Violence In Turkey Research Articles

Ethnography under Authoritarianism: Notes from Medical Anthropological Fieldwork

What is perceived today as “living in an unknown moment” with global pandemics and ecological disasters has long become the “new normal” that structures everyday life at the margins of Europe and the Middle East, particularly in places with rising authoritarian regimes. As scholars working in and on Turkey, for instance, we have witnessed or experienced firsthand several moments of crisis over the recent years. We have seen the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane; PKK) in 2015 and the resulting surge in state violence in Turkey's Kurdistan, the 2016 coup attempt against the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government by the Gülen movement, and the long-standing suppression, criminalization, and incarceration of dissent affecting, among others, students, politicians, journalists, and academics. These divergent yet interlinked moments of crisis have reshaped and often complicated, if not completely stopped, our research as ethnographers of Turkey. These moments of crisis have also pushed us to develop creative strategies and analytics to continue our fieldwork and provided opportunities to hone our research questions and methodologies in more nuanced ways.

Structural violence and the urban politics of hope in Ankara, Turkey

This paper examines the role of violence in Turkey’s state-coordinated pursuit of rapid urban transformation. We argue that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) implemented an urban development regime that relied on structural violence to control and distribute urban rent, housing and land. Despite framing this mode of urban transformation as a way to include marginalised urban populations in economy and society, it ultimately proved to be politically and economically unsustainable. In response to resistance, the AKP shifted its strategy to one of coercion in order to maintain control of the pace and scope of urbanisation. We present original research from Ankara and show how this strategic shift unfolded through an analysis of urban policy and planning practice. By highlighting the negotiated nature of Turkey's urban transformation and the limits of structural violence, this paper offers insights into the complexities of contemporary urban politics.

Women’s Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence in Turkey: The Role of Leisure Activities, Religiosity, and Patriarchy

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is an essential social and health problem worldwide and attitudes toward IPV are one of the important factors related to this issue. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of factors including social activities involvement, religiosity, and patriarchal ideology on attitudes toward IPV. Based on literature related to these factors three hypotheses were developed to test by the 2013-Turkey Demographic and Health Survey which includes a sample of 8847 women. Findings from a number of logistic regression models demonstrate that participation in leisure activities decreases the acceptance of IPV. On the contrary, an increase in personal religiosity and women’s patriarchal beliefs enhances the justification of IPV among women. Among social-demographic characteristics, education and household wealth seem to be important factors preventing the approval of IPV. The findings of the study are discussed in the context of the social and cultural background of Turkey.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Violence is a situation that causes physical or mental harm to a person by applying force and pressure. Domestic violence is the aggressive behavior of one member of the family towards other members of the family. It includes all kinds of attitudes and behaviors that force the person to act against their will (humiliation, threat, battering, forced sexual intercourse or coercion, restriction, forced marriage, etc.). The aim of this study is to examine the issue of domestic violence. The main purpose of the article is to clarify the issue of solutions in the literature by examining the definition, characteristics and effects of domestic violence on individuals. For this reason, studies on domestic violence in Turkey and abroad were examined. This research, which is a review study, can help experts and contribute to the literature. Further work on the subject is recommended.

Violence against adolescent girls and young women reported in Turkish newspapers, before one year and in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic

Although the negative health consequences on human being caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is reported by the news media globally, its role is not well understood in countries like Turkey. This study provides an assessment over time of the events of Turkish newspaper media reported physical, sexual and lethal violence against adolescent girls and young women. Data for the study was collected through newspaper media reports on physical, sexual and lethal violence that published between March 2019 and March 2021, before one year and in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 483 (15.3%) of 3165 newspaper media reports the victims were under the age of 18 and the mean age was 13.0±4.5 years. During the study period, physical violence caused by an intimate partner has significantly raised (from 32.6% in 2020 to 40.6% in 2021). Logistic regression analysis also showed that being an intimate partner was the only factor associated with physical violence (OR = 8.1, 95% CI 5.21-12.60, p < 0.001). Given the prevalence of intimate partner violence in Turkey, newspaper media reports highlighting vital issues that may arise during the Covid-19 pandemic can be a good monitoring tool in a low-resource setting. In raising of the public and policymakers’ awareness about the danger consequences of violence against adolescent girls caused by an intimate partner, capacity building of the news media might be a useful approach on this issue.

