Understanding the Post-Failed Coup Turkey: From State of Emergency to Permanent State of Exception

Turkey is currently ruled under a state of emergency declared soon after the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016 and extended recently for another three months by late July 2017. Although the Turkish government announced that the emergency decrees would solely be about the attempted coup-related issues, the opposing groups and human rights organizations condemned the government for using the expanded powers to crack down on critics as well as on democratic checks and balances in the country.

This paper argues that Turkey is about to fall into the ‘emergency trap’ where the state of emergency has turned out to be a permanent ‘state of exception’ (SoE) institutionalized through excessively securitized practices of the Turkish statecraft. Following Agamben, the SoE may be defined as a paradigm of government where the laws and norms of democratic regime are suspended by state elites demanding not to be held responsible as they break these laws and norms when facing a crisis. With the recently approved constitutional amendments granting considerable executive and legislative powers to presidency, the SoE is about to institutionalize as the dominant paradigm of rule in contemporary Turkish politics. This study hence, suggests that SoE is instrumentalized by the Turkish ruling elite for the radical reorganization of the juridical and political order and for the replacement the parliamentary system with the presidential one. This shift is justified through an excessively securitized discourse where Turkey is waging its second war of independence against diverse terrorist organizations supported by the Western states.