protest against them. Instead, they build a system of government in which people are expected to abide by the government’s unwritten rules. A good summary of the new features of current authoritarian regimes is to be found in the recent work of political theorist John Keane (Reference Keane2020). Keane stresses that the main difference between early and modern autocratic regimes is that while the new regimes use and abuse the law to repress the opposition and support their followers, while previous regimes rendered all law useless with the use of arbitrary powers (182). The new authoritarians and autocrats go to great lengths to reassure their citizens that the law is a vital tool, claiming that they ‘know how to employ law to defeat the rule of law. Law is their double-edged weapon, a gentle wand waved in favour of supporters and a sharp sword used against opponents’ (Keane Reference Keane2020, 15; italics added). To exert control over the judiciary, current authoritarian governments assign judicial members through top-down executive appointments, and downgrade or fire disobedient legal professionals while promoting others. In the new authoritarianism, the rule of law has been replaced by ‘rule through law’ (183).

The Turkish case is a good illustration of the (mis-)use of the law by an authoritarian state so as to subvert the rule of law, but still appear to ‘abide’ by and refer to it. According to renowned law professor Kemal Gözler, the AKP government has turned the Constitutional Court, whose first duty is to limit executive power, into an institution that expands the party’s executive power.

Gözler stresses that the same acute problem exists in both criminal and administrative law. There is in fact no legal basis for filing a criminal court case against the Academics for Peace signatories, yet 822 academics were prosecuted and gave statements in criminal courts. Similarly, the mass purge of public servants by government decree was illegal: the only way to legally dismiss people from their public service positions would be to prosecute them in a court of law (Topuz Reference Topuz2018a). This did not happen. Instead, some 152,000 public servants were purged en masse by government decrees issued one night without warning or investigation. Ali Duran Topuz, a journalist and former attorney, calls the AKP government’s subsumption of the judiciary under government control ‘anti-law’ (anti-hukuk), arguing that the ‘anti-law state’ (anti-hukuk devleti) extends beyond state of emergency rule.

In this book, therefore, the term ‘extra-legal’ implies not only the misuse of law and the suspension of the rule of law, but also the AKP government’s capture of the judiciary. As a result of this destruction of the rule of law and subordination of the judiciary to the executive, fundamental rights and freedoms are jeopardised, and state injustice practices go unrectified.

Extending far beyond one-man or one-party rule, AKP authoritarianism demonstrates how a new mode of power based on securitisation has rewritten La Boétie‘s understanding of voluntary servitude by complicating it: by threatening citizens with securitisation and civic death, the authoritarian securitisation state induces the voluntary participation of the population in their own persecution and servitude. The AKP employs a combination of older ‘targeted’ policing and surveillance techniques and new lateral surveillance methods that work to eliminate potential disobedience, govern all contingencies, centralise personal data, and perfuse distrust throughout society. One of the most striking aspects of the Turkish case is its hyperbolic use of ‘terrorism’ charges to persecute dissidents, criminalise political opposition, and limit all possibility of resistance to rule by ‘the One’ in the name of protecting the state from existential threat. By creating an atmosfearic environment of terror (Aly and Balnaves Reference Aly and Balnaves2005), the people are induced both to internalise the AKP’s new arbitrarily imposed laws and informal ‘anti-laws’ so that citizens collectively self-regulate. The AKP regime’s securitisation practices end up determining the shape of the regime itself by turning it into an authoritarian securitisation state.