Açıksöz, Salih Can. Sacrificial limbs: masculinity, disability, and political violence in Turkey. xxiv, 246 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2019. £24.00 (paper)

Açıksöz, Salih Can. Sacrificial limbs: masculinity, disability, and political violence in Turkey. xxiv, 246 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2019. £24.00 (paper)

The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany. Banu Karaca (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). Pp. 288. $138.00 cloth, $39.00 paper. ISBN: 9780823290215

The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany. Banu Karaca (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). Pp. 288. $138.00 cloth, $39.00 paper. ISBN: 9780823290215

Terrorism as a conceptual site for power struggles: problematization of terrorism in Turkey in the 1970s

In critical terrorism analysis, (counter-)terrorism is thought to be a discursive formation of power/knowledge comprised of some security experts from governments, the media, and academics. However, this one-sided articulation ignores the struggles in the concept of terrorism between historical narratives and counter-narratives, and it may be understood as a conceptual site where different political actors interpret it universally to strengthen or resist preexisting power relations. This article proposes that the problematization of terrorism can be studied by evaluating opposing narratives produced by political actors aiming to assert their power positions, drawing on Foucault’s analysis of problematization. From this theoretical perspective, this article examines how terrorism was problematized in relation to political violence in Turkey between 1971 and 1977, and how political actors used the concept of terrorism as a site for power struggle to gain dominant positions or weaken others, insofar as discrete ideological attitudes (communism and neo-fascism/racism, respectively) were abnormalized by universalizing them as a part of “international” terrorism. In this sense, the article contends that examining terrorism as a “universalized” site of power struggle can improve the analytical framework of critical terrorism studies by integrating the possibility of counter-narratives and, as a result, contradictions in the terrorism discourse.

Compulsory schooling reform and intimate partner violence in Turkey

We examine how Turkey's 1997 compulsory schooling policy affects intimate partner violence (IPV) using the 2008 and 2014 Turkish National Survey of Domestic Violence Against Women and regression discontinuity design. We find conclusive evidence that the policy reduces physical violence against rural women, whereas this evidence is suggestive for the sample of all women. For the urban sample, we reveal large negative, but statistically insignificant, effects on sexual violence and partners preventing women from working. We find null policy effects on psychological violence for the sample of all women. The policy appears to have been protective against IPV for women overall. In addition, we show that the policy effects are realized through changing partner characteristics as well as women's increased schooling. Our results contradict previous evidence for Turkey, and we demonstrate that the previous evidence misclassifies two key variables.

Coping strategies among women exposed to Gender-Based violence in Turkey.

To understand coping strategies used by women experiencing gender-based violence and living in Turkey. Coping is a cognitive and behavioural strategy that individuals develop to manage stress, generally categorized as emotion-focused or problem-focused coping. Women exposed to gender-based violence develop various coping strategies to manage stress and its adverse mental and physical health effects. Qualitative study using the phenomenological approach. Data were collected in Turkey by using the snowball technique (n=17) between September 2019 and September 2020. The Clinical Ethnographic Narrative Interview is the source of the qualitative data for this study. Data were coded manually and utilized the RADAR technique. Seventeen women aged 25-40 were included in this analysis. Women stated that they were exposed to more than one type of gender-based violence according to their lived experiences. Analysis of the nature of coping strategies revealed five main themes. The themes were self-competence, separation from others/isolation, getting professional help, having faith and social support. Breaking the silence and listening to gender-based violence experiences from survivors' voices contribute significantly to literature. There was a dearth of research on Turkish women's gender-based violence survivors; the research intended to address that gap. The participants highlighted that they would like to receive more attention and felt relief in sharing their experiences. The Clinical Ethnographic Narrative Interview is a great tool to explore narratives of gender-based violence and coping skills of women. The study explored coping strategies of Turkish women's gender-based violence survivors. The participants indicated their emotion-focused and problem-solving coping strategies and shared their stories. This study will enhance efforts to concentrate on gender-based violence among Turkish women and inspire other researchers, practitioners and policymakers to change and provide more opportunities for the benefit and well-being of these women.

