Having signed the Academics for Peace petition in January 2016, Ayşe was fired twice from her academic job as a lecturer at a university in Turkey. Dismissed from her job immediately after signing the petition by her rector, she then applied for a European fellowship for academics at risk. A few days after her arrival in her country of refuge later that year, she learnt of her second purging, this time by government decree: while in exile, she had become a KHK’lı. Her new purged status made her life in exile more fragile and less secure because it entailed the cancellation of her passport. The temporary working visa she had obtained with her now-cancelled passport was approaching its expiration date, putting her at risk in the very country where she had sought refuge and protection from violations to her internationally mandated civil, cultural, economic, political, and social human rights. Given the dire situation that she faced as a purged citizen should she return to Turkey, including unemployability, stigmatisation as a terrorist, and legal proceedings against her, one of the ‘safest’ options was to apply for asylum. Although she was aware of the deplorable conditions asylum seekers endure in her host country, she considered it as an option simply because it offered safety. But her NGO-supported fellowship would be cut short should she apply for asylum. This second purging by government decree presented her with a terrible dilemma: she could set out on the cruel asylum seeker route, which would allow her to stay in her host country, albeit with an uncertain future, or she could return to Turkey once her fellowship ended and become one of the purged ‘civic dead’ in her own home. As she put it,

Another person purged by emergency decree who relocated to a European country after signing the Academics for Peace petition in 2016, Leyla, was also purged twice: first by her rector and several months later by government decree. Although hesitant to leave Turkey, she changed her mind when she received a fellowship to finish writing up her PhD. She packed her bags and took up her new residence in Europe. But in our interviews, she emphasised how she had lost her sense of belonging because of her immigration status, which provides her only with temporary protection from the Turkish state.

This sense of unbelonging as a result of the fragile and temporary nature of their living conditions was echoed by another interviewee who was also purged while on sabbatical in a European country.

He choked up, and his eyes filled with tears when talking about his temporary, short-term immigrant status:

In Turkey, the discourse surrounding national security and state survival has played an important role in shaping protection policies and fostering authoritarian tendencies. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ruling AKP, the government has consistently used a discourse centred on the concept of state security and survival to justify a variety of policies and practices that have raised concerns about the erosion of human rights principles and the consolidation of authoritarian power. This discourse frequently points up internal and external threats, including terrorism and geopolitical instability, framed as existential threats to the Turkish state, thus aiding the government in enacting emergency measures, crackdowns on society, and deprivation of basic human rights in the name of protecting the state and its institutions. The litany of perceived threats to the state extends beyond the traditional security concerns of terrorism and regional conflict to include more nebulous dangers such as those allegedly posed by people dismissed by government decree without due process or by refugees who constantly face the risk of deportation under temporary migration status. The AKP’s broadened understanding of what constitutes a security threat has resulted in increased vulnerability for larger segments of the population, facilitating their criminalisation.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. It investigates the logic of protection animating the AKP’s new securitisation technologies and enumerates its impact on citizens and residents in three sections. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu) from various threats emanating from outside and inside. The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees and asylum seekers as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged by emergency decree after the 2016 coup attempt as ‘dangerous insiders’ and the consequences for the state’s obligation to protect them. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces (private paramilitary security forces, night watchmen (bekçiler), and village guards (köy koruculuğu)) that have come to supplement conventional security services (the police, the gendarmerie, and the National Intelligence Service (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, hereafter MİT)), and how they are also protected by enhancements to the entrenched culture of impunity. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation’, and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimises via a discourse of terrorism insecurity whereby the polity is made to feel under constant threat from ever new sources emanating both from outside and inside Turkey. The AKP achieves this by constantly identifying new groups as ‘threats’ in need of securitisation. This chapter looks specifically at the outsider category of refugees and asylum seekers and the catch-all insider category of the post-2016 KHK’lı, a group of some 152,000 citizens purged by emergency decree (European Commission 2019, 4). This constantly multiplying threat gives rise to the urgent sense that increasing numbers of the nation’s citizens and foreign ‘guests’ must be securitised if the state is to survive.

Protection of the State and the Technologies of Terrorism (In)Security

Throughout the Turkish Republic’s history, the protection of the state has taken precedence over the protection of citizens’ fundamental rights and lives. While the referent object of security (the state) has not changed, the referent subject of security (the entity designated as posing the threat) has undergone slight modifications. To tease out the logic of protection animating the AKP’s state survival discourse, I focus first on an historical genealogy of the discourse, emphasising how various governments and putschists have abused it to exert political pressure on society. I then look at how the AKP government has used a discourse of urgent state insecurity due to threats emanating both from outside and from inside to create a new threat inside the state: those purged after the 2016 coup attempt.

The primary goal of security in Turkey has long been the protection of the state. Since the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, Turkey’s ethno-religious minorities have been targeted and repressed by the state’s modern security order based on the discourse of a ‘threat from within’. In the early Republican period, ethno-religious minorities like Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and non-Muslims were the target of persecution; in the 1970s and 1980s, Kurds, leftists, ‘anarchists’, and ‘separatists’; in the 1990s, the Kurds and Alevis dominated Turkish security politics (Alemdaroglu and Göçek Reference Alemdaroglu and Göçek2023; Cizre Reference Cizre and Kasaba2008; Göçek Reference Göçek2011; Ünlü Reference Ünlü2016). With the launch of anti-terror military operations led by the USA, the UK, and their allies, and the rise of the global anti-terror campaign in the early 2000s, Turkey has labelled any organisation deemed a danger to national security as ‘terrorists’. Yet, throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, the state has remained the referent object to be protected.

