Between February and April 2011 Kurds in the Kurdistan region of Iraq staged their own version of the Arab Spring. Thousands of activists in Sulaimaniya held mass daily protests for almost two straight months, calling for government reform and an end to corruption. Other demonstrations against the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) took place in Halabja, Rania, and other cities under KRG rule. In clashes between protesters and security forces, nine people died before the KRG forcibly ended the protests in early April. This paper examines two main questions. 1) How do we explain the size and durability of the protests? These constituted a significant turning point in state-society relations for Kurds under the KRG, not only because they constituted the largest and longest-lived protests in KRG history but because activists’ demands shifted from service-oriented, localized demands of past protests to national demands for systemic reform. 2) How do we explain the differential geography of protest, in which cities in Sulaimaniya governorate rose up, but other provinces – most notably, Erbil province where the capital is located -- did not? I suggest this case provides us insight into the differential value of symbolic capital. In Sulaimaniya governorate, the symbolic capital afforded by the democracy/legitimacy discourse of the Arab Spring resonated profoundly and translated into an increased capacity to mobilize. This is for two reasons: 1) because of the breakdown in state (party) legitimacy in Sulaimaniya governorate; and, 2) because of the growing organizational capacity to mobilize there (due to a less repressive political apparatus, governance- and service-related grievances, and, especially, the development of civic protest networks after 2006). However, the “illegitimacy” discourse of the Arab Spring did not afford activists much traction in Erbil governorate, where the state-society dynamic is profoundly different, and the symbolic legitimation provided by nationalism and governance still resonates with broad swathes of the population. We can thus view the protests as part of a growing but geopolitically differentiated effort to redefine Kurdish notions of what constitutes the national (Kurdish) interest and shift the basis of government authority in the KRG from a national-charismatic model to a more institutionalized form of legal-rational authority. The paper is based on a series of research trips conducted in the Sulaimaniya and Erbil governorates between 2009 and 2012 (including during the 2011 protests). The main sources include in-depth interviews, media (traditional and electronic), government speeches, and other qualitative sources.

This paper is a comparative study of political amnesties and pardons in Morocco and Turkey. It addresses two main questions: 1) What explains a state’s willingness to pardon political prisoners?; and, 2) Why do some states pardon political prisoners frequently while others do not? Although the Turkish state has in general been quite tolerant of pardoning criminal prisoners (and the parliament has in fact approved more than 50 general amnesties since 1923), it has been resistant to apply these amnesties to political prisoners, and a law of repentance approved six times since 1985 for members of the terrorist organizations has been limited to those willing to serve as state informants. In Morocco, however, pardoning of political prisoners has been commonplace, and Moroccan monarchs have periodically pardoned some of the country’s most high-profile political prisoners. At the beginning of 2012, for instance, the King pardoned several leading members of the Salafist Jihadist movement, who were serving 20 to 30 year sentences. I suggest that states with lower coercive power use more cooptation strategies to deal with political opposition. Royal pardons in Morocco have been an effective tool for coopting the political opposition, integrating them into the political system, and consolidating the position of the royal authority as the center of rewards. States with high coercive capabilities, however, tend to pardon their political prisoners less. In the Turkish case, the security establishment, particularly the military, have vetoed different projects of political amnesties. My research is based on analysis of laws, interviews with lawyers and members of human rights organizations, parliamentary debates, and media sources.

Since the establishment of the Constitutional Court of Turkey (CCT) in 1961, the Turkish judiciary has played an unusually active role in some of the most contested questions of Turkish politics. Rather than deepening democracy, however, the judiciary in general, and the Constitutional Court in particular, have played a critical gatekeeping role that barred socialist, Islamist, and Kurdish movements from renegotiating the basic tenets of the Constitution. Beyond guarding the boundaries of legitimate public discourse through narrow interpretations of secularism and national identity, the Court, in alliance with several other unelected institutions, also maintained a democracy in which institutions with ultimate veto power were immune to contestation or infiltration by non-Kemalist groups, although such groups could participate in elections and civil society. Since the rise to power of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the role of the judiciary as the ultimate gatekeeper of secularism has come under strain. Through a series of measures grounded in democratic legitimacy, AKP dismantled the secular veto structure that “contained” non-Kemalist politics. In this paper, I examine AKP’s crackdown on the secular judiciary and its redeployment of ‘legalism’ against secularists and Kurdish activists. Through a case study of two mass trials (Ergenekon and KCK) with which AKP “struck” back at Kemalists and Kurdish activists, I examine the ways in which AKP’s use of law departs from Kemalist legalism as secularist veto point, while consolidating a novel power structure.

