The Politics of Emotions, Bio-Political Border Practices and the Question of (In)security on the Turkish Political Territorial Borders

This paper conceptually and analytically delineates the operation and employment of discourses and the political emotions of fear and anxiety in the making, conception, and cartographic imagination of the contours of modern Turkey's political territorial boundaries. This study posits that the emergence and formation of the Turkish political territorial borders after the traumatic and violent experience of the cataclysmic shrinking, collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire continue to influence discourses, emotions, practices and policies of border security and policing. Borders and borderlands are not only sites where the state performs, exercises and displays its sovereign will and power in protecting national security, dignity, pride and honor, but also sources and harbingers of fears, anxieties and ontological (in)securities. In the context of the highly publicized immigration influx of Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis and others into Turkey, this paper argues that discourses and emotions of fear, anxiety and hate regained new currency and have become consequential in the state's eliciting of consent from the masses in instituting border walls, fences and harsh border policing practices and policies on the borderlands and in cities across the country.