This state survival discourse has been used by successive Turkish governments and putschists to exert political pressure and legitimise state of emergency measures and rights violations. According to earlier versions of the ‘threat from within’ discourse, what must first be secured is not the Turkish people but the state, understood as the hegemonic spiritual embodiment of the Turkish (ethno-)nation. As a result, Turkish securitisation logics have never offered sufficient protection to all citizens’ human rights. To wit, the persistence of Turkish military assaults in Kurdish areas and the systemic political persecution of ethnic minorities and groups critical of the Turkish state. Historically, the state’s repressive impact on society has been maintained through a security discourse that stresses the urgent need for intervention against external and internal enemies who are imagined as waiting in ambush to attack or invade (Adisonmez and Onursal Reference Adisonmez and Onursal2020). Following its 1918 defeat in the First World War, the War of Independence against foreign occupation of the Ottoman Empire, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres that sought to carve up the empire between foreign powers, and its emergence as a nation-state in 1923, the Turkish state has been concerned with its own survival. Referred to in the literature as the ‘Sèvres Syndrome’, this fear of being encircled by enemies from without has made the state’s survival the primary referent object of Turkey’s security.

The preservation of the Turkish state prevails over any number of ever-emergent problems and always requires urgent intervention. Often combined with a discourse on the ‘threat from without’, this ‘threat from within’ discourse is mobilised in order to divide the population of Turkey into the sub-populations to be targeted for repression (Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities, namely, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Alevis, among others) and the core population deemed to be Turkey’s true ‘citizenry’ to be protected (the majority Sunni Turkish population). Political scientist Barış Ünlü (Reference Ünlü2016) has convincingly demonstrated that a nationalist aspect of Turkish identity constructs politics. In the early period of the Turkish Republic, he argues, the so-called Muslimness contract, which granted Muslims certain privileges over non-Muslim communities during the Ottoman era, was transformed into a ‘Turkishness contract’ at the beginning of the Turkish Republic. Since then, the Turkishness contract has been used by Kemalist elites and bureaucrats against the Kurdish movement.

As a fundamentally nationalist idea, Turkish identity has been based on a social contract designed to strengthen and safeguard ‘Turkishness’ over the identities of non-Turkish minorities.

The protection logic of a doubled threat from both outside and inside was expanded in the 1970s and after the 1980 coup to include ‘anarchists’ and ‘separatists’ (Cizre Reference Cizre and Kasaba2008), further sub-dividing the population to be protected to exclude political dissenters. Since 2013, the year of the Gezi Park protests and the break between the Gülenist community and the AKP, the government has expanded this discourse of a threat from outside and inside to include ‘cocktail terrorism’ (Akkoyunlu and Öktem Reference Akkoyunlu and Öktem2016) – ‘terror operations’ allegedly carried out by various organisations working in concert. After the 2016 coup attempt, the government used extra-legal data collection and digital surveillance to target the suspected Gülenist community and other groups and individuals deemed part of cocktail terrorism: Kurds, who have long been targeted and prosecuted (Çelik Reference Çelik2013, 39, 43), and the AKP’s erstwhile political rivals, including leftists, union activists, and the entire spectrum of opposition – even the Republic’s founding party, the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (hereafter CHP).

Until recently, the main groups accused of terrorism were leftists and the Kurdish community. The latter were subjected to mass displacement, widespread arrests and detentions, the banning of pro-Kurdish political parties such as the People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, hereafter HDP), and ongoing military operations in the south-eastern Kurdish area of Turkey (Cizre Reference Cizre and Kasaba2008). Until 2013, the AKP government and the Gülenist movement shared similar Islamist, nationalist, and pro-business principles. The AKP assisted the Gülenist community in strengthening their power and presence in bureaucracy and public administration by placing Gülenist cadres in critical positions in public service. However, the AKP–Gülenist alliance disintegrated in 2012 when the Gülenist police force targeted the powerful head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan, then Director of the MİT, one of Erdoğan’s closest allies (Winter Reference Winter2016). As a result, the Gülenist movement, which held onto a shadowy presence in the military and civilian bureaucracy, was added in 2013 to the list of ‘terrorist groups’ accused of undermining the state’s national security.

The AKP’s former ally, the Gülenist movement now became the prime terrorist suspect, accused of having masterminded the attempted coup d’état. To seal the legal and official discourse on the Gülenist threat, the AKP chose two new names for the movement: ‘Fetullah Terrorist Organisation’ (Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü) and ‘Parallel State Organisation’ (Paralel Devlet Yapılanması), often abbreviated together as FETÖ/PDY.

After the coup attempt of 2016, the AKP implemented a divide-and-rule strategy, maintaining that an immediate state of emergency was required and redefining the nation’s main threat as cocktail terrorism (Erdoğan Reference Erdoğan2016). At the same time, the construction of ‘terrorism’ expanded to include political dissidents and those who disagreed with the AKP. This is evidenced by a change in the language used in emergency decrees. The first four emergency decrees to include citizen’s names for purging issued after the 2016 attempted coup – Emergency Decree Laws no. KHK/667 (23 July 2016), no. KHK/668 (27 July 2016), no. KHK/669 (31 July 2016), and no. KHK/670 (17 August 2016) – begin with the following article:

Yet, from the issuance on 7 August 2016 of Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/671 on Digital Communication, all references to the ‘Fethullah Terrorist Organisation’ were replaced by the general term ‘terrorist organisations’.² The pretext for purging cited in the decrees is particularly telling in that they refer overwhelmingly to the ‘state’s national security’. In each emergency decree, the security of a state under threat is used as a pretext to indiscriminately and without evidence curb protection of a broad swathe of citizens’ fundamental rights. Indeed, all decrees issued after the 2016 attempted coup justify the urgent use of extra-legal methods immediately following the law’s publication by stressing the need to protect the state.

As the referent object of terrorism was expanded following the attempted coup from the usual suspects (the Kurds, leftists, and opposition) to the new category of cocktail terrorism (aka Gülenists), it grew into a witch hunt against journalists, writers, teachers, academics, peaceful protesters, civil society activists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and opponents of the AKP government. Erdoğan frames those purged for allegedly having associated with the Gülenists as having been ‘misled and deceived’, publicly circulating a victimisation narrative in which citizens were betrayed by the Gülenists movement:

The government claimed that these people had been targeted because the state had become vulnerable. The so-called FETÖ/PDY had infiltrated the state from inside in order to destabilise and overthrow the AKP government.

