Coming to terms with the past: narrating the 12 September 1980 military coup

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the meaning of the 12 September 1980 military coup at the present, and it aims to examine the representations and justifications of the coup, and the politics of coming to terms with it. In this study I analyze three perspectives about the coup that have been constitutive in forming the current public meaning of the coup: the political science literature about the 1980 coup, the discourse of the military and the narratives of the political activists of the pre-coup period as thewitnesses/victims of the coup. In this study, it is argued that whereas the discourse of the military rests on an ostensible mechanism of justification of the coup, the literature on Turkish politics accepts the assumptions of the military as taken forgranted and excludes the politics of coming to terms with the coup at normative and analytical levels. On the other hand although they share some characteristics of the discourse of the military, the narratives of the witnesses also open a way for questioning the coup and its effects up to the present.