Ahmet Özcan, “Outlaws, Bureaucrats, and the Gallows: Desertion, Brigandage, and Capital Punishment in Turkey’s Early Republican Period”, (in) Ümit Kurt and Spyros Tsoutsoumpis (eds..), Paramilitary Violence in the Post-Ottoman Borderlands: Pro-state Militias and Nation-Building, 1905-1949 (Dublin: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026).
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This chapter examines the interwoven histories of desertion, brigandage, and capital punishment in Turkey’s early Republican period to illuminate the organic relationship between crime, punishment, and power in nation-state formation. Moving beyond Weberian notions of monopolized violence, it traces how state elites simultaneously repressed, pardoned, and incorporated deserters and brigands, transforming them into both threats and instruments of sovereignty. Through analysis of laws, parliamentary debates, Independence Tribunals, and security reports, the chapter shows how executions functioned less as deterrence than as symbolic expenditure, dramatizing the state’s legitimacy. The gallows thus became central to the state’s performance of sovereignty during the turbulent transition from empire to republic.
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