This narrative about the persecution of AKP government rule went hand in hand with a persistent emphasis on the mortal dangers facing the state, both of which were posited as victims. At the New Security Concept for Turkey conference (Türkiye’nin Yeni Güvenlik Konsepti), organised a few months after the attempted coup, Erdoğan again stressed that ‘FETÖ/PDY is still in the Turkish Armed Forces and the state … We will make life unbearable for them’ (NTV 2016). To justify its use of state of emergency and extra-legal measures, the AKP articulates its protection logic by positing itself as a victimised state at risk.

The definition of terrorism included in the first article of Law no. 3713 on Anti-terror, enacted in 1991, illustrates how the law is intended first and foremost to safeguard the state apparatus.

With the coup attempt of 2016 came an altogether new threat to the state – a threat that was said to have emanated from ‘within the state’ itself (Erdoğan Reference Erdoğan2016). Even after the state of emergency was lifted on 19 July 2018, the AKP government was adamant about the threat’s ongoing nature to the state and the government’s consequent obligation to impose new laws and implement permanent security measures. These further adjustments to Turkish legislation and political and social life were enacted within the inexorable and time-tested logic of the internal enemy in the services of protecting the unitary state, now considered at risk from a threat from within its own institutions. The modifications to the anti-terror laws implemented in the aftermath of the coup attempt are striking in that they highlight the extent of the AKP’s legislative abuse.

Legal scholar Faruk Turinay (Reference Turinay2015) has studied the use of the term ‘terror’ in the Turkish Penal Code (Türk Ceza Kanunu).⁴ Turinay notes that the law related to the crime of involvement in a terrorist organisation – Article 7 on ‘terrorist organisations’ of Law no. 3713 on Anti-terror enacted in 1991 – was significantly amended in 2006 with Amendment Law no. 5532 such that the scope was gradually widened to make it possible to prosecute increasingly more people and organisations as terrorists, and the penalties for planning, managing, or being a member of a terrorist organisation were gradually redefined and their severity was increased (69, 70, 72). The 2006 amendment refers to two different types of organisations defined in the Turkish Penal Code: ‘terrorist organisations’ and ‘armed organisations’ (see Article 314 of Law no. 5237 on the Turkish Penal Code). In Law no. 3713 on Anti-terror, however, these two distinct organisation types have been combined, it is assumed that terrorist organisations can only operate with weapons. According to Turinay, this latest definition of a ‘terrorist organisation’ as an ‘armed organisation’ is confusing because while terrorist organisations are armed organisations, not all armed organisations are terrorist organisations (81). In addition, the law is against the principle of legality that requires laws to be clear and consistent (77).

A recent study on prison sentences in Turkey documents the problem of mass incarceration: the rate of remanded and convicted prisoners per 100,000 people has increased from 75 in 2000 to 283 in 2017, representing a 272 per cent increase in the proportion of incarcerated people over seventeen years (Akdeniz, Elveriş, and Alpan Reference Akdeniz, Elveriş and Alpan2019, 7–8). The effect of such legislative changes on conviction rates in the criminal courts reveals one of the most relevant features of the Turkish case: the extensive use of terrorism charges to persecute dissidents and criminalise political opposition. Indeed, the use of terrorism charges against political opposition, civil society groups, activists, and dissidents distinguishes Turkey from other authoritarian countries. According to the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics report for 2020, Turkey claimed 97.71 per cent of the total number of prisoners accused of terrorism: 29,827 out of the 30,524 total prisoners accused of terrorism in Europe (Aebi and Tiago Reference Aebi and Tiago2021, 51–52).

In Turkey, because the judiciary typically supports the government, the lack of the principle of legality enables systemic misuse of anti-terror laws. Since December 2017, when 2,212 academics signed the Academics for Peace petition calling on the government to halt military operations in the Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey and restart peace negotiations, 822, more than one-third, have been tried on charges of terrorism propaganda.⁵ Although detailed information concerning the conviction rate for those purged by emergency decree after the 2016 coup attempt is lacking (Human Rights Watch 2010), recent upwards trends demonstrate Turkey’s authoritarian turn and its (mis)use of terrorism-related charges to silence students, writers, journalists, and others critical of the government.

Turkey also abuses and overuses the international police agency Interpol’s arrest warrants. The instrumentalisation of Interpol red notices – the most consequential of member state requests to international law enforcement agencies to locate and arrest a person wanted by a legal jurisdiction or international tribunal – to apply terrorism charges en masse to tens of thousands of people has resulted in the persecution of political dissidents and violation of their human rights. This has prompted Interpol’s Notices and Diffusions Task Force to investigate the more than 80,000 arrest warrants submitted to Interpol by Turkey for political abuse (France24 2019; Topcu Reference Topcu2019). This frequent resort to the ‘terrorist’ label and to the criminalisation of political dissidence via anti-terror laws differs from earlier judicial means of making the friend-enemy distinction (Dillon Reference Dillon2007, 24). What distinguishes current practices is that it allows the government to apply significant pressure on individuals by labelling them as a threat to society in need of immediate and urgent intervention. To suppress the opposition, the Turkish judiciary suspends the presumption of innocence, applies long pre-trial detention times, sentences those targeted to longer prison terms, and places them under closer surveillance. Pre-trial detention is designed primarily for cases where the suspect is a flight risk and poses an imminent threat to society. Yet, in the Turkish case, pre-trial detention is widely applied: although the post-coup attempt state of emergency ended on 19 July 2018, according to Ministry of Justice data, as of 31 August 2019 approximately 58,000 people remained in pre-trial detention without having been charged or criminally convicted (Cupolo Reference Cupolo2019). A case in point is the politically motivated terrorism charges brought against prominent philanthropist Osman Kavala, who was placed in custody on 18 October 2017 on suspicion of having financed the Gezi Park protests five years earlier in 2013. Although the initial charges were for ‘supporting terrorism’ and ‘attempting to overthrow the government’, he was later accused of ‘political or military espionage’, apparently to effect his detention. On 25 April 2022, the Istanbul 13th Assize Court sentenced Kavala to life in prison without parole. The gravity of the charge of terrorism justifies the court’s decision to detain those targeted indefinitely.

