Over the last decade or so, anthropologists have insightfully explored the practices and politics of the conscience in a number of times and places, including in Israel (Weiss 2016, 2017), Germany (Sperling 2013), and Second World War Britain (Kelly 2015, 2018). Yet interestingly, in doing so many have been reluctant to propound a general theory of the conscience and its origins, unlike scholars in some other disciplines.1 Perhaps this is not surprising—rather than conceiving of the conscience as a universal human faculty and thus as a relatively independent object of study, anthropologists have preferred to historize and contextualize its emergence, sometimes considering it as a “subset” of something else.
For example, Tobias Kelly states that the conscience “takes on a particular salience in the context of attempts by liberal regimes to regulate the forms of conviction that are seen as having a legitimate place in public life” (2018: 115). He thus brings his investigation of British conscientious objectors to military service in the Second World War under the rubric of the “anthropology of actually existing liberalism” (2018: 115). Similarly, in her work on military refusers in Israel, Erica Weiss scrutinizes the rejection of military service by young people from at least three different social groups. However, she traces out how only one of them—well-educated, liberal, Zionist, Ashkenazi Jews—express their refusal in terms of conscientious objection. From this refusal, and like Kelly, she concludes that so-called “classical features” of the conscience—individuality, self-interrogation, internal voice, bindingness—are “tightly entwined with the concept of moral autonomy and the Kantian position that freedom of thought is necessary for morality” (2017: 56). Far from being universal, then, she concludes that the “inward and individual understanding of the conscience is today well-established in . . . the ethical imaginary of liberal individualism” (2017: 56).
Based on these diagnoses, both Kelly and Weiss assert that the work of conscience must be understood as only one expression of morality, thereby nesting it within a more general category of ethical practices or regimes.2 Talal Asad (2003: 245) adds the claim that “this conception of ethics has a history . . . and its great theorist is Kant.”3
Appropriately for anthropology, in both these cases appraisal of the practices of the conscience finds them unfolding as meaningful acts and language in response to the complexities of particular political histories and struggles. Much—but not all—of the anthropological study of the conscience has taken place in self-professed liberal political conditions, or at least in places where freedom of conscience is codified as a legal possibility. This partially accounts for the referencing and identification of early modern political philosophy as a major genealogy of the conscience by many anthropologists.
Kelly notes that although the category of the conscience is fundamental to liberal imaginaries of personhood, “there are alternative and important traditions of conscience that have run through and past those of liberalism” (2018: 115). He briefly mentions Uday Mehta's (2013) work on Gandhi as one possible example. In the main, however, anthropology has theorized the conscience as experienced and constituted in intersubjective life more in self-ascribed liberal modernities across the globe. Indeed, Kelly himself agrees that the most significant feature of the conscience is its Christian genealogy, so that its legal protection “allows distinctly Christian forms of conviction to trump all other concerns” (2019: 369).
By contrast, in this article I focus on the issue of the conscience (vicdan) in Turkey, whose political trajectories in the modern period reveal no substantive political influence of liberal ideology. The situation there resonates more with Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic's (2020) discussion of contemporary atheist activists in Moscow, who connect their right to freedom of conscience to a critique of the clericalization of post-Soviet Russia. Both Kemalist Turkey and socialist Russia, with their common histories of state-driven cultural revolution and control over religion, raise the vital comparative question of the perceptions and practices of the conscience in nonliberal contexts of modernity. Indeed, what can we learn about the conscience from the Turkish situation, in which discourse about freedom of conscience has been crucial to the political justification of its secularism but which in practice does not recognize the right of conscientious objection (vicdani ret) to its compulsory male military service?
More broadly, this article argues that many discussions of conscience unintendedly overlook or even downplay its importance for people who do not dwell within liberal or post-Christian regimes. In doing so, such analyses presume an overly tight link between self-consciously liberal societies, their “concept of the self-possessed and accountable person” (Lambek 2013: 838) as elaborated by liberalism or by early modern political philosophers, and the conscience. They may also underestimate the importance of authoritarian historical and cultural experiences in liberal contexts themselves that inform people's understandings about and concerns of conscience, as shown in Stefan Sperling's (2013) work on contemporary bioethics in Germany. There, the event of the Holocaust and of historical dictatorship circumscribe debates around scientific research, transparency, and conscience.
