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Revolutionary desire and decolonial struggle inside the heart of the carceral state

Deadly Refusals offers an intimate portrait of Kurdish decolonial struggle within the carceral and legal apparatuses of the Turkish state. Set in the counterterrorism courts and maximum-security prisons of Northern Kurdistan, Serra M. Hakyemez’s ethnography examines how prosecuted and imprisoned Kurds from different socioeconomic backgrounds organize in refusal of the criminalization and colonization of their political demands and desires. Through acts of self-criticism, revolutionary education, and comradely care, these prisoners articulate a political subjectivity that challenges the foundations of colonial power.

Based on more than seventeen years of ethnographic research—including interviews with former prisoners, lawyers, judges, and prosecutors; observations of more than one hundred court hearings; and analysis of prison memoirs, poetry, and legal archives—Deadly Refusals uncovers the mechanisms through which counterterrorism law reproduces the colonial state. Yet it is not solely a study of repression. Engaging psychoanalytic concepts of subject, desire, and ethics, Hakyemez illuminates how these carceral spaces also become sites of revolutionary responsibility. Here, refusal is not resignation but a political act in which the colonized self is killed—literally or figuratively—to make way for a larger collective subjectivity.

Using the interplay of comradeship and intimacy, political desire and ordinary pleasure, death and love, Deadly Refusals examines how Kurdish political prisoners forge multilayered relations of decolonization in an ongoing psychopolitical struggle. Hakyemez shows how both small gestures of withdrawal, restraint, and negation as well as radical acts like language protests, hunger strikes, and death protests become part of a shared struggle for alternative futures that state power cannot fully contain or comprehend.

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