The rationale for branding tens of thousands of citizens with the terrorist label is to communicate the message that terrorist attacks might occur at any time and in any place. The purges produce terrorists as an ever-present and unpredictable threat that requires immediate action. The direct coupling of the ‘terrorist’ label with individual citizens circulates publicly in new decrees and regulations, in pro-government media outlets, and on social media platforms. To get a sense of the extent and socio-political effect of this purposively public blacklisting of those accused of terrorism, consider the government’s public announcement and circulation in print and online of the names and details of those purged. As a formal part of its emergency decrees following the attempted coup, the government published both in print and online the personal details of some 152,000 purged citizens in Turkey’s official journal, the Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey (Resmi Gazete), listing their names, affiliations, job titles, work registration numbers, and in some decrees, their district and city of work. The decrees were typically announced on a Friday evening, without prior notice or known investigation of those being targeted for emergency decree purging. Since their publication as part of the emergency decrees of 2016–2018, the names and personal details of those purged are still available online and in print. In January 2017, when the state of emergency was still in force, the government set up the State of Emergency Inquiry Commission (Olağanüstü Hal İşlemleri İnceleme Komisyonu, hereafter OHAL Commission) to review all measures implemented during the state of emergency (Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/685; Law no. 7075 on State of Emergency Inquiry Commission). The Commission’s remit included a review of those purged by emergency decree. While the OHAL Commission has since exonerated some purged citizens, lifting their ban from public service and allowing them to return to work, their names and details are still available online and in print – in the decree laws published in Turkey’s Official Gazette, in news articles, and on social media – effectively extending their stigmatisation as terrorists indefinitely. These labels also circulate in the pro-government media. In January 2016, immediately following the public announcement of the Academics for Peace petition by its signatories, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Akit released more than 1,100 first signatories’ names in their print edition (BirGün 2016a). In July 2017, a year and a half later, Yeni Akit aggressively targeted the signatories in a news item entitled ‘Who protects these academics?’ (Yeni Akit 2017). The newspaper alleged that only a few had been purged by emergency decree and called for all of the petition signatories to be immediately purged. Pro-government media outlets also published the names of those purged after the attempted coup in July 2016 (Sabah 2017; Yeni Şafak 2018), singling out some for defamation in provocative news items.

The public disclosure of the names and details of those purged also works to shape the social construction of ‘terrorism’ and a ‘terrorist’ within society, generating social agreement around their public labelling as disposable citizens. In response to public outcries concerning purged citizens’ lack of access to livelihood, a provincial head from the AKP party was reported to have said of them, ‘Let them eat tree roots’ (Hürriyet 2016b). Not only have the AKP’s emergency decrees left those purged without wage employment, they have also stripped them of their basic civic and political rights and freedoms. Before local elections on 31 March 2019, the government appealed to the Supreme Election Council (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu) that would declare those purged ineligible to vote or stand for election. Although the Council rejected the government’s request to rule purged citizens ineligible to vote, it did determine that the electoral mandates of victorious candidates who had been purged by emergency decree should be revoked (Deutsche Welle Türkçe 2019a, 2019b).

One of my interviewees, a disabled teacher from a small town in Turkey who learnt of his purging in 2016 while he was at work, described the impact of being a disposable citizen had on his life:

The overuse and misuse of anti-terror laws to criminalise citizens as terrorists paves the way for the political repression of dissidents and activists and the deprivation of their basic civic and human rights. Academic and political analyst Ahmet İnsel (Reference İnsel2011) notes that the political aim of classifying citizens as terrorists is to destroy the social and political legitimacy of all those considered by the government to be objectionable or undesirable, including a wide range of political opponents and citizens who disapprove of government policies and projects. There are numerous examples of citizens being criminalised as terrorists: In 2015, agricultural labourers resident in the Black Sea town of Zile in Tokat Province protested the construction of three hydroelectric power plants on the Çekerek River. When Zile’s AKP mayor, Lütfi Vidinel, accused the protesters of being ‘terrorists’, the local district attorney immediately launched a prosecution suit against them, alleging multiple charges, including ‘resisting public servants’, ‘restricting the right to transportation’, ‘damaging property’, ‘restricting the right to work’, ‘causing harm intentionally’, ‘violating the law on demonstrations’, ‘insulting’, and ‘threatening’ (T24 2015). President Erdoğan himself regularly accuses his opposition of being ‘terrorists’. Exclaiming in 2021, ‘She is a DHKP-C militant!’ (Deutsche Welle Türkçe 2021a), Erdoğan sought to criminalise physician Canan Kaftancıoğlu, the party president of Istanbul for Turkey’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (hereafter CHP), a secularist Kemalist party founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that ruled as the Republic’s sole party until 1945. By associating Kaftancıoğlu with a violent insurgency group, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (Devrimci Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi, hereafter DHKP-C), Erdoğan also sought to taint the CHP with the terror of association. During the local elections in 31 March 2019, Erdoğan targeted the Nation Alliance (Millet İttifakı) electoral bloc, made up of four opposition parties including the CHP and the Good Party (İyi Parti) by accusing them of being connected with terrorism (Deutsche Welle Türkçe 2021a). In a speech one month ahead of the elections, he used a play on words to brand them as recalcitrant threats: ‘The Contempt Alliance (Zillet İttifakı) intends to place people associated with terrorist organisations on city councils’ (Deutsche Welle Türkçe 2021a). Then, in a public opening ceremony in Ankara, Erdoğan characterised the upcoming local elections as a ‘state survival election’.