The existing literature on the AKP’s authoritarianism is extensive and offers valuable insights into various aspects of the regime from the perspectives of political science, economics, and sociology. Most recent attention has turned from describing the regime as an ‘illiberal democracy’ (Bechev Reference Bechev2014; Türkmen Dervişoğlu Reference Türkmen Dervişoğlu2015) to characterising it as an instance of ‘neoliberal hegemony’ (Akça, Bekmen, and Özden Reference Akça, Akça, Bekmen and Özden2014; Özyürek, Özpınar, and Altındiş Reference Özyürek, Özpınar and Altındiş2019), ‘neoliberal populism’ (Akcay Reference Akcay2018), ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Kaygusuz Reference Kaygusuz2018; Tansel Reference Tansel2017, Reference Tansel2019), or ‘authoritarian populism’ (Kaptan Reference Kaptan2020). Several scholars have focused on Levitsky and Way’s (Reference Levitsky and Way2002) concept of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Çalışkan Reference Çalışkan2018; Esen and Gumuscu Reference Esen and Gumuscu2016; Özbudun Reference Özbudun2015) with a particular focus on the AKP’s consolidation of populism (Akcay Reference Akcay2018; Castaldo Reference Castaldo2018). In competitive authoritarian regimes, although opposition parties are allowed to participate in elections and compete for power by mounting a credible electoral challenge to the ruling party, such competitive authoritarian rules are not truly democratic due to the unfair competition (Esen and Gumuscu Reference Esen and Gumuscu2016, 1582–1583). There is consensus among political scientists and sociologists that Turkey’s democratic backsliding is linked to the loss of free and fair elections, violations of civil liberties, a decline in the rule of law, and the concentration of power in President Erdoğan’s hands. In this light, some analysts have attempted to characterise the regime as one-man rule with a leader cult akin to ‘Erdoğanism’ (Yilmaz and Bashirov Reference Yilmaz and Bashirov2018) or ‘Sultanism’ (Cagaptay Reference Cagaptay2017; Kuru Reference Kuru2015).

What these analyses confirm is the effectiveness of the concentration of power in the hands of the AKP leader and the embodiment of the sovereign with the nation and the state. In his analysis of ‘savage democracy’ in monarchies and other autocratic regimes, Claude Lefort (Reference Lefort1986) notes that because the king’s body embodies sovereign power, the sovereign and power are inseparable (290–292). As the legitimate and absolute owner of power, the king is above the law and the law is under his sovereignty. Such is the case in Turkey. Speaking at the AKP’s evaluation and consultation meeting in 2022 of the AKP’s closest political ally, the MHP, with which it formed a parliamentary coalition in 2018,⁴ Erdoğan stated, ‘Those who attack this brother and the People’s Alliance are actually hostile both to our great and strong Turkey ideal and to Turkey itself’ (BirGün 2022). President Erdoğan’s assertion that he is the embodiment of Turkey is also reflected in a recent speech made for the AKP’s youth section:

Extant studies of the AKP’s authoritarianism provide important insights into Turkey’s new authoritarian tendencies by highlighting regime changes, biased electoral laws, restrictions on opposition candidates, the concentration of power in the hands of the President, and excessive control over the media. But by focusing on structural accounts of power consolidation, erosion of the rule of law, the rise in populism, and regime change, these studies confine themselves to methodologically and theoretically constrained political debates. By combining the analysis of authoritarian features with an ethnographically and theoretically informed analysis of securitisation and citizen deprivation practises, I was able to avoid this pitfall. In placing the impact of such securitisation and deprivation practices on the daily lives of targeted people in the foreground, this book is able to characterise several key differences between the new features of AKP authoritarian governance and traditional forms of authoritarianism. Whereas traditional authoritarian regimes frequently rely on overt repression and a complete lack of political freedoms, the new authoritarianism incorporates elements of authoritarian control within a framework of ostensibly ‘democratic’ institutions and legal processes. By using such a ‘grounded’ theoretical explanation of the combined social and political processes of authoritarianisation, securitisation, and citizenship deprivation studied in their context and discourse, theory can be applied to cases outside of Turkey.

