Governing through Repression: The Spatial Logics of State Power in Turkey (1923–2019)

This article offers a juridico-political and spatiotemporal analysis of repression by examining how legal and extralegal modalities of state power were differentially deployed across Turkey’s national territory between 1923 and 2019. Drawing on extensive archival data, it reveals how repression operates as a spatial technique of governance as law and repression intertwine in the production of political order. The article bridges insights from the literatures on repression and on states of emergency and exception. While repression studies often remain descriptive and quantitative, privileging statistical precision over contextual depth, scholarship on emergency and exception tends to reduce juridico-politically distinct repressive measures to the state of exception. Whereas the former treats law merely as an instrument without any constructive force, the latter overlooks the legal and structural embeddedness of repression within political rule. Departing from both perspectives, this article conceptualizes repression as a historically constant mode of governance that operates through both proactive and reactive forms, rather than as episodic violence or a permanent state of exception. By foregrounding the territorial differentiation of repression across a national territorial space, the article demonstrates how both the law and its denial can produce politically and legally differentiated spaces within the state borders.