Before the election, Erdoğan personally targeted Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, in a public speech in Izmir, alleging that Kılıçdaroğlu was associating with terrorist organisations such as the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê):

In their securitisation practices, the AKP government achieves this association of the opposition with ‘terrorism’ by positing a duality between desirables/acceptables and undesirables/objectionables. Yet, what is striking about Erdoğan’s speeches is that he not only associates terrorists with the opposition, he also associates the opposition with jeopardising the state’s survival. In an interview on CNN Türk in the run-up to the election, Erdoğan framed Turkey’s greatest risk to the state as the relationship between the state’s survival and the opposition, positing a link between the Turkish opposition and the YPG/PYD, the People’s Defence Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel), a Kurdish militia and political party in Syria.

Running like a red thread through Turkey’s securitisation logics concerning the various threats emanating from external enemies, from within society, and from within the state itself, is the state, security’s primary referent object, which must be protected at all costs. This fact that the state is prioritised over the people within Turkey’s securitisation logic is evident in the repeated use of state of emergency rule: the 1960, 1971, and 1980 coups, the 1994–2002 OHAL ‘super region’, the 1997 military memorandum, and the 2016 attempted coup. With each suspension of constitutional and fundamental guarantees via a state of emergency, police security has displaced juridical security. But in the new era of securitisation techniques, such suspensions of basic rights have yielded something new.

In essence, the AKP reasons that the duty of protecting the state transcends the political rights of parties and the fundamental human rights of citizens, thereby necessitating extra-legal security measures. Replying to international criticism about the severity of the 2016 state of emergency measures, Numan Kurtulmuş, then AKP deputy chairman, put it starkly: ‘We declared the state of emergency in order to protect the Turkish Republic’s state from the coup plotters and to guarantee the future of our nation’ (Akan Reference Akan2016). Responding in 2017 to national and international criticisms of the purging of some 152,000 public servants by emergency decrees, Binali Yıldırım, then prime minister, expressed the AKP consensus about the risks involved: ‘We might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater [kurunun yanında yaş da yanıyor olabilir]. There are mistakes, but the error rate is not very high’ (Diken 2017b). According to a recent opinion poll from KONDA, a research consultancy company, 56 per cent of the Turkish population believe that ‘state security comes before individual rights’, with more than 76 per cent of AKP voters and 71 per cent of MHP voters supporting this notion (KONDA 2019, 44).

In 2017, the state’s internal vulnerability to coups became a pretext for the AKP to change the Constitution. Following a contested referendum, the AKP abolished the office of the prime minister and transformed Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential system by giving the president extraordinarily centralised and expanded executive powers. The expansion of executive powers on the grounds of protecting the state is the source of many subsequent abuses of power, including the large numbers of human rights abuse cases, the suspension of checks and balances, and the re-organisation of government bodies, legislation, and judicial authority, all of which have contributed to the institutional consolidation of authoritarianism by the AKP.

While the AKP legitimises its authoritarian power-grab by wielding the discourse of state survival, the main opposition party has criticised neither that discourse’s pre-eminence nor the excessive use of state of emergency decrees. On 7 August 2016, a few weeks after the coup attempt, President Erdoğan organised a Democracy Watch anti-coup rally in the Yenikapı quarter of Istanbul together with the participation of religious leaders and two opposition parties: the main opposition party of the CHP and the Nationalist Movement Party (BBC Türkçe 2016). Before an audience of more than a million people, President Erdoğan declared that if Parliament passed legislation permitting the death sentence, he would approve it. Capital punishment, Erdoğan argued, should probably be used in the case of the separatist militant, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader imprisoned in a maximum-security facility since 1999. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu then chimed in, ‘When it comes to the homeland, the rest is only details’ (BBC Türkçe 2016). But the rally, Erdoğan then stressed, was not for all parliamentary parties. They had not invited the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, the HDP, because it was not committed to Erdoğan’s slogan, ‘One nation, one flag, one homeland, one state’ (Tek millet, tek bayrak, tek vatan, tek devlet).

Before the AKP era – that is, before 2002 – the state survival discourse based on the Turkishness contract that granted Turks certain privileges over non-Turk minorities was utilised primarily by a Kemalist bureaucracy and set of elites. The AKP has since translated that older discourse into a new rendering, advertised through the frequent repetition of the AKP slogan ‘One nation, one flag, one homeland, one state’ by the president and other government officials. Yet here, too, there has been a shift. In 2012, when Erdoğan was still prime minister, before the country’s contested constitutional change to a presidential system, the slogan’s four elements were ‘one nation, one flag, one religion, one state’ (Evrensel 2012). After the attempted coup, ‘one religion’ was replaced by ‘one homeland’ (Presidency of the Republic of Turkey 2017), a shift that has coincided with the frequent invocation by President Erdoğan of the survival of the state.

The contents of a tweet from President Erdoğan’s official Twitter account posted on 11 March 2019 are revealing in that they represent an attempt by the president to fix the meaning of each term in his slogan to a particular meaning:

Pro-government media outlets also circulate the slogan. The Daily Sabah (2015) published a picture of Erdoğan at his desk sporting a sculpture of a hand making the Muslim Brotherhood’s rabia sign with his slogan’s expressions written on each finger: ‘One nation, one flag, one homeland, one state’ (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Picture of President Erdoğan with a small sculpture of a hand making the rabia sign with his slogan’s expressions written on each finger: ‘One nation, one flag, one homeland, one state’.

(Photo by Turkish Presidency/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

In a parliamentary group meeting in 2021, Erdoğan had the members of the AKP party stand up, raise their arms, make the rabia sign, and recite the slogan after him as an oath: ‘One nation. One flag. One homeland. One state’ (Duvar English 2021a). After this, Erdoğan declared, ‘We will be one. We will be great. We will be alive. We will be brothers and sisters. Together, we will be Turkey’ (translation mine).