Securitisation

It is certainly the case that the global rise in authoritarianism and securitisation feeds the Turkish case – and vice versa. Since the advent of the ‘war on terror’, conventional approaches to security involving military stratagems designed to protect the state against other hostile nation-states have been replaced by a new understanding of security that employs radically new securitisation technologies and governance strategies against new threats. Under today’s digital rule and especially in the Global North, new security techniques are transforming the primary objectives of social control and surveillance (Gros Reference Gros2019, 152). Today, the aim of security is to identify and categorise freely circulating citizens as quickly and as accurately as possible within the mass of data coming in from the various streams and networks (Bigo Reference Bigo, Dillon and Neal2008, 10; C.A.S.E. Collective 2006, 458; Evans Reference Evans2010, 416). These expanded security aims and demands have engendered new techno-biological control and surveillance techniques that track the lives of ordinary citizens. Designed to intrude into the most intimate realms of people’s lives, national security checks are one of the primary tools used by governments to vet individuals (Scott Reference Scott2019b) and to control and repress individuals in the name of safety. Occurring alongside other security practices, these new security technologies and tools have socio-political consequences that foster the emergence of an ‘imaginary suspect community’ (Breen-Smyth Reference Breen-Smyth2014, 232), itself the product of the classification of securitised groups and populations as potentially dangerous.

The literature on security practices in Turkey (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2008; Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010), including detailed reports by human rights organisations (Özen at al. Reference Özen, Özatağan, Tanık and Kurt2021), frequently adopts an international relations and political science perspective by focusing on migration, border enforcement, Turkey’s security in relation to neighbouring and regional countries, and energy security (Kaliber Reference Kaliber2005; Sula Reference Sula2021). Other studies have examined the AKP government’s use of new surveillance policies for exerting authoritarian control over society (Yesil and Sözeri Reference Yesil and Sözeri2017) and of an ‘authoritarian surveillant assemblage’ that includes multiple protest, Internet, media, and citizen-informant surveillance systems (Topak Reference Topak2017, Reference Topak2019).

Critical security studies researchers focusing on the techno-politics and biopolitics of security have explored the relationship between current securitisation practices around the world and older methods of control and surveillance (Chandler Reference Chandler2010; Dillon Reference Dillon2015; Gros Reference Gros2019). Michael Dillon (Reference Dillon2007, Reference Dillon2015) was one of the first to investigate ‘governance through contingency’: state use of biopolitical security practices that go beyond the older forms of police security. Anne Aly and Mark Balnaves (Reference Aly and Balnaves2005) have examined the ‘perpetual state of alertness’ brought about by the ‘atmosfear of terror’ that the global discourse ‘war on terror’ generates. Mark Andrejevic (Reference Andrejevic2004) claims that the new securitisation techniques create a climate of suspicion and distrust by employing a new strategy of ‘lateral surveillance’, which encourages everyone to spy on each other. Gros (Reference Gros2019) demonstrates how the new security techniques redefine key rules for governing a society and regulate that society by arranging a specific environment in order to fluently enhance and control it.

Yet this body of critical research on the techno-politics and biopolitics of security has yet to test the applicability of these theories to today’s authoritarian regimes (Pratt and Rezk Reference Pratt and Rezk2019). Partaking in global trends, these authoritarian regimes have adopted the new securitisation techniques; but they also depend on the older institutional trio of the judiciary, the police, and the military for securing the state. As a consequence, authoritarian governments over the world are using a range of techniques to deprive targeted individuals and groups of their citizenship rights: travel bans, institutional seizure, and censorship in Hungary; mass surveillance via the Social Credit System in China; bureaucratic citizenship documentation in the Assam National Register of Citizens in India. The mix of security practices in these states provides fertile ground for investigating how authoritarian regimes use biodata-based security vetting to extend the ‘array of possible threats’, target increasing numbers of citizens, stigmatise them as ‘dangerous’, and sever their ties to networks that provide them with basic biological support. Greater securitisation has engendered new techno-biological control and surveillance techniques that track the lives of ordinary citizens, lifting the rising tide of authoritarianism and populism.