Below, I examine the issue of conscientious objection to military conscription in Turkey in the context of the Republic's ceaseless religious militarism, which contradicts its simultaneous claim to relocate religion to the domain of the private conscience. I draw upon the published testimonies of both pious Muslims and other political objectors in Turkey to discern their reasons for refusal. The article seeks to sidestep a Eurocentric tendency in much liberal philosophical literature that, as Kelly (2019) diagnoses, describes the conscience by attributing its contemporary operations to a narrow model of the modern European or Protestant Christian self.
I do so by showing that conscientious objectors in Turkey make their momentous decision to oppose state policies based on a powerful sense of moral disquiet, individual continuity through time, and personal responsibility for their own ethical-political actions—all qualities supposedly characteristic of the so-called “modern” liberal self. And yet their reflection has no embedded connection to the conditions and laws of ostensibly liberal regimes. Adapting Michael Lambek's (2013) construct of forensic personhood, I use the term “forensic conscience” to indicate procedures of self-examination and self-accountability that pervade the narratives and ethics of refusers. The Turkish situation suggests the necessity for the cross-cultural study of the conscience's shared attributes across different languages and political situations.
Securing or Objecting to the Conscience?
For a long period after the Second World War, Anglophone political science portrayed Turkey as an exemplary model of secular polities for modernizing new states (Lerner 1958; Lewis 1994; Shah 2011). Military tutelage and an occasional coup were presented as short-term interruptions to save democracy from itself (Örnek 2012). More recent scholarship argues that the foundational years of the Republic are not best understood in this way, and over the last few decades alternative accounts of the Republic's political order have proliferated (e.g., Atabaki and Zürcher 2005; Der Mugrdechian et al. 2023; Houston 2022; Parla and Davison 2004). Building upon these reassessments, I focus on the meaning and practice of the Republic's secularism and more particularly of its positioning of the conscience within it. This is because in the Turkish situation the early Kemalist Republic made a direct, if ultimately fallacious, connection between its laicist order and the conscience.
In both the historical and current mode of laicism in Turkey, how should we perceive the position of the conscience? According to Niyazi Berkes, Turkey's first sociologist of secularism, it was in the name of the sovereignty of the people that Turkish republicanism forcibly secularized all aspects of worldly affairs (education, family life, law, economy, etc.). He goes on to explain that “religion was guaranteed freedom and protection so long as and insofar as it was not utilized to promote any social or political ideology having institutional implications” (1964: 499). Yet Berkes also admits there was a political intent to what he calls Kemalism's “non-political religion.” He concludes that for Kemalism “the religious question becomes one of religious enlightenment on the one hand and, in terms of a national existence, one of moral re-integration on the other” (1964: 482–483). To put it differently, Kemalism seeks both to civilize believers by rationalizing Islam according to scientific reason and to functionalize religion for Turkish ethnic solidarity and assimilation.
Less well-known but equally significant, this minimalization of religion was justified by a second major claim. In defending its diminishing of religious laws and their replacing by “modern” institutions supposedly animated by neutral reason and knowledge, the Atatürk Republic contended that thereafter religion would dwell more modestly in the conscience of the individual. For Berkes, its policies provided a framework “within which the believer could find ideal conditions for his religious expression, but that would authorize no one to interfere with matters of individual conscience” (1964: 485). Mustafa Kemal's speeches, too, as well as the documents of the Republican People's Party, assert that republican policies sought to emancipate religion from the compromising world of politics to allow it free rein in the conscience of citizens. For example, the Preamble to the 1926 Turkish Civil Code states that the reforms of the Republic “allocate religion to the conscience as [its] real and eternal throne” (cited in Parla and Davison 2004: 107). And Atatürk himself famously pronounced: “Din bir vicdan meselesidir. Herkes vicdanının emrine uymakta serbesttir” (“Religion is a matter of the conscience. Everyone is free to follow the command of their conscience”).
In short, since 1924 the Turkish Republic has claimed to ensure both the freedom of religion and the right of citizens to live their lives free from religion. One rationale by which it has defended its foundational policy of laicism is by declaring that it had rescued Islam from corrosive public life to allow its flourishing in the private conscience. In abolishing the Ottoman Empire and in establishing a new laic order, it allowed freedom of conscience to become a central theme in explaining and justifying the new status and position of religion in society.
