This book makes a strong case that Turkey’s regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. Building on the insights of critical and contemporary theory, the essays address the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power. Once there, they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, and to modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. This produces new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. Bringing together historical, discursive, and ethnographic approaches from multiple disciplines, this collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey.

Banu Bargu is Associate Professor of History of Consciousness and Political Theory in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her main area of specialisation is political theory, with a thematic focus on theories of sovereignty, biopolitics, and resistance. She is the author of the award-winning book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014).