My current work challenges the persistent and misleading perception of the Turkish society and state as divided by the fault-lines between Muslim and secular politics .In sharp disagreement with both the discontents and apologetics of Islam, I argue that the axis of conflict has shifted from Islam vs. secularism. Put differently, Turkey is no longer contesting issues over Islam versus secular democracy the way Europe increasingly does. Now that Turkey is done with the inclusion of the pious Muslims, it has moved on to another struggle –contestation in the aftermath of inclusion. Hence, contrary to the predominant view that sees urban contestation as a threat to democracy, my findings suggest that divided urban sides push efficiently for a liberal democracy that can secure liberties and rights. The paper is part of a larger ethnography on highly contested urban sites, which I conducted since 2007. One of these divided sites is an academically competitive and most liberal university campus in Istanbul. Although the faculty and students split deeply with regard to pious versus secular politics on campus, particularly over the headscarf issue, they unite indiscriminately and most promptly when it comes to the violation of academic freedom, arbitrary detentions as well as government’s crack down on Kurdish people. Most importantly, these campus-wide protests cross the deep fault lines between pious Muslim and secular camps, and thereby create new alliances between them towards a more liberal democracy. This paper is part of a larger ethnographic project on the intimate links between urban space and contestation over freedom and rights in the context of democratization.

Egypt and Turkey are undergoing regime transitions. Their transitions are vastly different, but they are similar in one respect: Exceptional courts are key sites for contesting their meaning. During the 2000s, Egyptian judges campaigned for the rule of law, but ultimately failed to end exceptional trials. When the 2011 uprising toppled Mubarak, many were hopeful that it spelled the end of such courts. Instead, the Army initiated an unprecedented wave of military trials which lumped activists together with state-sponsored thugs. In Turkey, a more gradual transition has taken place since the 2002 rise to power of the AK Party, whose government has led a push to adapt to EU membership criteria and uproot criminal networks within the security establishment. Yet there, too, the transition has taken an ambiguous turn: While the government has begun civilianizing the judiciary, it has retained “specially empowered” courts which have increasingly been used to try critical journalists and academics alongside purported deep-state strongmen. Exceptional courts are thus not simply participants in these transitions; they also magnify their ambiguity. Leaders present them as necessary measures in the struggle for a more transparent, safe society, but simultaneously undermine those ideals by circumventing due process and prosecuting democracy activists. Are exceptional courts simply tools with which state leaders can shape citizens’ perception of the ongoing transitions, or do they also have an independent effect on the trajectory of state-society relations? I argue that while recent trials exhibit continuities with pre-transition practices (and thus belie leaders’ rule-of-law rhetoric), their malleability at the hands of political elites depends on institutional heritage and on the capability of grassroots activists to bridge the state-society divide. Recent exceptional trials attempt to exploit the seemingly apolitical authority of legal discourse in order to criminalize political opposition in the public eye. Examining Egyptian and Turkish court documents as well as wider public debates concerning exceptional justice, I argue that lawyer-activist alliances can undermine these attempts by discrediting exceptional courts to the point that they lose their value as tools for de-politicizing the repression of dissent. The success and impact of these alliance-building efforts depend, in turn, on the degree to which exceptional courts were institutionally isolated from the ordinary judiciary and civilian legal professionals prior to the transition. The politics of exceptional justice therefore invites us to rethink “transitions” as contingent on specific combinations of continuities and changes in state-society relations.