But is it true that removing religion from core public domains and embedding it in the private conscience necessarily entails a reducing of its baleful force in social life? This is the express opinion of the Republic. By contrast, in early modern political theory and practice there is an alternative tradition that has been highly anxious about the role and power of the conscience in politics. Having lived through what he called the “disorders of the present time” ([1651] 1985: 728) including the English Civil Wars, the reign of Oliver Cromwell, and the Stuart Restoration, Thomas Hobbes would have thought that this decision to extract religion from the public sphere and release it into the domain of the private conscience was a disastrous political strategy. For him, leaving religious commitments and expressions to the whims of the individual made it impossible to generate civil agreement among the population and thus to avoid conflict and ensure security. Hobbes's argument was that allowing the conscience to determine its own preferences in matters of religion sharpens or creates religious divisions based on conscientious considerations of the truth of certain doctrines and practices. It is, thus, a force of severe social instability.
Accordingly, for Hobbes the best political order is one in which the Sovereign power declares a public religion, and then exercises the right to command the religious institution whose doctrines it must preach, as well as to determine its canonical books of scripture, approve or disapprove its interpretation of scripture, and even to authorize its use of descriptive religious language (Hobbes [1651] 1985: 415–427). Moreover, in propagating its public religious monopoly the state must also curtail the role of personal conscience.4 In brief, for any autocratic Leviathan (regime), the untrammeled conscience is a political obstacle, because it leads some individuals or groups to deliberate upon and enact religious, moral, or political convictions that contradict the unifying religious edicts decided upon by the state. Indeed, it is for this reason that Keith Thomas describes the European seventeenth century as the “Age of Conscience,” because “men and women were subjected to so many religious and political conflicts of duty and allegiance” (1993: 30).
Would Hobbes, had he been alive, thus been worried about Turkey's political arrangements? I think not, and we may be so bold as to claim that both Berkes's and the Kemalists’ presentation of Turkish laicism as quarantining religion in the domain of the free conscience is fundamentally misleading. In practice, the Kemalists did not leave religion and its meanings to the volatility, discretion, or freedom of the individual conscience. Indeed, as many writers have diagnosed (Davison 1998; Houston 2021; Kaplan 2006; Kemerli 2015; Somer 2013; Walton 2013), they did the opposite. To manufacture what Berkes revealingly called this “non-separationist secularism” (Berkes 1964: 480), in 1924 the Republic established and financed the Directorate of Religious Affairs (or the Diyanet), its essential, anti-secular bureaucracy, bringing both religious institutions and the training and appointment of religious personnel under the aegis of the state. The first article of the law constituting it stated that “the administration of all matters concerning the beliefs and rituals of Islam will belong to the Department of the Affairs of Piety” (Berkes 1964: 485). Governmentally, all religious functionaries in Turkey became salaried state bureaucrats of the Diyanet, appointable after completion of their state-approved qualifications. Specialists in Islamic şeriat law, too, were employed by the Diyanet. Combined with other state institutions, the Diyanet sought to influence the conscience's generative facility to judge personal religious right from wrong, as well as to shape its sense of responsibility to approve or condemn public actions.
In short, in the institution of the Diyanet the Kemalists generated a “Hobbesian” solution for themselves, controlling Sunni Hanafi Islam through its administrative election. In doing so, the Republic refused to leave the sovereign conscience in peace. Nationalizing Islam to officially serve the new ethnic nation, one core mission of the Diyanet has been to inject a particular public understanding of religion into the very domain of the private conscience of citizens.
In this process, what is the authorized version of Islam that Turkish Muslims are taught to believe? Among other characteristics, for example, its Sunni nature, militaristic nationalism is one pivotal feature of the religious and ethical sense desired in citizens. This history of cultivation and promotion of martial virtues has a long pedigree. In Askere Din Dersleri (Akseki 1925), the Diyanet's first publication in 1925, conscripts were instructed in how to practice Sunni Islam, advised about its core principles, and encouraged to feel that religion encompasses specific affects and duties toward the state and the ethnic-Turkish nation. Lessons include topics such as “Defending the Fatherland Is a Command of Allah”; “Soldiering Is a Holy Duty”; and “Every Person Is a Soldier in Islam.” Its first chapter claimed that “Islam also has a sixth pillar, which is cihad, military service . . . This duty is different from prayer, fasting, hajj, and zakat. Unless this duty is fulfilled, the others cannot be properly performed” (Gürpınar and Kenar 2016: 66–67). Here, one hears the new state's attempt to sacralize nation-making practices through references to Islam, including the extension of the religious term martyr (şehit) to those soldiers who die as witnesses to the essence of the nation.