With its recent broadening of its new authoritarian securitisation technologies, Turkey is a particularly ominous example of a handful of emergent authoritarian states ready and willing to redefine state–citizen relations. What remains unclear is to what extent the range of new securitisation practices in Turkey – the new modes of punishment, surveillance, control, and regulation used by the AKP – impact individuals’ daily lives. In this context, Turkey looks less like a cautionary tale meant to warn of future possibilities and more like the ominous prototype of an existing authoritarian securitisation state replete with new state–citizen relations. So, while the conceptualisation of this new kind of state and the analysis of its goals and security mechanisms is important, understanding how such a state brings its authoritarian securitisation practices to bear on individuals’ lives is imperative. By systematically applying research into the technologies and biopolitics of security to an analysis of the securitisation and punishment practices that have emerged in Turkey over the past two decades, this book attempts to understand recent shifts in AKP authoritarian governance modes and to catalogue the effects of these new securitisation practices on the daily lives of those targeted by the regime.

Andrejevic (Reference Andrejevic2004) suggests that the new technology-based strategies of ‘lateral surveillance’ amplify older ‘top-down’ and hierarchical panopticon techniques, engendering a climate of suspicion and distrust around the world. The new responsibilised ‘peer-to-peer surveillance’ (489) gives the population a sense of ‘shared responsibility’ (486) and participation in the maintenance of security. In the USA and the United Kingdom, for example, the new securitisation techniques have proliferated through the National Neighbourhood Watch crime prevention programmes and are facilitated by peer monitoring tools such as Google searches or online background check services (486, 490).

Yet the main difference between liberal and authoritarian securitisation practices is that the latter blurs the distinction between threatening entities (the referent subjects of security), threatened objects (the referent objects of security, the victims), and the audience (those who agree on the status of the threatening entity). In liberal securitisation, citizens are positioned either as potential threatened objects or as the audience and are encouraged to surveil each other, monitor their neighbours, and report unusual items or events in public places in order to apprehend threatening entities. In authoritarian securitisation, however, citizens are positioned as the threatening entities, the threatened objects, and the audience, all at once. To achieve complete control over the population, authoritarian governments compel citizens to act as collateral security personnel or undercover police agents against one another: because they are positioned not only as the threatened objects who, as the audience, willingly acknowledge the threatening entity but also as potential threatening entities, they are induced into a state of perpetual state of alertness and suspicion. In Turkey, this peer-to-peer monitoring has led to a climate in which citizens are more likely to make false accusations against one another, fostering a widespread climate of distrust. In contrast, liberal democracies frequently view personal accusation cases with scepticism (Bergemann Reference Bergemann2017, 402). In Turkey, lateral surveillance is deployed in the context of other authoritarian features: a strong preference for data centralisation, an expanded surveillance system (Yesil and Sözeri Reference Yesil and Sözeri2017), and extra-legal collection of biodata (Topak Reference Topak2019). This authoritarian version of securitisation is therefore both performative and transformative, requiring the population to actively participate in both surveillance and repression, all the while reshaping society by eliminating potential opponents.

While the Turkish state has from its beginnings been the primary referent object of security, it has not always fulfilled its role as guarantor of citizens’ rights (Gros Reference Gros2019, 73). With its repeated and habitual use of state of emergency rule, Turkey’s control methods continue to rely on a combination of state of emergency police security practices and intrusive surveillance methods. On 15 July 2016, Turkey experienced a failed coup against President Erdoğan’s AKP government. The main plotters were believed to be the Gülenist community, which had a shadowy presence in judicial bodies, civil bureaucracy, and the military. With the imposition of a state of emergency, Turkey experienced a deep crisis in human and fundamental rights, with more than 152,000 public servants including 6,081 academics purged for life from public service; 150 journalists and 169,013 other citizens imprisoned (including MPs, mayors, and politicians); 5,268 reports of torture; 179 media outlets, 880 schools, and 15 universities closed; and 94 municipalities seized and placed under trusteeship (Erem Reference Erem2018; European Commission 2019, 4; Gazete Duvar 2018). To ensure the state’s survival, the AKP reasoned, the fundamental human rights of citizens needed to be sacrificed and extra-legal security practices legitimised. In 2017, after a contentious referendum, the AKP used the state’s internal vulnerability to coups as an excuse to change the Constitution, replacing the parliamentary system with a presidential system with centralised and greatly expanded executive powers. Although the state of emergency was formally lifted on 19 July 2018, the new regulations and securitisation practices put in place during the state of emergency remained. As a result, the most relevant feature of the Turkish case is the use of hyperbolic ‘terrorism’ charges to persecute dissidents and criminalise political opposition in the pursuit of protecting the state.

