"Martyrs do not die": Politics and security in Kurdish insurgents’ funerals

Insurgents' funerals play a significant role in the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish insurgent group PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) for both parties. This article examines the dual features of the insurgents' funerals. While the Kurdish population seeks to reintegrate the dead into larger narratives of the "Kurdish liberation movement" and use funerals as a site for mobilization, the regime portrays the social and political lives of the dead manifested in the funerals as a matter of security and integrates them into larger security discourses. Kurdish mayors and deputies were dismissed from office and imprisoned for organizing and attending these funerals, and even for publicly displaying grief. In this article, I demonstrate how the social and political life of the dead that survives the biological death can still remain in the language and practices of security, and argue that securitization of funerals have a broader implication of leaving no space for the Kurdish Question to exist except for the realm of security.