The Diyanet's second work in the same year was the handbook Yeni Hutbelerim (My New Sermons), written for mosque imams whose duties included delivery of the Friday sermon. Accompanied by a sermon journal, it was dispatched to mosque preachers all over the country. In her survey of these first model sermons, Umut Azak argues that they propagated “the Kemalist regime's use of Islam in the service of the nation-state as they emphasized, for instance, the importance of national service as a holy duty” (2008: 167).5 Similarly, in their study of Diyanet sermons over different decades of the Turkish Republic, Doğan Gürpınar and Ceren Kenar conclude that they communicated two major messages: “(i) the idea of an organic community and (ii) the idea of an imposing communal morality” (2016: 74). Together, each relay an attempt to mold the structure of the person's conscience. For the Kemalists, forging the religious conscience of the population meant seeking to inculcate citizens with a religious militarism whose morality included obedience to the state. Ironically, given that Atatürk's reforms are still sometimes described as establishing a secular state, Turkey's illiberal order begins with its founding of the Diyanet.
Crucially, examination of the mission and practices of the Diyanet under the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government shows that it is continuing this authoritarianism while refurbishing older nationalist discourses (White 2012). Now the world's largest and most global Islamic bureaucracy, the Diyanet is integral to the AKP government's steady fabrication of an Islam-respecting and Muslim-friendly society. Indeed, recent research on the AKP's funding of the Diyanet demonstrates that since 2012 it has boosted the budget for its nationalist and sectarian mission (Mutluer 2018). Studying the sermons generated by the Diyanet over the last decade, İhsan Yılmaz and İsmail Bayrak (2022) diagnose their dissemination of Turkish nationalism, as well as their censuring of any oppositional or subversive Muslim religious actions and ideas. Further, the same contradictory relationship between laicism's language of conscience and the refusal of the government to provide any legal grounds for conscientious objection to obligatory military service continues.
Today, in the Diyanet's ceaseless advocacy of martial religious tenets and practices we hear the propagation of a gendered complex of piety that articulates religion with militaristic citizenship.6 Its dictates are clear enough. Turkish men are born soldiers. Military service is a sacred service. Dying for the nation makes one a martyr. Islam blesses such martyrdom. Martyrdom is simultaneously secular and religious. Serving and obeying the state is akin to serving and obeying the divine, because both are sovereign over the individual. To give just one example of how this assertion may be consented to by suffering people, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak recently reported the adult sister of a lieutenant killed fighting for the Turkish military as declaring at his funeral commemoration: “My brother became a martyr. What happiness that brings us; not everyone is granted such favour” (Kardeşim şehit oldu, ne mutlu bize, herkese nasip olmaz) (25 Eylül (September) 2022, Sunday).
Conscientious Objection to Military Conscription
In the event of the militaristic nationalism preached and practiced by religious institutions under the Kemalists and continued by the AKP, conscientious objection to participating in compulsory military training has become one central conflicted dimension of the conscience in Turkey. According to Turkish law, all male citizens are required to do military service sometime between the ages 20 and 45 for a period of six or twelve months, depending upon educational qualifications, regardless of whether they have dual citizenship or live outside of Turkey.7 Young men pursuing vocational or tertiary education can defer training up until a certain age. Today, despite its rhetoric of freedom of conscience, Turkey is the only member state in the Council of Europe that denies both the right to conscientious objection against mandatory military service, as well as any alternative form of national service (Çınar 2014). Other countries in Europe have either abolished compulsory military service, allowed young people to choose community work as an aspect of their conscientious objection to militarism, or have expressed an intention to provide alternative service (Kılıç 2019: 4).
And yet clearly, there is widespread social opposition to mandatory conscription, especially in the context of the state's ongoing cold and hot war against the very existence of Turkey's Kurds. In the explicit civil disobedience of some brave young men, we see an open rejection of the Republic's never-ending project to shape a nationalist conscience that thereafter goads a person to judge their own behavior by its categories. Further, there also exists the much more widespread circumvention of conscription by hundreds of thousands of young men who seek to defer military duty for as long as they can. Weiss (2016) reveals a comparable calculated evasion of compulsory military service by young Israelis, interpreting it as a form of refusal through abstention. Max Harwood's (2018) ethnographic film Man Made, comparing conscription in Turkey and Israel, shows both the tactics and the stress of young men as they seek to elude military service. Equally significant, alongside this endless deferral there are also tens of thousands of middle-class citizens in Turkey who now pay a fee or a fine to the state to drastically reduce the time spent in the military (from twelve months to three weeks). A recent report commissioned by the Association for Conscientious Objection in Turkey noted that of these the number of men “who feel compelled to submit themselves to the shortened military service by payment for reasons of conscientious objections are unknown” (Yıldırım and Ücpınar 2021). Taking these three practices together, we see that the Republic's efforts to engineer a patriotic conscience meets constant intransigence.
