Work

Necropolitics under competitive authoritarianism: martyrdom, fatalism and contested responsibility for death in Turkey

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Blame avoidance is usually theorized through democratic institutions, where elections, opposition parties, courts and independent media can contest official accounts of failure. This article extends blame avoidance theory to competitive authoritarianism by developing the concept of necropolitical blame avoidance: the conversion of responsibility-threatening deaths into governable objects of meaning, distribution and credit. Using evidence from Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2014 to September 2026, it identifies five mechanisms: reclassification, counter-attribution control, blame reassignment, compensatory incorporation and credit conversion. The AKP did not invent Turkish martyrdom politics; its innovation was to expand an older republican and military repertoire into a civilian, religious-populist and administrative technology for managing deaths linked to disaster, workplace risk, military exposure, intelligence failure and terrorism. The article shows that authoritarian blame avoidance is not only rhetorical but also institutional, coercive and distributive.

Source: Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies

DOI: 10.1080/14683857.2026.2745260

Authors: Ihsan Yilmaz, Omer F. Erturk

Institution: Deakin University

Language: English

Topic: Turkey's Politics and Society

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Australian Research Council