RT Article
T1 Civic death as a mechanism of retributive punishment: Academic purges in Turkey
JF Punishment & society
VO 23
IS 2
SP 145
OP 163
A1 Özdemir, Seçkin Sertdemir
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1760353922
AB In an era when authoritarian governments increasingly target academics, Turkey’s 2016 purge of more than 6,000 academics and their diminution to civic death is conspicuous in its cruelty. Although unprecedented, this is not the first time that Turkish academics have been punished en masse. By looking at the tools with which academics have been expelled from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I attempt to develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected forms of punishment directed towards academic citizens as knowledge producers. I suggest that the 1980 coup accomplished three things: it introduced new mechanisms of punishment based on a logic of retribution instead of compensation; it changed the legal system into a regime of exception; it transformed academics into patriotic worker-citizens. The latest purges have brought an additional change in the status of academics’ citizenship, rendering them as disposable citizens forever at risk of being targeted as the ‘civic dead’.
K1 Retribution
K1 regime of exception
K1 Purges
K1 new mechanisms of punishment
K1 civic death
K1 Academics
K1 Turkey
DO 10.1177/1462474520941744