Adisonmez and Onursal (Reference Adisonmez and Onursal2020) argue that Erdoğan’s slogan furthers the de-politicisation of the coup attempt: ‘AKP cadres actively prevent public contestation and keep the political dimension of the coup at bay’ (304). The slogan has also been used to justify the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation policies via recourse to the paradigm of life or death. ‘One nation’ denotes the Turkish nation in its broader context, which includes its religious body, the ummah. ‘One flag’ denotes the Turkishness contract, which grants Turks certain privileges over non-Turkish minorities, in other words, those often accused of terrorism. ‘One homeland’ references the territorial hegemony of Turkishness. ‘One state’ signifies the sole sovereign as manifest in the unitary state. The slogan thus links together the state survival discourse, the Turkishness contract, and the unity of the Muslim people. The military coup attempt of 2016 presented the AKP government with an ideal justification for all its subsequent human rights abuses, for its suspension of checks and balances, its re-organisation of government bodies, its reform of legislation and judicial authority, and its consolidation of authoritarianism, all on the grounds of protecting the state.

Protection of the Nation and the Technologies of Population Securitisation

Dr Esra Ergüzeloğlu Kilim, an academic in the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Mersin University, signed the Academics for Peace petition in 2016. Fired first in 2017 by Mersin University administrators, she was later banned from public service by government decree in 2018 (Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/701). In an interview with a newspaper, she compared her post-purge life in Germany, to where she fled, to being a Syrian refugee in Turkey: ‘I now live a little bit like a refugee. Like the Syrians in Mersin, During the day, I live with my seven-year-old son, Devrim, in a playground and at night, I sleep at a friend’s house. Devrim is no longer in school, and we don’t even have health insurance here’ (Sendika 2017). Other desperate purged people leave Turkey via illegal routes, exposing themselves to significant risks and dangers along the way, including human trafficking, smuggling, perilous sea crossings, physical violence, and sexual assault. Because the AKP government has cancelled their passports, they face a high risk of becoming stateless if they do not apply for asylum in their host country. They face the same set of adverse circumstances experienced by all asylum seekers in European countries: protracted confinement without adequate legal procedures, family separation, discrimination, harassment, restricted availability of health care services, and violent push-back operations at borders. Others move to Europe on temporary work visas, granting them only momentary stability: the overly restrictive and costly visa regimes and the absence of transparency mean that decisions can be arbitrary and inconsistent (Sertdemir Özdemir Reference Sertdemir Özdemir2021a: 946–947). Subjected to a form of internal banishment and without government authorisation to leave the country, purged exiles find themselves in a state of forced external exile.

Those who remain in Turkey often compare their living conditions with that of refugees (Mağdurlar İçin Adalet Platformu 2019):

Purged individuals who remain in Turkey often point to the similarities between the securitisation of purged people, refugees, and asylum seekers. All have been framed as security threats and have faced the deprivation of basic rights, stigmatisation, criminalisation, social exclusion, and lynching. But there are also significant differences in kind. While refugees and asylum seekers have faced restrictions on their ability to work and access education, and risked deportation and push-backs at the border, purged people who find themselves in exile in their own homeland face citizenship deprivation, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and far graver human rights violations.

To understand how entangled Turkey’s securitisation logics are with its humanitarian interventions and its relations with regional powers, we must compare the securitisation of refugees with purged citizens as threats to the nation from outside and inside. The section begins by looking at how rather than providing refugees and people seeking asylum with a secure environment, Turkey’s humanitarian policies make their lives precarious and prone to instability. It then focuses on how the government uses securitisation policies to transform purged citizens from ordinary citizens into targets for securitisation by converting them into ‘dangerous insiders’.

Protection of the Security Apparatus and the Technologies of Paramilitarisation and Impunity

The focus thus far has been on securitisation policymakers in Turkey: AKP government actors who develop securitisation policies so as to protect themselves and their positions of power. These actors legitimise their authoritarian securitisation policies via recourse to Turkey’s state survival discourse, circulating the idea that such measures are necessary for the survival of the state and the nation, understood as one and the same. This section turns to the transformation of the security forces in relation to the changing securitisation logic in Turkey. Over the past two decades, the AKP has augmented Turkey’s conventional law enforcement agencies composed of the police, the gendarmerie, and the MİT in two fundamentally important ways: it has authorised the establishment of private armed security guard companies, and it has expanded the powers of pre-existent security forces the night watchmen and the village guards. With the diversification of security forces and their visibility on metropolitan street corners, the technologies of surveillance, repression, and control diffuse throughout and across society. To ensure broad effectuation of such control, armed state security agents are offered the protection of immunity even when strong evidence of human rights violations is available.

The use of paramilitary groups as government-sanctioned and -funded security agents is a central aspect of state survival. Since 1990, successive Turkish governments have modified the role of internal security agencies in Turkey (Bedirhanoğlu, Dölek, and Hülagü Reference Bedirhanoğlu, Dölek and Hülagü2016), reflecting the strong influence of global neoliberal trends on security policies (Aas, Gundhus, and Lomell 2016, 7; Bigo Reference Bigo2003; Gros Reference Gros2019, 204–218). Given that standardised global security practices are always appropriated and adapted to local circumstances (Aas, Gundhus, and Lomell Reference Aas, Gundhus, Lomell, Aas, Gundhus and Lomell2008, 8), the global trend of commodifying security apparatuses found fertile ground in Turkey (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2005). As a result of the marketisation of security services in the EU and the integration of Turkey’s security policies that began in 1999 with Turkey’s EU accession process, new security suppliers and private security services have gradually increased in number and expanded their power.

The turning point for private security services in Turkey came in 2004, two years after Erdoğan became prime minister, with the passage of Law no. 5188 on the Private Security Services, allowing for the use of private security services as auxiliary public security forces across Turkey (Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi 2004; Yardımcı and Alemdar Reference Yardımcı and Alemdar2010). Since then, Turkey has developed one of the biggest private security sectors in Europe after Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, in that order; in 2015, spending more than three billion euros annually on private security services (CoESS [Confederation of European Security Services] 2015).