Methodology

My primary research focused on two newly securitised citizen types that have emerged in the post-2016 failed coup era, both accused of alleged ‘culpability of association’ with terrorism: the ‘emergency decreed’ Turkish citizen (KHK’lı) who has been purged from their job appointment for life by government decree and the ‘security vetting victim’ (güvenlik soruşturması mağduru) who has had their job appointment or promotion withdrawn following failure of the newly required security vetting and archival background check procedure. On the basis of an unsubstantiated government accusation of being among ‘those connected with terrorism’ (terörle iltisaklı olanlar), both targeted groups have not only lost their jobs or promotions, they have also been permanently blacklisted and branded as ‘objectionable/undesirable’ (sakıncalı) and ‘suspect’ (şüpheli). I analyse the process by which those who have been ‘emergency decreed’ or have become ‘security vetting victims’ have been rendered into the civic dead, asking what it means to declare citizens ‘dead’ while they are still alive.

I use a combined methodological approach that integrates phenomenological insights into the lived experiences of those who have been securitised with discourse analysis concerning the hegemonic discourses of the state, state actors, and state-aligned media, and the generation of grounded theoretical explanations of the socio-political processes under study (Mayoh and Onwuegbuzie Reference Mayoh and Onwuegbuzie2015, 102; Spencer, Pryce, and Walsh Reference Spencer, Pryce, Walsh and Leavy2020, 123–126). I examine theoretical and historical writings, primary and secondary sources, and empirical data collected during ethnographic fieldwork. To assess how Turkish state–citizen relations have changed since the early Republican period, I draw on a range of primary historical sources, including public records, legal digests and documents, court verdicts, laws, reports, papers produced by parliamentary deputies and committees, and the chronicles and diaries of those purged and those who have failed their security vetting. I consult parliamentary discussions and legislative proposals for investigations related to purged citizens. I review online articles chronicling their experiences and trials, journalistic interviews with them, and their opinions shared on social media. I also draw from secondary sources such as monographs, collected volumes, biographies, and legal and academic journal articles.

To ground this archival research on the biopolitics of authoritarian securitisation in the everyday lived experience of citizens declared civically ‘dead’, I conducted thirty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twenty-three purged citizens and eight security vetting victims on the history of their dismissal or security clearance refusal; the details of their internal or external exile; their pursuit of justice, acquittal, redress, or resolution; their personal experiences following their securitisation; and their short- and long-term expectations. To recruit interviewees who could provide me with rich qualitative information concerning both their experience of securitisation and the legal and social processes that they were subjected to, I used criterion sampling, a form of purposive sampling that relies per se on the researcher’s judgment as to the criteria used. I chose this sampling method because I knew that the sensitivity of the topic meant that it would be difficult to recruit interviewees willing to discuss their own securitisation in large numbers. Each of my interviewees met the same criteria: they had been purged by a government decree or turned down for a job or promotion solely on the basis of security clearance refusal and they had filed an appeal against their purging and security vetting outcome.

