Penality and Antagonistic Struggles: The Case of Maximum-Security Prison Reform in Turkey
This presentation challenges the widely shared assumption that the modern state has sovereign control over penality and illustrates its arguments illustrates through a detailed account of the struggles over maximum-security prison reform in Turkey in late 1990s.
SocSci Hub
Date: Wednesday 25 February 2026
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Online
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Student events
Speaker: Arda Ibikoglu
This presentation challenges the widely shared assumption that the modern state has sovereign control over penality. When we identify the crucial role that penality plays in the material and symbolic construction of social reality, it becomes imperative that we also recognise how state’s claims over penal power are challenged.
In this presentation, I offer a crude typology, which identifies three types of struggle between state and nonstate actors over penal power: central state actors vs. (i) those official and nonstate actors that reject the state’s claims and aim to keep (or carve out) penal power beyond the central state’s control; (ii) those official and nonstate actors that willingly or unwillingly accept the national penal infrastructure but dispute the rules of the game to gain control over parts of it; (iii) those official and nonstate actors that reject neither the state’s sovereign authority nor the rules of the game, and seek a favorable outcome within the existing setup.
Prominent theoretical models on penality, mostly based on cases in the Global North, presume the state’s sovereign control over penality and implicitly limit contestation over penality to the third level in my categorisation. As these models focus on a seemingly hegemonic moment in penality, they fail to recognise how certain antagonistic contenders for penal power have been co-opted, silenced or destroyed to shape the penal status quo. Borrowing McLennan’s (2008) key conclusion for US prisons throughout the 19th century, I argue that we need to think of penality as a “site and instrument” in broader political (and antagonistic) struggles. These three ideal types of contestations between state and nonstate actors do not only play a central role in shaping penality they also construct the state as we know it. The presentation illustrates this argument through a detailed account of the struggles over maximum-security prison reform in Turkey in late 1990s.
Bio.
Arda Ibikoglu received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington in 2012. He was a visiting lecturer at the Legal Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2009-2010, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Sociology Department of Bogazici University, Istanbul, between 2012-2014. Throughout the following decade, he worked at the Sociology Department of Altinbas University, Istanbul. Ibikoglu was also a member of the executive board of the Civil Society in the Penal System Association in Istanbul for the past two years. He is currently not associated with an academic institution.
This workshop is part of the Social Analysis of Penalities Across Boundaries series which is co-organised with the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, Universisdad Nactional del Litoral and Universidade da Coruña.