The Birth of a People Under the Sign of the Hunger Strike
2012 Hunger Strikes by Kurdish Political Prisoners in Turkey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19216488 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nazan Ustundag (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 327-346 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00382876-12310811 |
| OpenAlex | W7160626783 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
This article focuses on the 2012 hunger strikes of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey. In the vast history of hunger strikes in Turkey, what sets 2012 strikes apart from the rest is that the strike was not related to the bodily autonomy of the prisoners or to the limiting of state's power over them. Instead the strikers demanded the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's freedom. In that sense the 2012 strikes, rather than being a complicated form of subjectivization against the sovereignty of the state by prisoners turning their bodies into weapons, involved an act of generous entrust of their lives into the hands of people. The article utilizes the diary form to interject the reader in both the quantum time the hunger strikers thereby created and the universality they performed. Spilling and leaking into the streets through the bodies of other actors, into the consciousness of other oppositional actors through the memories they evoked, and into the speeches of the prime minister and his cabinet by the turmoil they caused, the prisoners ethically transformed space and time into a place in which care, mutual responsibility, connection, and solidarity reigned against denial and destruction
Autonomy · Cabinet (room) · Denial · Politics · Power (physics) · Sign (mathematics) · Solidarity · Sovereignty · Islamic Studies and History · Middle East Politics and Society · Turkey's Politics and Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |