Undoing Academic Cultures of Militarism: Turkey and Beyond

What can we learn from exploring the history of the questions that could not be asked, the connections that could not be made, and the research that could not be done? What are the challenges of demilitarization for society and political institutions at large, when academic research itself is shaped by layers of silence? Asking these and other questions, this article proposes “methodological militarism” as a tool to understand the deeply ingrained workings of militarism in academic knowledge production and engages in a search for the “better story” of demilitarizing academia. Since January 2016, more than 2,000 academics in Turkey have been facing the dire consequences of having signed the Academics for Peace petition asking for an end to militarized state violence and human rights violations in Turkey’s southeastern cities. Departing from this moment of rupture and focusing critically on my own scholarship, the article raises questions about the historical making of the academic cultures of militarism as...