I analysed the interview transcripts using thematic coding, closely reading and analysing transcripts to identify recurring patterns, topics, and concepts. I began by immersing myself in the data, and then assigned descriptive codes to text segments that encapsulate specific ideas and topics – for example, loss of a job; being labelled ‘suspect’; being surveilled; feelings attached to having been accused of having ‘connections with terrorism’; relationships with close family members, colleagues, friends; and so on. The codes were both descriptive and interpretative, capturing not only what was said but also underlying meanings, nuances, and patterns. The codes were then refined, clustered, and organised into the book’s overarching themes that encapsulated the central concepts of protection, punishment, control and surveillance, self-regulation, distrust of perfusion, and biopolitics. Thematic coding provided me with a structured framework for synthesising and comprehending the complexities of the qualitative data, allowing me to gain valuable insights into my interviewees’ diverse experiences of and perspectives on securitisation practices. This unearthing of the hidden layers of meaning within the interviews allowed me to gain a better understanding of the impact of securitisation practises on my interviewees’ daily lives.

The interview sample of thirty-one interviews reflects the sensitive security nature of the questions and the fact that participants’ trials, lawsuits, and/or precarious exiled status were ongoing. The interviewees had initial trepidations about participation and were suspicious of me. Was I really a researcher, or was I an undercover security officer? To provide evidence of my status as a legitimate researcher and build trust, I held the online meetings on the platform of their choice and anonymised their names and identifying details. The ethnographic data were of particular use both in identifying the type and scope of current forms of authoritarian securitisation to which those in Turkey are now subjected and for documenting securitised citizens’ lived experiences of and responses to the loss of their ‘right to have rights’. To paint a bigger picture of the new authoritarian securitisation ecosystem in which state and legal actors, purged citizens and security vetting victims, and the Turkish populace now circulate, all of this material was then set in the context of new security laws, eGovernment sites, a government contact tracing app, and AKP discursive framing of security

Plan of the Book

To tease out how the Turkish case may shed light on strategies of securitisation in a country with authoritarian practices, this book sets out to critically investigate the shifts in Turkey’s security practices in terms of protection, punishment, control, regulation, and biosecuritisation. The security studies lenses of technopolitics and biopolitics are particularly useful for examining how new securitisation techniques available in the twenty-first century may be mobilised to protect the state rather than its citizens; to punish retributively increasing numbers of citizens; to exert control over society through mass lateral surveillance; to regulate public order and induce the population to regulate itself; and to biosecuritise women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities with a doubled form of civic death. Each of these themes is developed through empirical ethnographic research in the book’s five chapters through an examination of five logics that animate the AKP’s securitisation logics and the impact of these logics on citizens’ and residents’ lives.

Chapter 1, ‘Protection: State (In)Security and the Widening Orbit of Securitisation’, investigates the AKP’s securitisation logic of protection that animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. The first section gives an historical overview of Turkey’s primary referent object of security since the late Ottoman and early Republican periods – the state’s survival (beka sorunu) from security threats allegedly emanating both from outside and inside. This discourse has been used both to protect the state and to target minorities and a cocktail of ‘dissidents’ and ‘terrorists’. To understand the AKP’s securitisation logics concerning threats from outside and inside, the next section engages a comparison of the temporary protection status of Turkey’s 3.7 million refugees and asylum seekers (the world’s largest refugee population) and the civic death status of the more 152,000 public employees purged by emergency decree after the 2016 coup attempt (the KHK’lı). The AKP government uses the technology of racialisation to turn refugees and asylum seekers into dangerous outsiders and the technology of exile to turn purged citizens into dangerous insiders in the name of state survival. The last section turns to an examination of the expansion, empowerment, and paramilitarisation of armed forces such as the night watchmen (bekçiler), the village guards (korucular), and private security companies as a supplement to the conventional law enforcement agencies of the gendarmerie, police, and intelligence services. As a result of the diversification of security forces and their visibility on urban street corners, the technologies of surveillance, repression, and control spread throughout society. To secure widespread and uninterrupted deployment of these technologies, the AKP government offers protection to armed state security agents through an ingrained culture of impunity, despite overwhelming evidence of human rights violations. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation’, and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimises via a discourse of terrorism insecurity whereby the polity is made to feel under continual threat from ever new sources emanating both from outside and inside Turkey. The AKP achieves this by constantly identifying new groups as ‘threats’ in need of securitisation. This chapter looks specifically at the outsider category of refugees and asylum seekers and the catch-all insider category of the post-2016 KHK’lı, a group of over 152,000 citizens purged by emergency decree. This constantly multiplying threat gives rise to the urgent sense that increasing numbers of the nation’s citizens and foreign ‘guests’ must be securitised if the state is to survive.