Criminalizing the individual's decision to refuse to participate in military preparations or actions, the state has refusers tried in military tribunals, not in civilian courts. There, they are often charged with the crime of desertion or insubordination. Mandatory conscription overrides conscientious objection to military training on the part of the individual because, in clear Hobbesian logic, freedom of conscience is seen as threatening national stability and security.
Methodologically, doing fieldwork with conscientious objectors in Turkey is politically problematic. Prosecuting refusers, the Turkish state also prosecutes any civil society group (or even individual) that supports them. Article 301 of the Constitution makes it a punishable offense to speak publicly against the army or conscription, terming it a crime to “denigrate the military.” Refusers who publicize their decisions on social media may be charged with “alienating people from military service.” Nevertheless, the extensive digital database of the civil society group Association for Conscientious Objection (Vicdani Ret Derneği, or VRD) is a rich source through which to apprehend the ethical and political motivations of conscientious objectors.8 In it, the moving statements of literally hundreds of military rejecters have been collected and posted online. Intended for varied publics, these sometimes-precise declarations are simultaneously personal interventions, in which refuseniks nail to the door their reasons for refusing military service. The VRD is Turkey's main antimilitarist civil society “group,” and is affiliated with the War Resisters’ International network. Alongside collecting and curating this archive of declarations of objection, VRD also provides crucial online information and support to potential conscientious refusers in Turkey, including the digital Handbook on Conscientious Objection.
Explicit refusal to do military service in Turkey comes in different political shapes and sizes. Kurds, anarchists, atheists, and gay men have made up the bulk of objectors. Since 2007, dozens of Muslims have also refused military enlistment (Kemerli 2015: 290). (Of course, Kurds may also be pious Muslims, and Muslims may also be anarchists, etc.). Following Tayfun Gönül's declaration of conscientious objection in 1989, more than 660 people over the last 30 years have announced that they, too, will not do their military training (Çınar 2021: 51). In Israel, Weiss discerned the existence of three clearly differentiated refusing groups, each with its own specific discourses and incommensurate reasons for objecting to or evading enlistment. By contrast, broad agreement with the deconstructive critique of official Kemalist historiography and opposition to the Republic's militaristic structure characterize the refusal of nearly all conscientious objectors in Turkey, including that of Muslims.
Examination of their statements reveals an overlapping series of political reasons for their decision: their rejecting of the Republic's authoritarianism, problematic laicism, and ethnic-Turkish chauvinism, as well as of its masculinist and hierarchical armed forces. Common convictions among those who refuse it include a belief in the sanctity of human life; a refusal to kill; a rejection of violence; a determination to never join the military; a refusal to give and receive orders; a denunciation of war in general and the current war in Kurdistan in particular; a rejection of state-sponsored enmity toward other ethnic groups; and a recognition and condemnation of the Republic's creation of the “cultural” opprobrium meted out to objectors. Tuğkan Tuğ’s succinct summation in his statement posted on the webpage of the VRD speaks for many: “Öldürmeyeceğim, ölmeyeceğim; kimsenin askeri olmayacağım!” (“I will not kill; I will not die; I will not be anyone's soldier!”).9
Most threatening to the AKP government are religious refusers. In 2007, Enver Aydemir became the first explicit Muslim conscientious objector, exposing himself to character assassination from both pro-government newspapers and AKP-aligned intellectuals (Kemerli 2015: 289). He explains that after being forcibly removed from his home and taken to the military training brigade in Bilecik he told authorities that, “based upon their laic tenets, the military elites demonstrated animosity to his religious beliefs, and for this reason he would not do military service in a laic country and would never become a soldier of a political order like this.” He went on to conclude that
the real issue that I need to share with the public is my lack of sympathy for the fundamental values upon which the Turkish republican state has been founded . . . But, taking into consideration the realities of the region I live in, I declare that I will only perform public work in an environment that is suitable to my beliefs and that recognizes my individual rights (right to education, freedom of dress, freedom of thought, etc.) in the framework of responsibilities that come with social life. Let this be announced to the public.10
Anti-Diyanet Muslims project radically different Islamic passions and ideas in their refusal to enlist. One shared Muslim emphasis involves their fierce deconstruction of the military's use of the term cihat (“jihad”) to dignify military service for a non-Islamic and nationalist state. As Pinar Kemerli writes, for Muslim objectors “neither the sanctioning of the Turkish army as the agent of jihad nor the characterization of military service as a holy duty rest on valid Islamic foundations” (2015: 292). Another is their common accusation that the Turkish army's suppression of Kurdish civil society and its concomitant militarization of the Kurdish issue contravenes Koranic injunctions against waging war on fellow Muslims. In a striking image, refuser Yusuf claims that “the war against Kurdish guerrillas [is] a ‘dirty war’ that is dressed in a fake Islamic overcoat” (2015: 291). Most “shocking” in the Turkish context is the denial that soldiers who die in the course of military duty for the Turkish nation-state are martyrs (Şehitler). Muslim objector İnan Aru asserts on the contrary that slain conscripts are “sacrificial victims of national sovereignty” (2015: 293).
