Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic examination of Turkey's coup trials, this paper demonstrates how legal proceedings have become one of the primary tools for the Turkish state to refashion itself and the actors that represent it.

Paper long abstract:

Starting from 2008, hundreds of officers of the Turkish Armed Forces were put on trial in multiple cases with allegations ranging from forming a terrorist organization within the state to leaking of state secrets for purposes of military espionage and plotting a coup to overthrow the government. These unprecedented trials constitute a momentous attempt to challenge the military's legitimacy and debunk its authority. As such, through the trials, soldiers, once privileged stakeholders of the state, often situated outside and above civilian legal frameworks, had their image shattered by the very state they were taught to represent and uphold. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research, the goal of this paper is threefold. First, it analyzes how, and to what effect, the rhetoric of the rule of law can become a tool to dismantle militaries, revert the exceptional status under which they operate, and in so doing, rearticulate the state and nation anew. Second, this paper reflects on the limits of contesting the doings of the state for people caught within the fraught situation of representing the state's interests and being its subjects—and subject to its power—at once. Finally, this paper demonstrates how, in the contemporary moment, legal proceedings have become a way to contain the chaos through which the Turkish state operates. Overall, this paper aims to highlight the interconnectedness of the law, state, and the military through the overarching framework of the trials as a moment of moral rupture in history by examining state making in action.