Description
Within liberal orders, the state’s use of repression is not an anomaly but a historical constant. States have always deployed it for political ends, although its intensity and scope have varied across time and space. Although the legal system may equalise all citizens and territorial spaces within the state boundaries, states can still target specific individuals and locations. Repression can be employed in varying juridico-political contexts and can take different forms, but it always sits in places. This paper offers a spatiotemporal analysis of state-conducted political repression by examining how legal and extralegal modalities of state power were differentially deployed across Turkey’s national territory between 1923 and 2019. Drawing on extensive archival data, it reveals how repression operates as a spatial technique of governance as law and repression intertwine in the production of political order. The paper bridges insights from the literatures on repression and on states of emergency and exception. While repression studies often remain descriptive and quantitative, privileging statistical precision over contextual depth, scholarship on emergency and exception tends to conceptualise state interferences with rights as external to legality. Whereas the former treats law merely as an instrument without any constructive force, the latter overlooks the legal embeddedness of repression within state rule. Departing from both perspectives, this paper conceptualises repression as a historically constant mode of governance that operates through proactive and reactive forms, rather than as episodic violence or permanent lawlessness. By foregrounding the territorial differentiation of repression and juxtaposing Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast with its metropolitan provinces, the paper demonstrates how the law and the denial of it can function to produce politically and legally differentiated spaces within the state borders.
