Eray Çayli, "Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2021)

New Books in Sociology · Jul 15, 2022 · 1h 6m

“Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey whose mainstream image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democracy to a hotbed of violence within the space…