Importantly, some private security services in Turkey have developed as paramilitary and state-led organisations. Former members of regular security forces such as police officers, soldiers, commandos, and intelligence officers have established and managed private security services or have been hired for them (Dölek Reference Dölek2015, 426–429). In 2012, former Brigadier General Adnan Tanrıverdi established a private law enforcement company, SADAT International Defence Consultancy, whose primary aim is to help the ‘Islamic World take the place where it merits among Superpowers by providing Strategic Consultancy, Defense and Security Training and Supply Services to Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces of Islamic Countries’ (sic) (Dölek and Rigakos Reference Dölek and Rigakos2020, 124; Freeman Reference Freeman2020).⁹ After the coup attempt of 2016, Tanrıverdi became chief military adviser to President Erdoğan, remaining in that position until January 2020. Opposition MPs from the CHP and HDP submitted numerous written parliamentary questions concerning allegations of SADAT involvement in the Syrian Civil War and other irregular organisational activities, but no explanation from SADAT was forthcoming (Deutsche Welle Türkçe 2020). By and large, private security sector stakeholders in Turkey are former government officials dedicated to implementing the AKP’s security policies (Dölek and Rigakos Reference Dölek and Rigakos2020, 123–124).

The recent establishment of legal frameworks for paramilitary police has blurred the distinctions between public and private security forces, granting paramilitary groups ever greater authority to control society and carry out political repression. Deployment of pro-government paramilitary forces by the AKP is evidenced in Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/696, issued on 24 December 2017, stipulating that anyone who assisted in thwarting the 15 July coup attempt, terrorist acts, or public protests shall not be subject to legal, administrative, financial, or criminal consequences, regardless of their formal status. With this decree, the government granted amnesty to all those who interfered with the 2016 coup attempt, during which 251 persons died and 2,194 people were injured (Sade Reference Sade2020).

In addition to pro-government paramilitary groups, the state also directly employs other security organisations, notably night watchmen and village guards. Since the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, Turkish governments have sanctioned private paramilitary security groups in the form of Hamidiye cavalry regiments, an armed and irregular cavalry formation deployed in the south-eastern provinces of Ottoman Empire, and village guards (Özar, Uçarlar, and Aytar Reference Özar, Uçarlar and Aytar2013). Ever since the 1985 amendment to and revival of a 1924 law allowing for the formation of temporary village guards (geçici köy korucuları) to protect rural areas against marauding criminal gangs that had sprung up in the security vacuum during the War of Independence – Law no. 442 on Village Affairs – the village guard system (köy koruculuğu sistemi) has operated in the south-eastern Kurdish region (Biner Reference Biner2019a, 9), staffed by both salaried guards and volunteers. The state has also long employed an armed network of local Gendarmerie General Command-aligned anti-PKK paramilitary groups, whose hiring conditions, duties, training, and authorisation to carry firearms was first mandated in 2000 with Regulation Law no. 24096 on the Village Guard System (Özar, Uçarlar, and Aytar Reference Özar, Uçarlar and Aytar2013, 9). In a press conference concerning Turkey’s cross-border military operation in Syria in 2019, then Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu stated that the positions of retiring 18,482 village guards had been filled by their children, brothers, or those who they recommended, and that 54,000 guards then serving in the line of duty would obtain special commando training (T24 2019a). Some village guards have been hired by the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-terror Organisation (Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele) – an organisation whose existence was denied until the 1996 Susurluk scandal revelations about the close relationship between the Turkish mafia and state employees (Söyler Reference Söyler2013, 316–317) – the village guards that have been hired by this organisation engaged in brutal crimes such as ‘unsolved murders, setting villages on fire, evacuation of villages, invasion of fields, murder, rape and drug trafficking’ (Özar, Uçarlar, and Aytar Reference Özar, Uçarlar and Aytar2013, 10).

In 2008, the AKP government announced that it would discontinue another older auxiliary public security force established in the late Ottoman period – the neighbourhood and bazaar night watchmen (Batuman and Erkip Reference Batuman and Erkip2019). But after the failed intervention of 2016, Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/690 reconstituted them. By February 2020, their number had risen to more than 26,000 (BBC Türkçe 2020). With the passing of Law no. 7245 on the Neighbourhood and Bazaar Night Watchmen adopted in the summer of 2020, the Turkish Parliament granted them the authority to carry weapons, access central criminal record databases via mobile tablets, conduct random checks, demand to see identification, conduct pat-down searches, and detain suspects (BirGün 2020c; Gazete Duvar 2020a). Their mounting powers and numbers have resulted in the misuse of force, documented in the national daily newspaper Evrensel (Öztürk Reference Öztürk2020). When a young man taking out the rubbish in the Etimesgut district of Ankara was asked to show his ID but did not have it on him, watchmen used pepper spray on him and beat him. When his parents arrived on the scene, they too were sprayed, and all three were handcuffed and spent a night in detention. In Antalya, watchmen attempted to fine a trans woman while she was walking to her home; when she objected, they beat her violently (Öztürk Reference Öztürk2020).

Batuman and Erkip (Reference Batuman and Erkip2019) argue that it is no coincidence that the redeployment of watchmen in Turkey has come at a time when the use of hidden street and business video surveillance technologies in Turkish cities has increased significantly. The large presence of watchmen on city streets creates a highly visible auxiliary armed police force patrolling, surveilling, and policing metropolitan public space. The revival and empowerment of this security force provides important insights into Turkey’s recent mass profiling technology: once technological surveillance systems are deemed insufficient to the task of guaranteeing security, a need to ‘relativise’ the merits of the traditional armed forces appears (Bigo Reference Bigo2005, 26). They are then made more mobile, facilitating quick responses to security emergencies and blocking resistance and protest. This is exemplified in the case of a peaceful protest by stallholders in Izmir whose open markets were closed; when they demanded a new spot for a market, riot police and watchmen launched a baton charge against them and fired tear gas (BirGün 2018).