Opinions of male nursing students about violence against women: A qualitative study.

This study aims to explore the opinions of male nursing students on violence against women in Turkey. The prevalence of violence against women in the world is increasing every passing day. Although women try to deal with the changes their lives bring along, they are faced with physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence for various reasons at the same time. Inclusion of men in studies can have a strong impact on how strategies are developed and implemented. Tackling the issue of violence against women requires active engagement of men and, therefore, knowing the knowledge, attitudes, and understanding of male nursing students is important. In this qualitative study, 18 male nursing students participated. The participants were selected through purposive sampling, and data were collected through individual semi structured interviews. The data were analyzed using the thematic analysis method designed by Clarke and Braun. The findings of the study are presented in seven themes and these are definition of violence, causes of violence, reactions to witnessing violence, impacts of violence on society, solutions to violence, efforts regarding violence in Turkey, and being a male nurse. Among the striking results of the study were that students considered violence with its many dimensions, that they stated that violence could be prevented, that they found that efforts regarding the issue were insufficient in Turkey, and that they stated that important responsibilities for preventing violence against women lay with nurses. Students considered violence and its various dimensions. They felt that violence could be prevented, that the efforts regarding the issue were insufficient in Turkey, and that important responsibilities for preventing violence against women lay with nurses. The views of male nursing students on violence against women are promising as it encourages the empowerment of future nurse professionals, who are expected to be the pioneers of necessary changes in the field of health in order to defend women.

Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability and Political Violence in Turkey

ABSTRACTThe honorific term gazi has a significant place in right‐wing politics in Turkey as a key symbol of Turkish nationalism and Islamism. Historically a title associated with Muslim warriors and Ottoman and Turkish sovereigns, it has gained a renewed visibility in everyday life and politics since the 1990s, when the Turkish state began to bestow this title on disabled veterans returning from the counterinsurgency war in Kurdistan. As the war's toll rose, thousands of young, lower‐class men who were badly wounded during their mandatory military service ended up joining the ranks of the gazis, and their injured lives and honored status would go on to become an important point of nationalist rhetoric and action. In Sacrificial Limbs, Salih Can Açıksöz takes his readers deep into the world of Turkey's contemporary gazis, chronicling diverse aspects of their lives – from their memories of war and traumatic experiences of injury, to their everyday struggles in the intimacy of their homes, at healthcare institutions, at work, and on the streets. Traversing disabled veterans’ social and political networks, Açıksöz lays bare a dangerously fragile masculinity and its constitutive interactions with state sovereignty, neoliberal governmentality, and ultranationalist politicization.

Exposure to Recurring Community Violence Scale: A validity and reliability study in Turkey.

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase in the interest in violence occurring at home or school, as well as in neighborhoods. Yet, there is no standardized instrument to measure community violence in Turkey. Thus, the present study aimed to adapt the Exposure to Recurring Community Violence Scale into Turkish and explore its psychometric properties. The sample consisted of 210 participants (57% were females) between 18 and 64 years (Mage = 38.33, SD = 10.67). For criterion-related validity, we evaluated the participants' scores on the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), the Traumatic Life Events Form, the Relationship Quality Scale, and a Demographic Information Form. We performed all statistical analyses using the FACTOR and SPSS v.20 programs. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a 2-factor structure for the scale (victimization and witnessing), explaining 52% of the total variance. As expected, the witnessing and victimization scores were correlated with the subscales of the BSI, the number of traumatic life events, and the subscales of The Relationship Quality Scale. For reliability concerns, we calculated Cronbach'sαcoefficients to be 0.79 for the victimization and 0.90 for the witnessing. Besides, the findings revealed acceptable psychometric properties for the Turkish version of the Exposure to Recurring Community Violence Scale. Thereby, we concluded that the scale can be used as a reliable and valid measure in the Turkish context. Overall, the scale will likely allow further research to scrutinize the risk factors and consequences of community violence.

