Civic Death in Contemporary Turkey: Mass Surveillance and the Authoritarian State

This event was the launch of Seçkin Sertdemir's latest book 'Civic Death in Contemporary Turkey: Mass Surveillance and the Authoritarian State' published by Cambridge University Press. What does it mean for a government to declare its citizens 'dead' while they still live? Following the failed 2016 coup, the Turkish AKP government implemented sweeping powers against some 152,000 of its citizens. These Kanun hükmünde kararnameli ('emergency decreed') were dismissed from their positions and banned for life from public service. With their citizenship rights revoked, Seçkin Sertdemir argues these individuals were rendered into a state of 'civic death'. This study considers how these authoritarian securitisation methods took shape, shedding light on the lived experiences of targeted people. Meet the speakers and chair Seçkin Sertdemir is a Visiting Fellow in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on ideas of democracy, and current problems of political philosophy such as civil disobedience and political rights. Zerrin Özlem Biner is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS working at the intersection of political and legal anthropology. She is author of 'Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Co-existence in Southeast Turkey' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). With Özge Biner, she co-edited a special section on the 'Politics of Waiting: Ethnographies of Sovereignty, Temporality and Subjectivity in the Margins of the Turkish State' in the Journal of Social Anthropology. Katerina Dalacoura is Associate Professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dalacoura’s work has centered on the intersection of Islamism and international human rights norms. She has worked on human rights, democracy and democracy promotion, in the Middle East, particularly in the context of Western policies in the region.