2.1 RESEARCH NOTES
Note 1
As I write this text, Turkey chokes on tear gas and pepper spray[iv]. Messages to some friends still remain unsent on single ticks as the government intermittently shuts off telecommunications. Online, my eyes refocus with apprehension when I encounter updates from Antakya. I come across images of placards that have emerged from the city, memorialising the losses experienced in the 2023 earthquakes as a prelude to the demonstrations now taking place on its surviving streets; “Kolonlarımız değil ama direnişimiz sağlam” (Our [building] columns may not be durable, but our resistance is), reads one placard. Another, “6 Şubatta bu kadar polis olsaydı, şimdi daha çok olurduk” (If there were these many police on the 6 February, there would be many more of us here right now). Another says, “zihnimiz özgür” (our minds are free). I wonder though, what about the entanglements of the body. Do those like my own family, currently residing in large container camps on the fringes of their native city, perceive themselves as free?
For Matute (2021), entanglements and detachments themselves are mutually constitutive: ‘depending on the context, time and space at hand, not only is one deeply entangled from a relational standpoint, but also “detached” if such relational ontological departure is displaced by exclusively insisting on the tangible material realm of particles that the ontological commitment to separation affords’ (515). In this view, materiality and physicality are mobilised to normalise detachment and constrain the possibilities of intentional relationality. Temporality and spatiality remain central to reimagining entanglement as a mode of relational connectivity. I believe that this framework offers a lens for understanding contemporary events in Turkey. The recent demonstrations that began in the large cities to the west of the country are a continuation of resistance to the regime’s increasingly autocratic rule since the aftermath of the Gezi uprisings. During this movement, a number of youth from Antakya were martyred, and the hopes of many were shattered. That withstanding, the city never gave up in protecting itself. Even in the aftermath of the 2023 earthquakes and the subsequent progression of state neglect, the people of Antakya began engaging in sustained civil mobilisation to demand accountability and secure their livelihood in the face of extractive governmental usurpation. This mobilisation continues until today, taking place across various localities, whether to protect trees from being uprooted, rivers from being polluted, or cultures from being near totally erased and mythologised. In this sense, Antakya’s sustained mobilisation and the current nationwide uprisings unfold within the same landscape, shaped by the government’s shift from ostensible democracy to entrenched autocracy. These contexts must converge as protracted struggles for accountability and justice, with the shared occupation of streets as sites of collective anger underscoring their endurance.
This, however, is not what comes to be. The ready acceptance of detachment towards Antakya amid the uprisings further reveals the ambivalence with which Turkish society engages the politics of difference. Antakya, a city of historic significance at the margins of the Republic, has never commanded the sustained attention afforded to Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, or to Kurdish metropoles such as Diyarbekir (Āmīd) and Mardin (Merdīn). Its peripheral status may relate to its late annexation, but more likely stems from its proximity to Syria, the vilified ‘Other’, to cities such as Aleppo, Idlib and Latakia. Much like for Kurdish communities, the nation-state itself can be read as a carceral regime, in which those at the fringes are perceived as a threat to the tenuous stitches that hold its collective identity together. Like the damaged walls of Affan, Antakya persists in a state of existential uncertainty, at once inside and outside the Republic’s imagined homeland (Dağtaş 2018).
Terms such as entanglement and detachment, however, may not fully capture the scope of relational significance. A more nuanced framework is needed, one that recognises their coexistence and intersection. Querejazu (2021) reminds us that ‘[e]ncounters shape life in anything but an ordered and tidy way, yet we often opt to simplify such messiness through knowledge, theories, and methodologies that attempt to capture reality in manageable and discrete categories … systemati[s]ed into binaries composed of opposite poles …’ (21). The interplay of movements, actions, and points of enunciation within the same spatio-temporal context may therefore be more accurately conceived as encounters. In light of Antakya’s peripheral yet pivotal role as the social centre of the February 2023 earthquakes (Gürboğa et al. 2023), the disproportionate loss of its youth during the 2013 Gezi Uprisings (Taş 2022), and its geographic position as a gateway between Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘encounter’ offers a compelling lens for understanding the dynamics of violence in Turkey as they unfold between people and the state. It is this analytic of encounter, tracing the resonances between Antakya’s post-earthquake mobilisations and the current uprisings, alongside attention to the processes consolidating the Turkish state as carceral and autocratic, that underpins my inquiry into civil unrest and state violence.
[iv] Amnesty International. 2025. “Turkey: Unlawful and indiscriminate attacks on peaceful protesters must end and protest bans must be lifted immediately. Amnesty International (official website), March 24. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/turkiye-unlawful-and-indiscriminate-attacks-on-peaceful-protesters-must-end-and-protest-bans-must-be-lifted-immediately/
[v] Şahin, Gökhan (@igokhansahin). 2025. “Kolonlarımız değil ama direnişimiz sağlam.” Instagram photo, March 28.
igokhansahi
[vi] It is commonly accepted that LGBTQIA+ communities, Kurdish activists, and survivors of the February 2023 earthquakes have been the most consistent of civil society factions vis-à-vis mass public protest in the contemporary Republic’s last two-year history.
[vii] Pamuk, Orhan. 2025. “Clampdowns in Istanbul and Turkey: democracy, jail, President Erdogan, rival protesters”. The Guardian (official website), 28 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/28/clampdowns-istanbul-turkey-democracy-jail-president-erdogan-rival-protesters
[viii] My maternal family’s city of origin, located approximately 42km from the city of Antakya and similarly devastated as a result of the February 2023 earthquakes.
[ix] A report on the work is available via the Doria Feminist Fund website here: www.doriafeministfund.org
[x] More information on the film can be found here: https://linktr.ee/no910doc?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=2356a4a3-c681-4780-a81a-24cb46ee9648
[xi] Likely to be much higher since the beginning of the uprisings at the end of March 2025.
[xii] Prison Insider. 2024. “Türkiye: Prisons in 2024”. Prison Insider (official website). https://www.prison-insider.com/en/articles/turkiye-prisons-in-2024 [Accessed: 24 March 2025]
[xiii] Jordan, Gülseren Tozkoparan. 2025. “Parlamentoda 6 Şubat belgeseli: NO: 910”. Cumhuriyet Gazetesi (official website), 16 February. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/pazar-yazilari/parlamentoda-6-subat-belgeseli-no-910-2300229.
[xiv] Wilks, Andrew. 2025. “More journalists detained by Turkey in dawn raids after covering anti-government protests”. Associated Press (official website), 28 March. https://apnews.com/article/turkey-protests-media-arrests-raids-637f93b144818ad3b5abad88fd68eb46
[xv] Field notes from research and development period of No.910 film, October 2023.
xvi] Personal correspondence