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theses

My dissertation project is an ethnographic examination of the controversial civilian trials of military officers accused of treason and coup plotting in contemporary Turkey. Since 2008, hundreds of officers of the Turkish Armed Forces have been on trial in multiple cases with allegations ranging from forming a terrorist organization within the state to leaking of state secrets for purposes of military espionage and plotting a coup to overthrow the government. Controversial from beginning to end, the trials of these military officers have been unprecedented in the country’s history where the military has had persistent involvement in politics with rather strong legal immunity. The trials, therefore, constitute a momentous attempt to challenge the military’s legitimacy and debunk its authority. Yet, despite being portrayed as a switch from a historically pervasive military exceptionalism to the rule of law, the whole process has been enmeshed in a web of legal complexity with unclear allegations, multiple waves of police operations, internments and arrests of hundreds of people, and indictments totaling thousands of pages of documents. My dissertation focuses on one of these cases in particular–the Sledgehammer coup trial, an alleged coup plot dating back to 2003, in which 365 officers were indicted in 2010, all of whom were later acquitted in 2015 (despite initially being sentenced to 16-20 years in prison) due to the presence of fabricated evidence. Aiming to capture the tension between a historically pervasive military exceptionalism and the notion of the rule of law, as well as the actors caught between that tension, my dissertation project analyzes what the trials have meant for the military members who, once privileged representatives of the state often situated outside and above civilian legal frameworks, have had to step into the public arena and grapple with their social downfall in multiple realms. Through an eighteen-month ethnographic research that goes from the courtroom and prison to the public protests on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, and from the private opinion of military officers in good standing to the disrupted lives of the families of the accused servicemen and the public reaction against them, this dissertation project analyzes how, and to what effect, the rhetoric of the rule of law can become a tool to dismantle militaries, revert the exceptional status under which they operate, and in so doing, rearticulate the nation anew.

ETD_8822

doi:10.7282/T35X2DCM

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Senem Kaptan

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.