Professor Zeynep Şimşek

Ethnic, Religious, and Gender-Based Lynching Cases in Turkey: 2000-2022

This project develops an alternative narrative of the state by looking into lynch practices in Republic of Turkey between 2000-2022, with a particular emphasis on lynching practices with ethnic, religious or gender-based motives. Challenging the weak-state, which was frequently used to explain lynch phenomena, this narrative seeks to understand how the state utilizes, internalizes and instrumentalizes collective violence.

The methodology for data collection and analysis will be a combination of Protest Event Analysis (PEA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), where lynch cases are traced through newspapers.

The corpus is the electronic archives of eight national newspapers. It looks into (1) the frequency and quantity of lynch attacks with ethnic, religious and gender-based motives (2) how these intensified quantitatively under AKP government's rule since 2002, (3) and how lynch mobs are accommodated, encouraged, or averted by the State through direct and/or indirect intervention.