School of Social and Political Science

Description

Deadly Refusals offers an intimate portrait of Kurdish decolonial struggle within the carceral and legal apparatuses of the Turkish state. Based on more than seventeen years of ethnographic research—including interviews with former prisoners, lawyers, judges, and prosecutors; observations of more than one hundred court hearings; and analysis of prison memoirs, poetry, and legal archives—Deadly Refusals uncovers the mechanisms through which counterterrorism law reproduces the colonial state. Yet it is not solely a study of repression. Engaging psychoanalytic concepts of subject, desire, and ethics, Hakyemez illuminates how these carceral spaces also become sites of revolutionary responsibility. Here, refusal is not resignation but a political act in which the colonized self is killed—literally or figuratively—to make way for a larger collective subjectivity.