Reading politics through emotions: ontological ressentiment as the emotional basis of current politics in Turkey

For almost sixteen years now, politics in Turkey have been analysed with reference to the theme of victimhood. It is true that the political discourse of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi or AKP) gained its power by the mass response to its victimhood claims. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the legitimacy of the victimhood claim rests mainly on the already‐existing emotions of masses, aroused and triggered by political elites. Thus, Turkish politics during the AKP period cannot be thoroughly understood without taking into consideration the emotions of both political elites and the masses. This article shares insights into the sixteen‐year‐long AKP reign of power based on Recep Tayyip Erdo?an's appeals to such emotions as humiliation, envy, disgust, hatred, anxiety, and anger. It further argues that these emotions reveal a much deeper and stronger emotional trait which we identify as ontological ressentiment.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

Writing Veterans’ History: A Conversation on the Twentieth Century

This article is a conversation between five specialists of veterans’ history on the current direction of the field and its importance to the study of war and society. The discussants offer an an overview of current methodologies, definitions and historiographical approaches. Concentrating on the experiences of twentieth-century veterans (particularly after 1945) and using a diverse range of case studies from across the world, this article also asks what connections bound veteran communities together, and how we as historians might conceptualise veterans: as a class, as a collective, or as a far looser grouping of individuals? Finally, this article explores what distinguishes veteranhood after 1945 and the evolving relationship between veterans and the memory of conflict.