Beyond Legal Truth: Immigration, Sexual Violence, and Feminist Solidarity Politics in Turkey

This lecture examines the multiple registers of truth that surface during sexual assault cases involving immigrant defendants and victims, which various actors then mobilize to achieve different objectives within and beyond the legal realm. Close analysis of those cases reveals insights not only about immigrant experiences but also about Turkey's judiciary. It provides valuable understanding of the parameters for establishing legal truth in courts, the limitations of judicial remedies that depend on legal truth, other registers of truth that overflow from case files, and political strategies that engage with legal proceedings to assert structural truths that the judicial system cannot formally recognize. As I examine the spectrum of truths and their mobilization in these cases, I explore the possibility of crafting a politics of immigrant solidarity that transcends simple narratives of victimhood and heroism, and consider law's potential role in such an effort.

Elif Babül is a political and legal anthropologist whose research focuses on national and transnational bureaucracies, migration management, human rights, and the politics of truth in Turkey. She is the author of award-winning book Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey, published in 2017 by Stanford University Press. Her work has appeared in the American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Social Anthropology, and the Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, in addition to several edited volumes in Turkish and English. She was part of the Editorial Committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) between 2018-2024 and has served as Associate Editor of Current Anthropology between 2021-2024. Currently she is serving as the President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

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