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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8818-9642
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Political Science
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Dean Robinson
Second Advisor
Vincent Ferraro
Third Advisor
Sonia Alvarez
Fourth Advisor
Ventura Pérez
Fifth Advisor
Forrest Bowlick
Abstract
My thesis is about the politicization of the dead which is a cultural mechanism used for establishing domination by organizations such as nation states, empires, colonial companies, or drug cartels. It is a type of performance violence used to back claim to monopoly over legitimate use of force in a given territory where political organizations engage in micro-conquests and biocultural warfare. Biocultural warfare is the use of sovereign power that exceeds what the paradigmatic approaches under biopolitics and necropolitics can elucidate. The goal of biocultural warfare is the eradication of indigenous life and its replacement with settler forms. I focus on actions that withhold or otherwise make use of human remains—both body parts and corpses—they send political messages to survivors of conflict. These actions go further than conventional forms of oppression and suppression that physically target the human body for discipline. I make visible how this phenomenon takes place, especially in Turkey and Mexico where it has frequently occurred in the past and looms in the present. In both countries, ruling regimes have used the politicization of the dead as a form of counterinsurgency. The effect of this kind of violence is invisible in both senses of the word. First, while the politicization of the dead is outlawed under contemporary rule of law systems, the practice is invisible to specific publics and illegible to courts. Second, it has psycho-social effects that are invisible to the human eye but expressed through culture and noticeable in everyday life. Since there is a gap in our knowledge of how politicization of the dead continues to occur despite being illegal, my thesis fills this gap and adds onto the interdisciplinary studies of political violence, a discernable subfield in political science that approaches research using critical interpretive tools that push back against state sponsored forms of violence. In conclusion, my dissertation is meant as a provocation to think about invisible violence as injustice.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/31020761
Recommended Citation
Sumer, Bilgesu, "THE POLITICIZATION OF THE DEAD AND INVISIBILE VIOLENCE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TURKEY AND MEXICO" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2666.
https://doi.org/10.7275/31020761
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2666