Chapter 2, ‘Punishment: Civic Death, Cruel Retribution, and the Securitisation of Academic Purges’, investigates the AKP’s securitisation logic of punishment. Here, the analysis focuses on the case of purged KHK’lı academics as a site for analysing the emergent punishment technology popularly known in Turkey as ‘civic death’. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, in the period following the Second World War, following the 1980 military coup, and after the failed coup of 2016, Turkish academics were sacked, jailed, denaturalised, and forced to flee the country or live in internal exile. Through an historical examination of the iterative yet varied technologies with which academics have been expulsed from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I focus on the ways academics, as producers of knowledge, are subjected to interconnected forms of punishment. I argue that despite continuity with the previous academic purges that occurred during the early Republican era, the securitisation practices following the 1980 military coup and the neoliberalisation of the country’s economy afterwards, the most recent purges conveyed new punishment technologies to a new level of cruelty. In line with the literature on shifting regimes of punishment (Fassin Reference Fassin2011, Reference Fassin and Kutz2018; Garland Reference Garland2018; Gros Reference Gros2019; Kaldor Reference Kaldor2006), I conclude that, under the AKP, the logic behind punishing academics has shifted from a logic of compensation to a logic of retribution (Fassin Reference Fassin and Kutz2018), and that the AKP’s cruel retribution involves the subjecting of individuals targeted for expulsion from the polity to civic death.

Chapter 3, ‘Control: Centralised Digital Politics, Lateral Surveillance, Shared Governance of Contingencies and Extra-legal Over-reach into Domestic Life’, investigates the AKP’s securitisation logic of control. The aim is to critically analyse recent changes in security technologies designed to surveil and control. The chapter begins with an analysis of the permanent state of emergency rule for Kurds living in the south-eastern Kurdish region as a means for their persistent persecution as a dissident minority. In the wake of the 2016 coup attempt, the AKP exported the extra-legal methods used against the Kurds to the whole of society as a means of deepening social control, developing what I call authoritarian lateral surveillance, a system in which everyone watches each other not because they are on the lookout for threatening entities emanating from outside the polity, but because anyone, even your neighbour or family member, could turn out to be a threatening entity. The second section on centralised digital politics examines the AKP’s data collection technologies, which exhibit a strong predisposition towards centralisation and exclusive administration of all information collected, and its policies of Internet censorship and social media control. The third section on the shared governance of contingency describes how authoritarian modes of governance work to eradicate all potential future security threats by taking pre-emptive action to control and oversee ‘emergent life itself’ (Dillon Reference Dillon2007, 7) to the point where the legal principle of individual responsibility is violated, and families are made to share in the purge or security vetting failure of their members. The final section examines the AKP’s extra-legal and religious overreach into private space, looking specifically at extra-legal economic constraints placed on the family members of those purged and the instrumentalisation of religious institutions for control and monitoring of kinship and family life. I argue that under the sway of an authoritarian politics of securitisation that takes as its objective the anticipation and pre-emption of all potential future security threats, the AKP government uses not only the techniques of authoritarian lateral surveillance and centralised digital politics to transgress the principle of individual criminal responsibility in favour of ‘shared responsibility’ (Andrejevic Reference Andrejevic2004, 486) and participation in the maintenance of security.

