Serra Hakyemez

SERRA HAKYEMEZ, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2020 to aid research and writing on “The Law’s Enemy: Anti-Terrorism Trials in Turkey.” “Deadly Refusals: Decolonization at Times of Counterterrorism” is a monograph that explores how counterterrorism, and its institutional forms in the courtroom and the prison, function as the colonizing state power and disseminate into the broader as well as the most intimate textures of life in Northern Kurdistan (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). Based on systematic observation of court hearings, archival research of counterterror cases, and interviews with former prisoners, judges, prosecutors and expert witnesses, this book demonstrates why counterterror law is unable to capture, captivate, and tame the revolutionary surplus that emanates from the subjects making up the Kurdish liberation movement. Building on psychoanalytic, decolonial, abolitionist, and feminist theory, this book situates the interplay of refusal and desire at the crossroads of counterterrorism and decolonization to articulate this revolutionary surplus.