These strands are woven together in a striking way by Nebiye Arı, the first female Muslim conscientious objector in Turkey, in 2011 (2015: 293).11 Criticizing the Republic's gendered order that funnels men into military training and women into domesticity and the martialized rearing of boys, she avers: “As a Muslim woman . . . I refuse to participate in this role crafted for me, and do not want to sacrifice the men I love, or my children, for the dirty war in the Southeast” (2015: 294).
All this shows that, as in other places, conscientious objection in Turkey is hyper-charged with affect. The Turkish state's response has been equally ferocious. Its penalizing of refusers includes the levying of massive fines, lifelong criminal prosecution and persecution, potential repeat imprisonment, formalized inability to work, and the suspension of civil rights (including the withholding of passports, travel bans, cancellation of voting rights, disallowance of custody arrangements, negation of financial guarantor duties, and prohibition from office-holding in any civil or trade association). Far from incorporating objectors into any alternative legitimate public, those who refuse enlistment on grounds of conscience risk the affliction of “civil death.”
Based on his research in ‘liberal’ Britain, Kelly (2018) argues that the granting of special provisions to those who made claims in the name of conscience reproduced objectors’ already respectable status. Weiss (2017) sees a similar favored position for Ashkenazi conscientious objectors in Israel. By contrast, in Turkey individual appeal to one's conscience and to dissenting political convictions as grounds for refusing conscription receives no hearing and begets no duplication of privilege. Conscience is a curse. Objectors are not loyal but disloyal citizens. There are no ‘reasonable grounds’ for objection and thus no judicious weighting up of objectors’ sincerity in the court of public opinion or in the tribunal of state. Unlike objectors in Israel, refusers in Turkey do not need to perform correct presentation of “the bundle of signs invoking ‘conscience’” (Weiss 2017: 56), which part guide the testimony of Israeli objectors in establishing the sincerity of their ethical claims and thus success in the granting of their exemption. This because in Turkey there is no legal ‘conscience clause’ nor space for private conscience. Contra Kelly's conclusion about British pacifism, there is thus no state authorization of dissent (ibid: 125).
And yet there are conscientious objectors. Moreover, even though there is no promotion of conscience by the current AKP regime, one striking fact about conscientious refusal in Turkey is the overlapping similarity of refusers’ moral subjectivity with that of objectors emerging in more liberal circumstances, including ethical accountability for past and future acts and thus the continuity of personhood over time. For example, in a 2016 interview published in the newspaper Evrensel with refuser Inan Aru, the latter was asked what he thought he would be doing if he had not become a conscientious objector. His answer is revealing:
For me, this is less an act of rejection than an act of self-constitution. . . . These are the paths I choose to walk in life. If I somehow felt that I had to go to the military and went, I think my integrity and self-respect would be destroyed. Maybe I couldn't do what I do now. I would be another me.12
His initial statement, released on social media in 2008 and uploaded to the conscientious objectors’ webpage soon after, explains his decision more fully. In it he describes how,
on the evening of 27 September 2008, at 7:00 pm, in front of the tomb of Simavna Kadısıoğlu Şeyh Bedreddin at Sultanahmet surrounded by 30 people—thanks to all of you, wonderful friends—I read a statement declaring that under no conditions would I do military service. I left a copy of that declaration with a bouquet of flowers at Bedreddin's grave. I expressed my conscientious objection in the presence of Bedreddin, my friends, and the night. Now, I share my declaration with you. I did not call the press, because the mass media with its motives and modus operandi is part of the militarism and lies that I reject . . .
For the love of truth and anarchy! Peace be upon you! May the earth be heaven!
Perhaps most powerfully, Inan finishes his ipse dixit with a poem, whose first line begins “In the name of God, the Merciful and the Compassionate,” and whose finals lines assert:
No army that surrounds the world can nullify the Owner of All Possessions [Malik-ül Mülkü].
I will not pick up a weapon.
