Security and Revolution in the Global City: Young Female Turkish Activists Negotiating ‘Emergency Politics’ Under Surveillance

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Higher education, crises and populist imaginaries: A Turkish case study

Proposal

The global city functions simultaneously as a space for the manifestation of multi-layered and emerging ‘freedoms’ whilst also maintaining a symbolic role as a ‘battlescape’ in the representation and enforcement of state power. This paper explores how this duality of ‘freedoms’ and repression experienced by a group of young Turkish female activists and revolutionaries shapes their logics of action and political expressions in the midst of 21st century ascending authoritarianism. Drawing upon 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I illustrate how the perpetuation of transnational norms of surveillance impact on their conceptions of the ‘political’, the ‘revolutionary’ and ‘emerging politics’ in authoritarian contexts. These are forms of securitisation that echo populist logics of control, modern violence, and strategic unpredictability designed to depoliticise, foster practices of political individualism and fragmentation, leading to a necropolitical state of non-politics (see Mbembe, 2017). Using post-Gezi Uprising activism and university-based activism as a starting point, I argue for the necessity of bridging surveillance studies, the sociology of state knowledge-making and emergencies (Honig, 2009), and critical youth studies to reveal the paradoxes associated with youthful female revolutionary desires to energise novel forms of contemporary political action in times of intractable personal monitoring.

As Mohanty (2011) argues, the omnipresence of the security apparatus, seen through the spread throiugh new modalities of surveillance in the global city serve to normalise both security practices and public security anxiety, leading to forms of bio-militarisation. In this context, the targeted activist enters a state of perpetual political strain, leading to chronic fatigue and burn-out. Significantly, such experiences manifest differently in relation to the classification of the female body in the history of state-making, citizenship, and nation-building. In this way, the body represents a ‘site of memory’ (Nora, 1989) in which the state projects and/or channels its visions of the ideal citizen through security practices that reify past hierarchies and challenge new forms of political expression. These divergences in state crackdowns serve to divide activists and catalyse renewed negotiations of belonging within political spheres of resistance. Diminishing levels of social trust, further exacerbated through neoliberalising economic conditions, also challenge the potential of collective action, whilst simultaneously igniting new conversations around intersectional oppressions felt both within the wider social boundaries of the state, and within activist circles. Consequently, I ask: what kinds of alternative political knowledges are developed within the Turkish national context and with what kinds of consequences for the young female revolutionary? And what forms of political education are in place through ascending authoritarianism and political dissent?

Author

• Lakshmi Sagarika Bose, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education