Emine Rezzan Karaman

The Turkish state instrumentalized enforced disappearances after the conflict between the Kurdish Workers’ Party and the army escalated dramatically in the 1990s. In response, the Saturday Mothers demanding justice for their disappeared children began their protests in 1995, which became the longest-running civil disobedience movement in Turkey. I have organized the protests for years and written about them based on my 15 years of feminist ethnographic fieldwork. If I receive Hunt Fellowship as a scholar trained in Law, Jurisprudence, Political Science, History, Sociology and Gender Studies, I will publish four articles on, what I name, the Mothers’ judicio-politics-a combination of legal and political practices to get justice for the dead, to heal the rest by reckoning with the past and to form new legal cartographies to save the future. My first article analyzes the Mothers’ legal struggle in Turkey and ECtHR; the second discusses the Mothers’ position in the judicial system as “defendants” of cases filed against them since 2020; the third traces the Mothers’ coalition with lawyers to remind judges of their power as their rulings on the forcibly-disappeared have healing impact on social wounds; and the fourth compares the Mothers’ judicio-politics with the maternal movements in neighboring countries.