Protecting Women from Violence in Turkey: The Contentious Decision to Withdrawing from Istanbul Convention

Abstract The Turkish President formally announced the decision to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) on 20 March 2021. This announcement drew serious intra-national and international reaction. Despite the critiques and protests, the denunciation of the treaty became legally effective by 01 July 2021. This study aims to shed some light on this development mainly from an international law and constitutional law perspective. In this regard, first, the denunciation from an international treaty in general and the Convention in particular will be given from an international law point of view. Next, the national legal outlook will be presented mainly from a constitutional standpoint. Here particular emphasis will be on the new government system in effect since 2018, and the presidential decrees and presidential decisions as important tools of this system. Finally, the study will demonstrate the current situation and project future possibilities.

Seeking safety from male partner violence in Turkey: Toward a context-informed perspective on women's decisions and actions

Women's stay/leave decision-making in violent relationships has become a subject of investigation in psychology over the last few decades. Despite making significant contributions to the understanding of how women's psychological processes shape their responses to violence, much of this research has lacked a contextualized approach. The present study aimed to provide a feminist context-informed examination of women's decision-making and safety-seeking processes. Twelve women who had experiences of violence in their marital relationships were interviewed individually. The study was carried out in Istanbul, Turkey, and all participants were socioeconomically disadvantaged women. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used for the data analysis. The results indicated that women's helplessness, beyond being a psychological construct, was a reality shaped by the conditions of marginalization in their lives. More than being related to the experience of psychological trauma, the women's narratives revealed the disempowering barriers associated with the lack of socioeconomic and institutional resources. Under these circumstances, regardless of their decisions to stay or leave, the women underlined their ongoing strategic efforts to ensure their safety, as mainly strengthened by the relational support available to them.

Gender Politics, Debility, and Violence

Gender Politics, Debility, and Violence Zainab Saleh (bio) books discussed in this essay Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries. By Sherine Hafez. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. By Salih Can Açiksöz. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan. By Sima Shakhsari. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. By Jasbir K. Puar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. in her foundational work on piety, the late scholar Saba Mah-mood critiqued feminist theory for too often perceiving the subject as either constituted through subjugation or as a site of resistance to power.1 Her work examines how devout women in Egypt carved out pious selves by embodying the Islamic virtue of modesty. These women, she explains, drew ”an ineluctable relationship between the norm (modesty) and the bodily form it takes (the veil) such that the veiled body becomes the necessary means through which the virtue of modesty is both created and expressed” (23, emphasis in original). For Mahmood, the question is not whether a norm — modesty — was subverted or enacted, but how it is lived and inhabited. Aiming to move away from the binary of doing and undoing the subject, Mahmood is interested in the different modalities of moral-ethical action, which contribute to the constructions of certain [End Page 557] types of ”subjects whose political autonomy cannot be grasped without applying critical scrutiny to the precise form their embodied actions take.”2 However, Mahmood does not detail how neoliberal reforms or increased militarization of public spaces in Egypt have impacted the construction of pious subjectivity or the formation of gendered bodies. Her work focuses on the individual’s efforts to define a pious self. In the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East, influenced in part by interventions such as Mahmood’s, have begun to pay attention to questions of gender and embodiment in relation to broader political contexts. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar argue that this new literature approaches the body in relation to colonial, medical, and modern projects of subject formation and ethical engagement.3 Farha Ghannam and Sherine Hamdy, for example, approach embodiment and piety by situating Egyptian body politics within neoliberal reforms and the privatization of health care, staggering inequality, the management of toxic waste, and increased surveillance and police brutality. Hamdy explores the religious and medical debates over body integrity related to organ donation and brain death [End Page 558] through the lens of bioethics.4 Meanwhile, Ghannam employs Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis— that is, the ways that bodies reflect their socioeconomic positions — to show how men in Egypt embody a masculine self that is not individual but constructed by both men and women under evolving economic, social, political, and religious norms.5 Here, masculinity is embodied and materialized through different regimes of governmentality, including the family, the community, the school, the military, the state, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. These works emphasize how the state — whether through neoliberal reforms, increased police brutality and surveillance, or failure to deal with toxic waste — shapes the body by producing it as a site of governance and violence. In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar offers a new reading of the role of the state in shaping bodies through debility or through bodily injury and social exclusion engendered by political and economic realities. The state perceives bodies as sites of intervention in order to debilitate and govern them. Puar critiques disability studies, which often uses a universalistic human rights framing of the usefulness and uselessness of the body, for its failure to consider the specificity of location and the ways that bodies defy identities (xiv). Puar calls attention to how postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and Indigenous studies have long examined the impacts of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and environmental degradation in producing disability and debility for certain populations. To Puar, connecting critical race theory and postcolonial studies with disability studies unveils the fact that while many bodies might not be labeled as disabled...

