Turkiye’de Iktidari Yeniden Dusunmek (Rethinking Power in Turkey) is a collective work of Professors and Ph. D. students, who study on the reconfiguration and transformation of power relations in Turkey especially after the 1980 military coup. The book is the first and unique analysis of power relations in Turkey through a post-structuralist and Foucauldian theoretical framework. In that sense, Turkiye’de Iktidari Yeniden Dusunmek (Rethinking Power in Turkey) does not only provide a novel analysis of power and government in Turkey but it also presents a critique of the former liberal and Marxist approaches towards the nature of power in Turkey.

Table of Contents:
-”Preface” / by K. Murat Guney
-”Power and Reality in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
-”The Fear of Archive and the Black Notebook of Nizami Bey: History, Memory and Power in Turkey” / by Meltem Ahiska
-”The Gender of Europe: The Docile Virgin, The Absorbing Female, and The Conquering Son” / by Nurdan Gurbilek
-”Patterns of Behavior, Forms of Interpretation, and Inequality in a Istanbul Courthouse” / by Dicle Kogacioglu
-”The Youth, Population and Power in Turkey” / by Ferhunde Ozbay
-”Non-Governmental Organizations in Turkey: ‘Voluntarism’ in the Age of Modernity, Nationalism and Neo-Liberalism” / by Yasemin Ipek Can
-”Different Faces of Power and the Transformation of Alevi Identity” / by Ozlem Goner
-”‘Managing’ the Kurdish Question” / by Firat Bozcali
-”A New Hegemonic Battlefield: The Formation of the Official Kurdish TV, TRT6″ / by T. Balca Arda
-”Being Mothers of the Army: Mothers of Martyrs in Turkey” / by Esra Gedik
-”AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the ‘new’ Power in Turkey” / by K. Murat Guney

The Paper Presented in the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting in 2008 in San Francisco.

1 - The Power of Death over Life
1.1 - The Life of Ikbal Yasar’s Dead Body
On 22nd of March, 2008, Ikbal Yasar, a 20 year old Kurdish man was killed by the Turkish police in Yuksekova , a Kurdish populated town in the southeast corner of Turkey on the border of Iran and Iraq. 22nd of March was the day when most of the Kurds in Turkey were celebrating Newroz that is the Kurdish New Year. Yet, since celebrating Newroz in many eastern and southeastern Kurdish populated provinces of Turkey was banned by the Turkish state, Newroz celebrations usually transformed into Kurdish people’s protest of and resistance to the Turkish state. Ikbal Yasar was shot to dead by the police during such a demonstration. A day after, at the midnight of 23rd of March at 2am, the body of Ikbal Yasar was buried hurriedly in a cemetery close to the government offices in the town. The immediate burial of Yasar was ordered by the governor of the town and the chief officer of the police. There was no funeral prayer. The burial of someone at midnight indeed violates the customary code of funeral in Islam. Nevertheless, Ikbal Yasar, whose official ID given by the Turkish State showed that he was a male human being, a believer of Islam and a citizen of Turkey when he was alive, was buried as if he was nothing but a residue of some flesh.
This treatment of Ikbal Yasar’s dead body is just an example within lots of stories about the humiliation and distortion of dead bodies of Kurdish demonstrators or guerillas during the civil war in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces which started in 1984 and still continues today.
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