Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2024, İstanbul, Türkiye, 5 - 07 Nisan 2024, ss.1-2
Challenging institutionalist dichotomies such as military–civil, or war–police, this paper proposes a perspective of security through the lens of state power. Drawing on instances from the 1980s and 2000s it seeks to reflect on how security politics has operated in neoliberal Turkey in conjunction with the social war of capital. The paper first argues that the main strategy of statecraft underlying the security configuration post-1983 (i.e. transition to the 'authoritarian statist' form) had been the ‘liberalization of martial law’, which is also a key component of pacification as a class strategy that has accompanied the fabrication of the neoliberal order. Such liberalization denotes the transformation of martial law, which had been the unmediated expression of social (class) war, into emergency powers through the mediation of law. In simpler terms it refers to the civilianization of martial law powers for use within the authoritarian statist form. In this light, contrary to the claims of 'military tutelage' and 'militarization' the paper refers to the ways in which emergency powers and national security have been devised as a governing technique at the disposal of the executive power and civil administration (rather than the jurisdiction of the military-driven NSC) in the political ordering of civil society and class relations. The process of 'liberalization' was shored up by another strateg that was found in the technical, financial, and legal restructuring of the police institution as a key political actor in the consolidation of the new state form. Taken together, administrative powers of the martial law have been diffused into the institutional materiality of authoritarian statism by means of emergency powers, wide legal and ideological reach of national security, as well as a strong police institution developed in its fullest sense.
The second part of the paper is devoted to challenging the militarization/civilianization dichotomy as to the debates on the 2000s by emphasizing the alignment of the security configuration under the AKP rule with this 1980s' strategy of liberalizing martial law. In contrast to the liberal narrative of the ‘authoritarian turn’ the party has in effect initiated a much intense politics of securitization in tandem with the demilitarization process carried out within the scope of EU-led political reforms. Prompting qualitative shifts in the authoritarian form of the state the AKP has indeed developed a mode of governing in which policing and practices of war (on terror, dissent, and social commons) have been strongly intertwined in creating new zones of pacification. Relying on a much broader conception of police than the conventional scope of 'police studies' the paper shows how police and security have indeed been key ideas behind the political project of the AKP from the very outset, by connecting varying modes of policing to class war and the general process of pacification under neoliberalism.