There will be flowers in my hair, earrings on my ears, rings on my fingers.
I will not wear degrading ranks on my shoulders
that taint the beauty of the wild child within me.
I will not march in step,
my feet will guide me in all the winding paths to truth.
And oh, my Sultan, my Lord, my General,
don't tire your lovely mouth by giving me orders.
From now on I will not be subject to any command other than the word of truth.
An equally uncompromising but more recent declaration comes from Dogan Ciritcioğlu, posted on the webpage in 2022:
The idea of compulsion is unacceptable to me. I believe that an imposed issue, under any name, harms and destroys human dignity and is a devasting insult. I do not even accept the possibility of disagreeing with the millions of people who have chosen not to see any harm in being forced to submit to orders and to weapons. The possibility that I will be able to agree with you, that is, with the officials of the palace regime and the society, through any method of communication in the world, is an option as small as a speck of dust. Under no circumstances and under no conditions; not to any institution of the state nor at any time: I refuse to be subjugated by the fairy tale of a sense of duty and the mask and make-up of service for the benefit of society.13
More considered is an announcement from Abdullah Özoğul, who clarifies his reasons for refusing in more classically pacifist terms:
I am Abdullah Özoğul. According to my perception, there is no justification for killing people, and the human right to life cannot be usurped under any conditions. Because military service is a special institution with weapons, war, death, and killings, I never wanted to serve in the military. At the same time, the deceased and the murderers are siblings, citizens of the same land, and the fact that they have shared values also carries a separate motivation for me. For these reasons, I am against dying and killing, I will not pick up a gun or become a soldier, [and] I will not kill my brothers. For these reasons, I declare my conscientious objection to the public.14
All of these pronouncements are defined by a strong sense of self-possession, an uncompromising assertion of personal responsibility for choosing one's own ethical path, a repudiation of the “ethics” of the military and of the state, and a lucid acceptance of the social and political consequences of one's acts. Each testifies to an internal yet interactional process of ethical deliberation and ethical self-formation, as well as to a determination to be honest with oneself about one's own truth.15 Moreover, these declarations also express and intend a particular mood and affect, a tone that reverberates with a defiant challenge to the powers-that-be—the military, the state, the government, and the Atatürk Republic—and carries an obstinate refusal to entertain the validity of any competing ethical regimes. Reflecting the authoritarian character of the regime against which they stand, objectors brook no reciprocal moral evaluation here.
Conclusion
Wartime liberal Britain. Politically fractured Israel. AKP-dominated Turkey. In all these places, the force of the conscience articulates with specific issues of freedom of action, different histories of institutions and dissent, and varieties of ethical religion. And yet these three different sociohistorical circumstances have produced clear similarities in the operations and self-expressions of the conscience. This encourages us to delink the study of what I have called a “forensic conscience” from analysis of liberal political arrangements, enabling us to interpret people in different political situations as reasoning with similar categories.
According to Michael Lambek (2013), early modern philosophers developed a binary model of ethical personhood, whose contrasting features were supposedly culturally specific to Europe and non-Europe, respectively. Characterized by continuity, responsibility, and intentionality on the one hand, and discontinuity, performance, and lack of accountability on the other, the European pole of these concepts—named the “forensic person” by Lambek—articulates with the imaginaries and values of the liberal conscience. Deconstructing the duality of the model, Lambek argues that, rather than being distinctive to particular societies, these two constructs are better understood as “universal and intrinsic dimensions” of personhood everywhere, “modes or dimensions of action that are relevant for all persons” (2013: 838).
The pronouncements of conscientious objectors in Turkey affirm Lambek's argument, corroborating the claim that a similar “forensic” mode of conscience is not reserved for liberal subjects but can be interpreted as a more cross- cultural phenomenon. Too often, genealogical approaches to conscience argue the opposite. For example, Asad's (2003) interpretation of Islamic ethics does not discuss how Muslims themselves animate and apply the central Arabic-Turkish-Persian term vicdan, even as he makes a particular association between “conscience” and “modern Christianity” via an arbitrary severing of Christianity's earlier history.16 In the same way, Kelly contends that conscience “can be seen as lying at the heart of a particular sense of liberal moral personhood” (2018: 115), in which claims of conscience “address political questions by referring to internal convictions” (2019: 372).