Chapter 4, ‘Regulation: Informal Rule of Law, Radical Uncertainty, and Atmosfearic (Self-)Regulation’, investigates the AKP’s securitisation logic of regulation. The chapter begins with an examination of new post-2016 laws concerning security vetting and archival background checks that initiate the identification of those targeted for expulsion from the polity as purged KHK’lı and thereby enable the state to strictly regulate citizens’ daily lives. Reviewing recent amendments in the security vetting law and the conduct of the OHAL Commission tasked to decide on applications by purged citizens for reversal of their civic death status, the first three sections reveal how ambiguities in the new law allow for the extensive use of informal rule of law based on extra-legal practices and unsubstantiated citizen-informer accusations of association with ‘terrorism’. The last section looks at how these new regulations affect citizens’ daily lives, inducing people to participate in their own securitisation through the regulation of self and others. With an eye to unpacking the AKP’s authoritarian use of these new securitisation technologies, I focus on several denunciation cases and blacklisting practices and connect them to theoretical strands. I argue that the new regulatory technologies of citizen-informers and a perfusion of distrust throughout society spreads an ‘atmosfear of terror’ (Aly and Balnaves Reference Aly and Balnaves2005), inducing the population to self-regulate, perform, and participate in their own securitisation.

Chapter 5, ‘Biosecuritisation: The Doubled Civic Death of Purged Women, LGBTQ+, and Disabled People’, investigates the AKP’s securitisation logic of biosecuritisation. The chapter examines the gendered, sexualised, and abled understanding of what it means to have a secure life and the dire consequences of purge by emergency decree for women and LGBTQ+ and disabled individuals whose bodies, kinship relationships, and reproductive lives are targeted as biological substrates by the biosecuritisation of gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. To understand the role of new regulation technologies in the AKP’s efforts to control, surveil, and anticipate every aspect of ostracised people’s lives, including their biological entity, the chapter begins with a theoretical examination of biosecurity technologies as a new mode of power that compares Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society’ (Reference Foucault1978), Deleuze’s ‘society of control’ (Reference Deleuze2003), and Gros’s ‘biosecurity’ (Reference Gros2019). Following a discussion of how the older punitive and disciplinary technologies of emergency decrees and policing combine with new biosecuritisation practices to induce people to regulate their own lives, the second section examines the doubled civic death that results from the biosecuritisation of structurally insecure groups. The third section describes the focuses on the impact of these biosecuritisation technologies on women, resulting in their invisibilisation, and on purged women, resulting in their further (in)securitisation, highlighting the inequalities among those purged. The fourth and fifth sections examine the biosecuritisation of LGBTQ+ and disabled people, paying particular attention to what happens to them once they or a member of their family have been purged by emergency decree or have become a victim of security vetting failure. As a result of the combination of punitive emergency decrees, disciplinary policing, and the biosecuritisation of this population through the technology of civic death, women, LGBTQ+, and disabled people are twice excluded from the polity, doubly (in)securitised and rendered invisible among the large mass of ‘undesirable’ (sakıncalı) and ‘suspect’ (şüpheli) citizens. The reach of this new form of authoritarian biosecuritisation extends deep into citizen’s bodies, kinship relationships, and reproductive systems and consigns them to a doubled form of civic death.

In the Conclusion, ‘Turkey’s Authoritarian Securitisation State and the Global Rise of Authoritarianism’, I make the argument that, taken together, the AKP’s combined authoritarian securitisation state is predicated on five authoritarian securitisation logics: 1) repressive protection of the state; 2) cruel retributive punishment; 3) centralised and mass lateral control; 4) self-regulation through informalised rule of law; and 5) biosecuritisation as a doubled form of civic death. I then examine how these authoritarian securitisation logics have played out in the AKP government’s policies following the February 2023 earthquake, one of Turkey’s deadliest, and look at present-day global empirics concerning the global system of securitisation to argue that the differences between democratic and authoritarian governance are increasingly more of degree than kind. Asking the question of what next, I look briefly at signs of democratic optimism visible in Turkish citizen’s capacity for resilience and innovative resistance.