War on Drugs: A View From Turkey

• In Event: 2229 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #14

Abstract

In February 2018, the AKP government announced its “2018-2023 Five Year Activity Plan and Strategy Document for Fight Against Drugs,” rearticulating its commitment to the ongoing war on drugs. In one of the public messages about the strategy, a government official proclaimed that it would be “equal to the war on terror.” The issue of drugs and the state responses to drugs might be seen as a criminal problem, thus marginal to contemporary authoritarianism in Turkey. This paper argues that, contrary to this perspective, the war on drugs is about the expansion of state capacities in the criminalization and penalization of “problem populations.” It explores how the war on drugs is bound up with the consolidation of authoritarian state forms first through excavating the sources available to illustrate the elements and dimensions of the war on drugs in Turkey, delineating the new repertoire of force it produces. Then it draws from emerging ethnographic studies from Turkey’s cities, as well as the literature on other geographies where wars on drugs have been waged, to understand the dynamics, functions, and the role of war on drugs in regulating and containing particular populations, and in reinforcing the state capacities to control political resistance.

Author

• Zeynep Gonen, Framingham State University