It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators' narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators' rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators' narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.
By:
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231222310
ISBN 10: 0231222319
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 12 May 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Performing Public Confessions 2. State Violence, Public Secrets, and Denial in 1990s Turkey 3. Remorse and Responsibility 4. Justifying Violence 5. Complicity and Complacency in Turkish Society Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız is a lecturer in sociology and program convener for the MA in Human Rights, Culture, and Social Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London. She previously worked for many years with local and international human rights NGOs, and she is coeditor in chief of the Journal of Perpetrator Research.
Reviews for Performing Public Confessions: Avowal and Disavowal of State Violence in Turkey
In Performing Public Confessions, Yıldız critically contextualizes confessional speech acts as a process of meaning making that actually ends up benefiting the perpetrators rather than the victims. Timely and beautifully written, this book is a must read for anyone interested in Turkish state and society and those concerned about the systematic undermining of public accountability everywhere. -- Fatma Müge Göçek, author of <i>Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789-2009</i> Yıldız breaks ground by focusing on what public confessions do rather than reveal in the context of Turkey’s paramilitary fight against the Kurdish Freedom Struggle. She shows convincingly how awovals of wrong doing in terms of content become disawovals when their performative aspects are taken into account. -- Nazan Üstündağ, author of <i>The Mother, the Politician and, the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement</i>
