In the framework of the Tuesday meetings, a lecture by Dr. T. Deniz Erkmen entitled “Resistance under Mobile Emergency Rule: Repression and Transformation of the Protest Scene in Authoritarian Turkey” will take place on Wednesday, 6.12.2023, at 11:00 a.m. in the library of the Institute of Criminology. The lecture will be held in English.
Dr. T. Deniz Erkmen got her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her BA degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She works as an Assistant Professor at the International Relations Department at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She has also worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Boise State University, ID, USA and as a Research Fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, in Berlin, Germany. Currently, she is in Ljubljana for the EU-Horizon project SOS4Democracy (Social Sciences For Democracy: A Training Program For Improving Research On Illiberal Systems And Finding Ways To Build More Robust Democracies) led by the Criminology Institute at University of Ljubljana. Her teaching and research fields are comparative politics and political sociology, involving transnationalism, new middle classes, authoritarianism, autocratic legalism, and protest repression. She has published in Territory, Politics, Governance; Sociology; Democratization; South European Politics and Society; Current Sociology and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.
In this talk, drawing on insights from the literature on emergencies, specifically those that question the conceiving of emergency rule as a rupture from normal legal order, Dr. Erkmen will first introduce the concept of “mobile emergency rule” and use it to analyse and make sense of protest repression under the last decade of the AKP rule in Turkey. Mobile emergency rule entails the extremely temporary and localized practice of suspending or limiting constitutional rights via administrative orders in the name of public order. Dr. Erkmen will illustrate this mode of ruling using an original data-set of protest bans. She will then turn the protest arena in Turkey to evaluate the effects of protest repression under autocratization. Using another original data-set of protests in Turkey, and focusing on actors, issues, and tactics of protests, she will analyse the transformation of the protest arena, pointing to resilience as well as contraction under mobile emergency rule.
This research was conceived, conducted, and written with Dr. Mert Arslanalp from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. It was supported by a Scientific Research Grant of Boğaziçi University, as well as by Özyeğin University.