Instead of providing security in the form of human safety, the AKP has transformed Turkey’s policing into an intelligence-based exercise in exerting increasing surveillance, control, and repression of society. In 2019, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu cited an average of one police officer per 211 inhabitants and one gendarme per 92 inhabitants in Turkey, whereas in Europe, the average was one police officer per 314 inhabitants (Sayılgan Reference Sayılgan2020). Despite difficulties in calculating Turkey’s security expenditures, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (World Bank 2019; Yentürk Reference Yentürk2019, 27–28), Turkey’s security costs related to the armed forces, defence ministries, paramilitary groups, military operations, and military and civilian staffing have seen an extraordinary rise for the years 2016, 2017, and 2018 (Figure 1.2).¹⁰

Figure 1.2 Turkish security expenditures, 2008–2018 (Turkish lira).

(Data from Yentürk (Reference Yentürk2019), 22–23)

Impunity is another central aspect of state survival. Despite the existence of substantial evidence against them, soldiers, police officers, military personnel, and other security agents who claim to be acting to protect the state are not held accountable for their extra-legal acts. A report by the Istanbul-based Truth Justice Memory Centre (Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi) on Turkey’s impunity culture notes that security personnel accused of human rights violations enjoy both de jure (laws and regulations) and de facto (administrative and judicial interpretations and failures) protection, even for crimes of torture and ill-treatment committed by security officials (Kurt Reference Kurt2014). A report from Amnesty International (2007) indicates that although the AKP government has repeatedly affirmed its strong commitment to a policy of ‘zero tolerance for torture’ (4), security personnel on trial for killings or torture are generally not suspended during investigation and/or trial and are not prevented from receiving promotions (12). The report also notes that official Turkish government statistics on impunity are neither credible nor consistent: sets of figures on the rates of ‘investigation, prosecution, and conviction’ for the crimes of torture and ill-treatment, fatal shootings, and excessive use of force are either contradictory or non-existent (7).

Following the coup attempt, the AKP government bolstered Turkey’s already entrenched culture of impunity for both security personnel and civilians acting to support them. A recent decree law adopted on 24 December 2017 provides legal impunity to individuals ‘whether they have an official title or not, and whether they have carried out official duties or not’ (Article 121 of Emergency Decree Law no. KHK/696). This law aimed to protect both those civilians who clashed with soldiers acting on the part of the coupists during the night of the 2016 coup attempt and authorised security personnel accused of torture and ill-treatment in detention centres and prisons. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Nils Melzer visited Turkey from 27 November to 2 December 2016 – more than four months after the attempted coup – to report on consistent allegations of torture and various forms of ill-treatment. Melzer found evidence of widespread human rights violations following the coup attempt (Melzer Reference Melzer2017, 6): detainees exhibited signs of anguish, distress, and psychological trauma consistent with such abuses, and in some cases the forensic experts found enduring physical signs of ill-treatment, even after the passage of months. The report also notes that despite the ‘large number of allegations and of public reports about the prevalence of torture and other forms of ill-treatment in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup’ (13), complaints about torture and ill-treatment were not investigated, and most victims of torture did not file complaints for of fear of retaliation against them or their families and out of deep distrust of the justice system.

A striking example of the coupling of impunity for excessive use of force with the discourse on state survival and the alleged threat of terror is the case of Kemal Kurkut, a twenty-three-year-old Kurdish student in fine arts at İnönü University who was shot dead by a police officer during the 2017 Newroz celebrations in Diyarbakır (Duvar English 2020b). The incident was photographed by Kurdish journalist Abdurrahman Gök, whose camera the police attempted to tamper with (Duvar English 2020b). The photos of a shirtless Kurkut contradicted police claims that he was a terrorist suicide bomber. The Diyarbakır Seventh High (Assize) Criminal Court (Diyarbakır 7. Ağır Ceza Mahkemesi) subsequently acquitted the police officer of all charges. The photojournalist Gök’s house was raided by police, and he was charged with alleged ‘membership in a terrorist organisation’ and engaging in the ‘propaganda of a terrorist organisation’, facing up to twenty-five and a half years in prison (Gazete Duvar 2022c). Prosecutors at the Criminal Court decided to bring the case against Gök based on a statement made by a secret witness whose identity remains hidden from the defendant and their attorneys. The secret witness claimed that Gök was ordered to take photographs of the execution by the PKK terrorist organisation. While the court acquitted Gök on the charges of ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’, it sentenced him to one and a half years and twenty-two days in prison for the charge of ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ (Gazete Duvar 2022c).

Conclusion

In lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation practices rely on the long-standing discourse of state survival to protect the state, the discursive ‘nation’, and the security apparatus. The AKP achieves this by constantly identifying new groups as ‘threats’ in need of securitisation, using the technology of racialisation in order to turn refugees and asylum seekers into dangerous outsiders and the technology of civic exile to turn those purged into dangerous insiders. The range and visibility on metropolitan street corners of paramilitary and private forces now acting as authorised and often government-salaried security personnel has contributed to the diffusion of intelligence-based surveillance, repression, and control throughout society. Bolstered by government, judicial, and pro-AKP media circulation of the urgent sense that increasing numbers must be securitised if the state is to survive, the increase in de facto and de jure impunity granted to security personnel leads to increased criminal abuse of citizens, violation of their fundamental rights, torture, and in some cases killing.

The next chapter, ‘Punishment: Civic Death, Cruel Retribution, and the Securitisation of Academic Purges’, examines the AKP’s securitisation logic of punishment, indexing its basis in a particularly cruel retributive punishment whereby purged citizens are subjected to civic death and turned into disposable people, unable to reclaim their basic rights even after they have been acquitted and the state of emergency has been lifted.