This chapter investigates the logics of punishment that animate the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. Examining the different yet recurrent tools with which academics in Turkey have been historically expulsed from educational institutions, the public sphere, and the political body, I develop a nuanced understanding of the interconnected yet changing forms of punishment directed at academics as knowledge producers from the early Republican period to the first two and a half decades of the twenty-first century. In keeping with the literature on changing regimes of punishment, I conclude that the logic for penalising those targeted has shifted from compensation in the early Republican era to a securitised logic of retribution (following the 1980 coup), to a cruel form of retributive securitisation in the form of subjection to civic death in post-2016 Turkey.

This chapter investigates the securitisation logic of control animating the AKP’s new securitisation technologies by enumerating the impact of four relevant factors on society: authoritarian lateral surveillance; centralised digital politics; shared contingency governance; and extra-legal and religious over-reach into domestic life. By focusing on these four factors in each section, I argue that under the sway of an authoritarian politics of securitisation, the AKP government combines the technologies of lateral surveillance and centralised digital politics to transgress the principle of individual criminal responsibility in favour of ‘shared responsibility’, a familial ‘sharing in the referent object of securitisation,’ and participation in the maintenance of security. I further suggest that this new development marks a shift away from state of emergency rule to an authoritarian securitisation in which Turkey uses peer-to-peer surveillance pervasively and invasively in the service of state protection.

Every state traces its origins back to violent tribes united by the greedy prospect of conquest. Every civilization is rooted in courage and war, and is founded by Bedouins whose initial violence is apeased until final extinction by the peaceful rule of state-led, sedentary societies.

This chapter contrasts with the introduction by focusing on an event that an intersection of different sources (Ottoman, Arabic, English and French sources) document in an exceptional way: the attack of a big caravan on its road from Damascus to Baghdad in 1857. Its aims at plunging readers into the life, business and management of caravans in the mid-nineteenth century – a period that is introduced here as a turning point for life and business in the steppe in the Ottoman realms. Built as an enquiry into the attack and into what the historiography has considered a handicap of overland trade (insecurity) unlike oceanic trade, this chapter illuminates the regional system institutionalised by Bedouin/State/Traders to deal efficiently with insecurity and hazards of caravan trade over long distances.