But the ethical practices and discourses of conscientious objectors in Turkey suggest that people experience and express a subjective and free conscience in other political contexts. Indeed, this article has shown that similar ideas and practices of the conscience have emerged where the nebulous scaffoldings of liberalism (or modern Christianity) do not hold sway. There, individuals’ pacifist, anarchist, Muslim, or nationalist objections to war and killing—held as inward convictions and buttressed by the online activism of both criminalized local and legal global groups—reject both public manifestations of official Islam and the Turkish state's affective politics of national security. In the conflicted social life of the conscience in Turkey, citizens generate an alternative conscience to spite the militarist ethic desired of them by the authoritarian state. The same contention can be seen in South Korea, where over the last two decades more than 90 percent of worldwide conscientious refusal of mandatory military service has occurred (Suk Yoo 2018).
Establishing reasons for the commonality of these ethical senses cross-culturally is difficult and beyond the scope of this article. They may indicate that the binary between liberal and illiberal orders is simply too polarizing. They may be better comprehended as the result of the diffusion of modern imaginaries over two hundred years of global modernities, resulting in complex histories of regional relationships and differentiations. They may also reflect a much longer history, including thousands of years of religious encounters and fertilization between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Regardless, methodologically the Turkish situation suggests the necessity of the presumption of core cross-cultural qualities of conscience, and thus the identification of their universality across different languages and in varieties of political circumstances.
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to Jean-Paul Baldacchino, Banu Senay, Joost Jongerden, Daniel Tranter, Paul Mason, Roberto Costa, and Michael Jackson for their useful comments on different versions of this article. Many thanks, too, to its anonymous reviewers and especially to Social Analysis editor Penny Harvey.
Notes
Tobias Kelley (2015) notes that academic discussions of conscience have been dominated by the disciplines of philosophy, law, and theology. Cognitivephilosopher Patricia Churchland (2019), for example, argues that the neurobiology of the conscience sees it as an evolutionary feature of the mind or brain developed through natural selection for human membership in groups, including for the internalization of their relativistic standards of right and wrong. In psychoanalytic traditions, the conscience is often equated with an internalized super-ego. By contrast, for Orthodox (Christian) theological traditions, for example, the conscience is conceived as a “spark of God” within a person (Zigon 2009: 8). Other traditions with more scripture-based legal orientations see the ethical scope of the conscience as originating in authoritative texts (Weiss 2017).
Harini Amarasuriya and colleagues (2020) make a different subsumption in their book, arguing that the claims of conscience can be included under the broad category of political dissent.
Scholars interested in the legal dimensions of conscientious objection more often trace its juridical lineage to the work of Locke and his arguments against Hobbes that the state should not restrict a person's freedom to maintain or change their religion or belief (Çınar 2014: 11).
Indeed, according to Mark Hanin (2012: 56), Hobbes thought conscience was “akin to a disease . . . ; it invites suspicions of antinomianism [the view that God's grace has freed the Christian from the need to observe established moral precepts] and rampant moral subjectivism; it is a destabilizing force responsible for the mayhem of the state of war that requires quick suppression in society.”
Since 1924, the Diyanet has sent out a recommended weekly address, making its preaching compulsory in recurrent periods of state of emergency.
For further inspection of the gendered practices of state militarism, see Altınay (2004).
The first law on male conscription was promulgated in 1919.
See https://vicdaniret.org/tarih-sirasina-gore/ (accessed 2 February 2023).
See https://vicdaniret.org/tugkan-tug/ (accessed 2 February 2023).
https://vicdaniret.org/enver-aydemir/ (accessed 4 February 2023).
Given their exemption from military service, women conscientious objectors who volunteer in (semi-legal) anti-conscription civil society groups focus their criticism on the sociopolitical consequences of Turkey's militarism.
See http://www.evrensel.net/haber/274247/vicdani-retci-inan-mayis-aru-askere-gitmeyisimiz-etik-temellere-dayaniyor#.Vtv0lTp9YlA.facebook (accessed 25 December 2023).
See https://vicdaniret.org/zoraki-olarak-emir-ve-silah-altina-girmeyi-kabul-etmiyorum-dogan-ciritcioglu/ (accessed 25 December 2023).
See https://vicdaniret.org/abdullah-ozogul/ (accessed 28 December 2023).
Compare similarities in the concluding lines of a recent article by a conscientious objector in Israel. Etan Nichin writes: “Refusal isn't heroic, but it expresses a different kind of resolution—the resolution to stand alone, to navigate the complexities of dissent, and to remain true to your beliefs in the face of societal dissonance; to realize that rebellion is required when facing a violent and unsustainable status quo” [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/tal-mitnick-israel-soldier-military-service-society].
According to Paul Heck (2014), there is a long history of self-examination and of self-accountability in classical Islam.
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