Public discussions on the failed coup of July 15, 2016 in Turkey often address the putsch attempt as the triumph of the civilian governmentality against militarism. But in fact, the current configuration of political legitimacy relies heavily upon the authoritarian institutions, legislation and discourses established during the 1980 military coup. Arguably the bloodiest coup d’état that succeeded in Turkey, the 1980 coup drastically changed Turkey’s socio-political landscape. Deeply hostile against dissidence and difference, the junta altered the country’s economic, political, social, cultural, educational, and legal infrastructure in the name of securing law and order. Within this framework, a series of population engineering projects were launched, promising national unity, stability, and social order. The detrimental impact of the 1980 coup is yet to be examined beyond the teleology of civilian/military or secular/religious divides. How are the legacies of the 1980 coup engaged today? What is at stake in such engagements that often appear to circumvent the broader implications of this military coup ideologically and transnationally? Drawing from parliamentary records, legal documents, military publications, propaganda pamphlets, 1980 junta’s leader Kenan Evren’s speeches, newspapers, national culture reports, statistics, and political debates, this paper explores the broader implications of militarism, its ideological ramifications, and the legacies of the 1980 coup in contemporary Turkey. Through textual, legal, and visual analysis of these sources, the paper argues that the 1980 coup has reached its logical conclusion today. Within this framework, the paper identifies key methodological problems in the academic engagements of the 1980 in the present, and proposes a “history of the present” approach to reconsider the detrimental legacies of this coup d’état--as an ongoing process.

One of the most common tactics to repress an armed insurgency which uses non-linear and dynamic urban space as a medium of war is to destroy walls that not only envelop public squares, courtyards, and streets, but also those separating private homes, as well as the domestic spaces within them. This piece concentrates on the walls that were broken down, sprayed with graffiti and re-erected in virtual form by Turkish counterinsurgents during the latest counterinsurgency war in urban Kurdistan (2015-2017). Approaching walls as phantasmatic artifacts to be decoded to critique counterinsurgency, this ethnographic and archival research moves from the scorched walls of a Kurdish town to pictures of graffiti-covered walls to the virtual walls of a YouTube music video. Reading these three sets of phantasmatic walls against one another, it argues that nationalist suffering subjects who feel grief and grievance about the war of their own creation are inextricable from militarist pervert subjects who intrude into intimate worlds of the Other to further their suffering. As two inseparable effects of counterinsurgency, this piece contends that the infliction of intimate injury and the production of nationalist suffering subjectivity keep expanding violence to new territories without end.

In the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 coup in Turkey, the left was decimated, military rulers subjected the country’s economy to IMF-style reforms, and Kurdish activists were ruthlessly pursued. This story is relatively well known. However, what is discussed far less is that the coup radically altered the archival landscape of Turkey in two, diametrically opposed, ways. First, the military junta initiated the reorganization and redaction of the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul and founded a new state archive for material from the Turkish Republican era in Ankara. Second, 1980 was a moment when people, particularly leftist political activists, destroyed not only their personal archives, but also the archives of the political and community organizations they were part of in an attempt to avoid persecution by the military regime for their activities. In contrast to the July 15 coup attempt of 2016, relatively little scholarly literature exists on the 1980 coup and its aftermath in either English or Turkish. This paper argues that one reason for this divergence is the central role archival destruction played in the events of the coup and its aftermath. Arguably, there has been too little reflection on the way both events- the creation of state archives, on the one hand, and the destruction of personal and community archives, on the other hand- have shaped the landscape of contemporary Ottoman and Turkish historiography. This “twin” legacy of the coup thus presents a methodological challenge. How does one write a history for an event that itself changed the nature of archives and resulted in the loss of personal, cultural, and political texts? Based on oral history interviews conducted in Germany, Turkey, and the United States, this paper explores how archive destruction can be understood as a form of personal preservation and political strategy. In so doing, it interrogates the ethical responsibilities, methodological challenges, and political stakes of (re-) creating through historical research the contours of destroyed archives.

In the aftermath of the July 2016 coup attempt, markers of that night’s violence came to be memorialized in a variety of ways: bullet holes preserved, bomb-scarred roads placed under glass, personal items transformed into museum displays. Violence was also marked in other ways, including attempts to indemnify Fethullah Gülen’s movement and the designation of those injured on July 15 as ‘injured veterans’ (gazi). Yet as observers of Turkey are aware, there have been and continue to be many other kinds of slow violence that are often left unremarked, including indefinite detentions, court cases that drag on, passports confiscated, employment terminated. What can we learn from considering where, how, and why some forms of violence - but not others - became remarkable following the July 2016 coup attempt? To answer that question, I draw on fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2019 and ongoing readings of the Turkish-language press to make three linked arguments. First, the commemorations of July 15 - and the acts of violence that these memorialize - helped to redraw the boundaries of the nation, drawing a sharp line between ‘heroes’ and ‘traitors,’ between those ‘betrayed’ and those who betray. Second, following how the violence of July 15 has been marked requires that we move beyond a focus on authoritarian leaders and instead consider the circuits and networks that constitute a specific memorial public. Finally, placing the events of July 15 in relation to longer and ongoing forms of slow violence opens up a broader discussion about the politics of memory operating not only in Turkey but around the world today.

Many political observers agree that contemporary Turkey’s regime has changed, but there is little consensus on what this new regime is. Is it an executive presidentialism or an elective autocracy? Is it a form of competitive authoritarianism or simply an illiberal democracy? The complexity of the diagnosis is exacerbated by the deployment of populist techniques, which have cultivated the power of the President’s office at the expense of the parliament even prior to the constitutional referendum and especially during the state of emergency following the failed coup of 2016. This paper focuses on one of the main instruments wielded by President Erdogan, the muhtar conventions he held at the Presidential Palace (2015-2018), in building the new regime. In a series of almost fifty meetings, President Erdogan hosted thousands of muhtars, who are the most local, lowest ranking elected officials at the level of villages and urban neighborhoods from around the country. During these visits, Erdogan gave them fiery speeches about the state of the country, focusing on how its security is threatened by a multiplicity of domestic and external actors. This paper analyzes the transcripts of those speeches to show the ways in which populism helped forge a new alliance between the most local, most popular seats of political representation and the highest national office of the land. I examine how the muhtars were fashioned into a form of popular power alternative to that expressed both through parliamentary political representation and by the direct presence of people on the streets. If the muhtars thus participated in the bottom-up constitution of the new regime, I argue, supporting AKP’s self-representation as a democratizing and ultimately constituent force, their alliance also domesticated them into an arm of the securitarian state.