Turkey’s political history is littered with alarmingly numerous murders, ‘disappearances’ and unexplained deaths of investigative journalists, academics, officials, businessmen, and human rights and other activists of various kinds. A notable recent example was the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007. Death threats to prominent public figures such as the writer Orhan Pamuk, suspiciously-staged terrorist incidents, and unsolved violent attacks on the Alevi and other minorities can be added to this litany.1 Incidents such as these have convinced many Turks of the existence of a so-called ‘deep state’, assumed to be composed of an ultra-nationalistic, arch-Kemalist and authoritarian network of bureaucrats, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, criminals and the like. They are often drawn from, but acting in parallel to the state, immune to prosecution, acting against those judged to be in opposition to the official secularist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of the Turkish Republic. The activities of the ‘deep state’ are often believed to spill over into criminal activity of various kinds.
Turkey’s powerful security forces are at the centre of a growing scandal as evidence grows that a fatal explosion in the remote Kurdish town of Semdinli was the work of their own men.
The bomb which killed a shopper in a bookshop on Wednesday was the 16th to go off in Turkey’s most southeasterly province in the last two months.
As they had for the others, the authorities at first blamed the blast on the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which renewed its 20-year guerrilla war against Turkey last year.
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world,
and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to
further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes
of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought,
across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are
welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirical research,
dealing with various types of mobilization, from neighborhood groups to
revolutions. We especially welcome work that synthesizes or compares different
approaches to social movements, such as cultural and structural traditions,
micro- and macro-social, economic and ideal, or qualitative and quantitative.
Books in the series will be published in English. One goal is to encourage nonnative speakers to introduce their work to Anglophone audiences. Another is to
maximize accessibility: all books will be available in open access within a year
after printed publication.