"This Is Not the Soldier You Know:" The Making and Unmaking of Military Victimhood in Turkey's Anti-Coup Trials

This paper will analyze the social, political, and legal “unmaking” of the Turkish military through an ongoing ethnographic examination of the trials of military officers accused of plotting a coup in contemporary Turkey as part of the Balyoz (Sledgehammer) case. These anti-coup trials have been unprecedented in the country’s history as one of the first momentous attempt to challenge the military’s legitimacy and debunk its authority not just in the political, but also in the sociocultural realm. Labeled as “a post-modern Dreyfus affair” by the military families, the trials have immensely shocked the family members alongside being a source of public humiliation and resentment towards the Turkish Armed Forces for not defending its officers. Despite making continuous effort to appropriate the category of victims, the families have met with continuous failure to be publicly recognized as such. Based on life history interviews with military families, participant observation in public demonstrations, a close reading of court transcripts as well as memoirs and books written by prosecuted military officers and their families, my work sheds a close look at how the trials have transformed the otherwise privileged lives of these “fallen elites.” My paper thus examines what happens when soldiers, and their families, become a social, political, and legal “excess,” an unsustainable liability to the state apparatus they were meant to represent and uphold, and asks what constitutes the parameters of legitimate victimhood in the competing realm of moral demands to socially recognizable “true” suffering and justice.