Sacrifice, commemoration, and resistance

The central contribution of Deniz Yonucu's Police, Provocation, Politics is to show that counterinsurgency strategies employed by Turkish security forces in working-class Istanbul neighborhoods with strong leftist revolutionary traditions do not aspire to eliminate dissent; rather, they manage it, shape it, and even provoke it in the service of a “war on politics” aimed at disrupting progressive solidarities. In developing this insight, Yonucu pushes us to think in valuable new ways about how efforts by police worldwide to produce specific forms of social order (“capitalist, racist, colonial, and patriarchal”) may hinge on generating and channeling disorder. Alongside this central argument though, what is also crucial is her use of ethnography in a predominantly Alevi neighborhood that she calls Devrimova to show how members of a policed population navigate and resist these modes of governance. It is this latter dimension that I will focus on here. At the heart of this part of the story stands the figure of the revolutionary martyr—whether Ottoman-era Alevi rebels, global icons like Che Guevara, local activists, or other victims of Turkish state violence. It is in the everyday commemorations of martyrdom that saturate Devrimova—in posters, anniversaries, revolutionary journals, names of people and places, and collective events—that Yonucu sees openings for authentic resistance to police power. Drawing on Avery Gordon's sociological conception of “haunting,” she develops a unique reading of martyrs as those who have been “torn from the world by traumatic forms of oppression and injustice” and “return in ghostly form”, uncannily blurring life and death, past and present (p. 120). She makes a further original contribution by connecting this in turn to the notion of “political spirituality” developed by Michel Foucault. Impressed by Iranians' use of religious practices like mourning rituals to reinforce their political commitments in the run-up to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Foucault advocated a search for secular techniques through which people might similarly transform themselves as ethical subjects (p. 120). This is exactly what Yonucu sees in the efforts of Devrimova youth to cultivate a sense of indebtedness to the martyrs who haunt their neighborhood, and in doing so to foster a defiant agency and capacity for resistance (p. 126). There is enormous comparative value in this discussion. While martyrdom is now widely thought of as an Islamist phenomenon and has been fetishised as such in terrorology, Yonucu's account reminds us that commemorations of martyrdom have been a remarkably widespread feature of insurgencies and protest movements of diverse political stripes across the globe throughout the modern period. This history encompasses 19th-century anarchists and socialists, pro-democracy mobilizations of the early 21st century, and any number of secular-nationalist and anticolonial movements in between (Abufarha, 2009; Buckner & Khatib, 2014; Cook, 2017; Dorraj, 1997; Yenen, 2022). Part of the value in Yonucu's approach derives precisely from her commitment to analyzing the significance of martyrdom without automatic recourse to religion. In this, she follows her interlocutors in Devrimova, some of whom even seek to do away with the label martyr (şehit) because of its religious connotations, and replace it with terms like “immortals” (ölümsüzler) and “martyrs of revolution” (devrim şehitleri) (p. 121). Banu Bargu, whose work also deals with the place of death and sacrifice in leftist politics in Turkey, has previously suggested distinguishing “religious forms of martyrdom” from “secular forms” and has observed that the latter are greatly under-researched (Bargu, 2014, 401, n. 43). By developing what is ultimately a psychoanalytical reading of martyrdom as a “generative social force” independent of any question of religion, Yonucu offers us valuable routes forward in this regard (Yonucu, 2023, 362, 377). Reading between the lines, one senses that beyond respecting her interlocutors' own avowedly secular politics, part of what is at stake in this effort to think about martyrdom beyond religion is a commitment to avoiding either Orientalist exoticization of these practices or any temptation to treat them as inherently regressive. Beyond the terms of Yonucu's own argument, there is reason to exercise a degree of caution in any effort to separate out “religious” and “secular” forms of martyrdom. Bargu's own account of how a campaign of deadly hunger strikes by leftists in Turkey was bound up with a reconfiguration of Marxism into a kind of “political mysticism” or “secularized political theology” indicates how the politics of sacrifice may sometimes muddy any such clear distinctions. In recent years, critical engagement with Carl Schmitt's claim that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” has generated new insights into affinities and connections between religious traditions and secular understandings of sovereign power (Schmitt, 2005, 36). The study of martyrdom might be one promising point of departure for broadening these debates, to encompass not just analyses of state power but also a political theology of resistance. If there is any risk that such thinking might further exoticize martyrdom in contexts like Turkey, one solution may lie in continuing to draw out the comparative dimensions that are already such an important feature of Yonucu's work. Elsewhere, Yonucu has highlighted the Mexican communist David Alfaro Siqueiros's “Christianity-inspired portrayal of the revolutionary as a ‘human torch’ ‘who consumes his life in a passion that transforms the world’” and has noted echoes of this in discourses of martyrdom in Turkey (Yonucu, 2023, 366, quoting Lomnitz-Adler, 2003). Similarly, 19th-century European anarchists translated notions of Christian witnessing into their own understandings of death and suffering as “propaganda of the deed” (Gabriel, 2007). Socialists of the same era adapted a Christian matrix to express their own secular conceptions of history, transcendence, and renewal (De Spiegeleer, 2014; van Veldhuizen, 2013). More recently, the Tamil Tigers seem to have constructed a novel secular nationalist culture of martyrdom on the foundations of Hindu and Catholic folk religiosity, “planting” fallen heroes as “seeds” and demarcating the territory of the Tamil nation with their tombs (Hettiarachchi, 2007; Roberts, 2005). It is in this sense then, that there is nothing unique about the fact that commemorations of martyrdom within secular political projects in Muslim-majority contexts may display certain affinities or genealogical connections with religion. The same goes for any fear that thinking in these terms might bolster existing views of martyrdom as inherently regressive. It is certainly true that assumptions about martyrdom as an anachronistic species of religious barbarism remain alive and well, particularly in discussions of Islamist politics. Yet others have shown—again, including with reference to European political and intellectual traditions—how modes of sacrifice with partially religious genealogies may contain within them a progressive potential to convert death into “a form of freedom” and “bear witness to the truth that there is something in the human subject which is more than itself” (Eagleton, 2018, 85). An important pay-off of Yonucu's commitment to thinking about martyrdom beyond religion is that even if we do seek to bring the latter more squarely back into the picture, her analysis demands that we think critically about the order of things: “Which comes first, the phenomenon of martyrdom or religious notions of martyrdom?”1 She forces us to consider how this question must be posed historically, conceptually and in terms of the social processes at work, and she shows the kinds of analytical tools that might help us to do so. Wherever one stands on these questions, it is a testament to the originality of her work, and its conceptual and empirical richness, that it does so much to bring them into focus.