The Long-Overlooked Gender Inequality Problem in Turkey

Gender inequality can be traced back to social and legal conventions. It could manifest itself in the form of unequal economic opportunity, educational access, and decision-making processes. When roles are divided based on gender, men and women will have different access to resources within them. Fisheries, water, and agriculture are examples of such resources. GBV has always been used or employed to preserve such a power imbalance, according to evidence. Expectations and conventions in society have been ruthlessly enforced. These have only served to exacerbate the issue of gender inequality. The focus of this study will be on gender-based violence in Turkey. Since the 1980s, this has been included in the state’s agenda and that of civil society organizations. There is also need for gender politics to be focused on. Violence against women is an issue that needs to be taken seriously. This is because it is not just a criminal act but can also have some economic and social implications. When a culture adopts gender norms that are considered inflexible, there is always the issue of visible imbalance between men and women. There is a significant issue or challenge that has hampered the analysis of domestic violence in Turkey. This study takes a critical look at the topic in this regard. In addition to the neglect of this problem in Turkey, women have been left behind in education, employment, the language of violence against women in the media, the insufficient law is both effective and worrying in the domestic violence problem in Turkey.

A Critical Assessment of Turkey’s Positive Obligations in Combatting Violence against Women: Looking behind the Judgments

Abstract After almost two decades in power, R. T. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have established authoritarian and Islamist governance in Turkey, which has adversely affected gender equality and women’s rights. So much so, that in 2009 the European Court of Human Rights acknowledged that there is a climate conducive to domestic violence in Turkey (Opuz v. Turkey). Despite Erdoğan withdrawing Turkey unconstitutionally from the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention), the government cannot withdraw from the state’s duty to protect its citizens from the criminal acts of private individuals. By using international and regional organisations’ approaches to positive obligations and due diligence as a measure, the article addresses whether Turkey is fulfilling its duty of protecting women from the violent conduct of others. It is concluded that the government is failing in its positive obligations and instead, is reinforcing the climate through its discourse and practices that strengthen a national tolerance of violence against women and the national authorities’ reluctance to address it, thus allowing for impunity of its perpetrators.

Book Reviews

Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 264 pp., (ISBN 9780812251753). Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, 272 pp., (ISBN: 9780520305304). Reviewed by Marlene Schäfers, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Andrew Bush, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, 240 pp., (ISBN: 9781503611436). Reviewed by Metin Atmaca, Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey Mneesha Gellman, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, 226 pp., (ISBN: 9781138597686). Reviewed by Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Siena College, United States Seevan Saeed, Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK, London and New York: Routledge, 2017, 150 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-138-19529-5 (hbk); 978-1-315-63848-5 (ebk)). Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter, Tennessee Technological University Mohammedali Yaseen Taha, Media and Politics in Kurdistan. How Politics and Media are Locked in an Embrace, London: Lexington, 2020, 145 pp., (ISBN: 9781793611031). Reviewed by Kerem Schamberger, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Yiannis Kanakis, "God First and Last": Religious Traditions and Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume I: Religious Traditions, by Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. XIV+188 pp., (ISBN 9783447114240). Reviewed by Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, Netherlands Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini, The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political changes and Migration, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 229 pp., (ISBN 978-981-15-2634-3). Reviewed by Hamidreza Nikravesh, Free University of Berlin, Germany Mohammed Ihsan, Nation building in Kurdistan: Memory, Genocide and Human Rights, New York: Routledge, 2017, 194 pp., (ISBN: 9781472466792). Reviewed by Ugur Ümit Üngör, NIOD Institute, University of Amsterdam

Book Review: Collective & State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State

Book Review: Collective & State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State