Author Archives: Zerrin Özlem Biner

About Zerrin Özlem Biner

Research associate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research includes the study of the state and the experience of minority citizens in contemporary Turkey. Recent publications include “Acts of Defacement, Memory of Loss: Ghostly Effects of Armenian Crisis in Mardin, Southeast Turkey,” in History and Memory (2010), and “Multiple Imaginations of the State: Understanding a Mobile Conflict of Justice and Accountability from the Perspective of Assyrian-Syriac Christians,” in Citizenship Studies (2011). She is also co-editor of the volume Law Against the State: Ethnographic Forays into Law’s Transformations (Cambridge, 2012).

The Logic of Reconciliation: Between the Right to Compensation and the Right to Justice in Turkey

June 20, 2014 by
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This article analyses the processes and outcomes associated with legal reforms designed to provide restorative justice in the context of contemporary Turkey. Focusing on the practices and discourses associated with the Compensation Law, it explores both state practices and the survival mechanisms of Kurdish citizens living in the conflict zone. The article shows that the Compensation Law did not transform the relationship between the state and Kurdish citizens. Rather, it reproduced the symbolic and material relationships that historically and politically had been based on bribery, disavowal, abuse, and subversion.