2 - Punishment

Summary

This chapter investigates the logics of punishment that animate the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. Examining the different yet recurrent tools with which academics in Turkey have been historically expulsed from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected yet changing forms of punishment directed at academics as knowledge producers from the early Republican period to the first two and a half decades of the twenty-first century. In keeping with the literature on changing regimes of punishment, I conclude that the logic for penalising those targeted has shifted from compensation in the early Republican era to a securitised logic of retribution (following the 1980 coup), to a cruel form of retributive securitisation in the form of subjection to civic death in post-2016 Turkey.