The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation

Date

2015-06-03

Author

Bahçecik, Şerif Onur

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

255
views

0
downloads

While the perspective of 'liberalism of fear' assumes that human rights limit the despotic power of the state, this paper argues that human rights reforms promoted in the context of institution- and capacity-building programmes have had significant power effects by enhancing the disciplinary capacities of the Turkish state and blunting the transformative potential of rights claiming. The reforms increased state surveillance by rechanneling criminal justice processes towards producing evidence (such as telecommunications data, DNA collection, etc) rather than testimonies. Instead of limiting state power, these reforms enhanced the disciplinary mechanisms of social control. They depoliticised the problem of torture by constructing it as an occupational accident (as opposed to a state crime) that happens because of lack of police officer know-how or resources for the investigation of crime. Finally, reforms revamped the way police investigated crimes, rather than launching campaigns against torture and dismissing past wrongdoers in the police. The paper concludes that the neoliberal emphasis on the technicalisation of political problems has limited the democratic potential of human rights reforms.

Subject Keywords

Turkey, Depoliticisation, Police, Technical assistance, Human rights, Torture

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/35056

Journal

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1047204

Collections

Department of International Relations, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Assessing the human rights regime of the Council of Europe in terms of economic and social rights Milli, Ece; Okyayuz, Mehmet; Department of European Studies (2012) This thesis seeks to answer the question whether economic and social rights have the same status with civil and political rights under the human rights regime of the Council of Europe. To this end, the thesis examines the assumptions with regard to the nature of economic and social rights, on the one hand, and civil and political rights, on the other. Second, it seeks to find out whether the nature of economic and social rights is different from that of civil and political rights. Third, it examines how the...
The Individual application to Turkey’s Constitutional Court and its role in the development of human rights in Turkey Ayhan, Tuğçe; Polat, Necati; Department of International Relations (2018) This master thesis looks into the role of individual application mechanism of the Constitutional Court in Turkey in the protection of human rights. Besides several significant developments in the field of human rights since the beginning of Turkey’s desire to integrate with Europe, one of the most important developments in Turkey is the individual application to the Constitutional Court, effective from late 2012. In this study, the success of individual application mechanism will be examined by comparing th...
Institutionalization of human rights in Turkey : experiences and perceptions of women’s human rights activists and state officials Arıner, Hakkı Onur; Acar, Ayşe Feride; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2013) This thesis contends that human rights advocates’ dismissal of attempts by the state in Turkey to institutionalize human rights since the 1990s as insincere or as efforts to delimit and control human rights advocacy is informed by the dominant historical narrative that posits a center-periphery dichotomy as key to explaining Turkey’s democratization process, as well as the actual experiences of the state’s failure to tolerate autonomous human rights institutions. This dismissal is contested on theoretical a...
Discourse on human rights : representation of the idea in Turkish human right Duduhacıoğlu, Başak; Rittersberger Tılıç, Helga İda; Department of Sociology (2012) The main concern of this thesis is to analyze the transformation of domestic human rights discourse by looking at the shifting representations of the idea of human rights. The representation of the idea of human rights in ‘Turkey Human Rights Movement Conferences’ in different political contexts during the period 1998-2010 is evaluated with reference to three areas of literature on the idea of human rights and with a social constructionist perspective which begins with the proposition that ideas and practic...
Institutionalisation of human rights in Turkey in the context of international assessment mechanisms Çakır, Çağrı; Göksel, Asuman; Department of European Studies (2013) The thesis aims to analyse the process of institutionalization of human rights in Turkey, by assessing the nature of the institutions with the focus on the dynamics forcing Turkey to establish a totally new structure devoted to human rights. In line with this aim, firstly worldwide development of institutionalization in the area of human rights is examined. The process of accession to EU has been a strong impetus for Turkey to ensure the compliance with the Copenhagen political criteria and to undertake leg...

Citation Formats

Ş. O. Bahçecik, “The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation,” THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY, pp. 1222–1236, 2015, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/35056.