Pınar Selek’s Intellectual Journey of Resistance

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Pınar Selek is a prominent figure of feminism and anti-militarism in Turkey. A friend of Hrant Dink, her sociological research focuses on marginalized voices in Turkey, the production of virility, power dynamics and structural violence. Through her writings that encompass essays, novels, academic research, and tales, one can find a unique perspective on the Armenian genocide and the construction of the Turkish state, providing fresh insights for Armenians’ collective reflections. 

In a bookshop in 2015, my eyes were drawn to a book titled “Because They Are Armenians”. The author’s last name, “Selek,” surprised me as it didn’t sound Armenian. Reading the back cover, I discovered that not only was Selek not an Armenian name, but the author was Turkish! At 19, being admittedly disconnected from anything Armenian, I found it inconceivable that a Turkish woman would advocate for the Armenian cause. This chance encounter introduced me to the remarkable case of Pınar Selek, an embattled Turkish intellectual-in-exile. 

Turkish authorities have persecuted Pınar Selek for 27 years. She was arrested in July 1998, in connection with an explosion at the Istanbul spice bazaar that killed seven people and injured over 100 others. Though an expert report revealed years later that an accidental gas cylinder explosion caused the tragedy, she was imprisoned for two and a half years and tortured to “confess” and renounce her Kurdish sources. She didn’t break, which she attributes to chance: “Not bravery or anything like that.“ 

Despite four acquittals, her prosecution continues; a Kafkaesque trial that seems endless. “I’m facing irrationality, and more than 20 years later, I refuse to get used to it,” she told AFP last year. In 2022, the Turkish Supreme Court sentenced her to life in prison and issued an international arrest warrant. While completing her political science degree at the University of Strasbourg in 2014, she was granted academic asylum. Now a French citizen for eight years, Selek is a lecturer and a researcher at Nice Côte d’Azur University. When I first met her at a lecture during the Un Weekend A l’Est festival––which honored Armenia in November 2024––her passionate speech left me with more questions than I could ask during the Q&A. We arranged to meet the following month in Nice, my hometown. 

The Irresponsibility of the Left 

“To be Armenian in Turkey was to stroll without revolt along avenues named after the rulers responsible for the genocide,” Selek says.

Under the comforting January sunlight of the French Riviera, Pınar meets me at a cafe, rushing between her many scheduled meetings. She greets me with hugs, as if she has known me for years. Although I’m meant to begin the interview, her altruistic personality leads her to ask about me and my life in Armenia. When she shares details about her extensive Armenian network, it seems remarkable given her Turkish educational background. 

Pınar grew up with many blind spots. The first emerged at school, where a denialist program is the norm. Her Armenian schoolmates, whom she calls her “mute comrades,” endured the targeted erasure with resignation. During this time, Pınar’s father was in jail. Although she revolted against the regime’s lies in schoolbooks and refused to take the daily oath of allegiance, she ultimately internalized the same resignation as her Armenian comrades and eventually forgot their names. A question emerges in her book “Because They Are Armenians”: What is the price of forgetting? What becomes of us when we forget? Another blindspot emerges through an uncomfortable question: “I understood that the dictator, the bureaucrats, the reactionaries, and the grotesque professors had done everything to exclude them, but how could the [leftist] opponents, in a permanent struggle for peace, democracy, and justice, imprisoned and tortured, have accepted the invisibility of the Armenians?”

Pınar was born in 1971, the year of the second coup of the modern Turkish State. She was only nine when the third coup occurred in 1980, leading to the detention of her father, the lawyer Alp Selek. “When I was a kid, all the lefties were in jail,” she recalls. “They almost became ‘Marxist revolutionary’ idols. They resisted, they were victims, and victims couldn’t be criticized.” In the midst of state repression and simultaneous lionization, blindspots could prevail even over the most ardent champions of minority rights. “The refusal of racial stigmatization and their firm internationalist convictions made them insensitive to ethnic hierarchies in the country where they lived,” she tells me. There was also the refusal to give grist to imperialist nationalists who spoke of the “Armenian question” as a problem. Rather than give weight to these political opponents’ arguments, many chose to avoid speaking of it altogether—a tendency to “avoid” that seems to be a global, eternal issue for leftist movements.

As Pınar begins digging, she discovers that the genocide isn’t an isolated event. Its legacy led to an entrenched military-authoritarian regime and sparked pogroms against non-muslims in 1955 in Istanbul, in Marash in 1978, and in Sivas in 1993. This pattern of violence culminated in the brutal suppression of Kurdish protests in the 1990s. During these years, her meetings with Hrant Dink and his testimonies provide firsthand evidence of how Turkish society perpetuates the “Armenian traitor” stigma to rationalize the 1915 genocide.

Despite the left’s political and organizational defeat in Turkey’s brutal military coup of 1980, Pınar says a new cycle of contestation emerged by the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Kurdish left, a descendent of the broader Turkish left, consolidated its position. She characterizes this period as a convergence movement among Armenians, Kurds, feminists, and LGBT+ activists. It was a significant spark, but not quite a revolution: “Although struggling together transformed some things, the ideological hegemony in Turkey was way deeper than we thought,” she says. Among these transformations—in which Hrant Dink’s newspaper, Agos, played a role—Pınar explains that it was a revolution in the space for social struggle: “It changed so many things at the base of all these different movements. Within feminists and LGBT+ struggles, we have never talked about genocide before. From that moment, it became the culture to talk about it. But this culture will weaken if it’s not constantly nurtured. It’s not completely dead, but structures like Agos don’t regenerate themselves.” She doesn’t let her voice fade; on the contrary, she speaks joyfully about the crowd that gathered in front of the newspaper office just days before for Hrant Dink’s assassination commemoration. “It shows a willingness,” she states. 

But willingness alone can’t do much when facing annihilation. “The Turkish state has created an imaginary narrative,” she says. “Behind it lies a supposed anti-imperialist struggle, which justifies anything the army does and spreads these dynamics to the rest of society.” This newly imagined nation requires the submission of groups that challenge its foundations. The Turkish system cannot exist outside a dualist, binary framework (man-woman, culture-nature, etc), leading to the persecution of marginalized ethnic groups, trans identities, sexual preferences, and women’s reproductive freedom. “Fascists understand that privacy, intimacy, and sexuality are political, and that the way you own your body is political,” Pınar explains. “That’s why they first focus on controlling bodies and family structures. Because intimacy is difficult to control, they maintain men’s dominance over women. Thus, the militarization of society extends into the sexual sphere. Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, and other ethnic minorities disrupt this picture by breaking the homogeneity of a binary culture, dislocating the national narrative.”

When I share—not without emotion—how beautifully Hrant Dink’s perspective changed some of her perceptions, she reframes: “If I’m being honest, the real revelation about social inequalities began with feminism. This is what led me to think about the genocide from a feminist perspective.” This means considering what Armenian women endured during the genocide. “We have to always think about the articulation of power relationships. For a power to find legitimacy, it must rely on other existing power relationships that have created a culture, language, and way of thinking. Patriarchy is an ancient culture now, and it had its consequences for the genocide. Men organized it. We shouldn’t forget who decides, who organizes, who’s responsible, and how historically it has been possible to occur this way. I’m not saying women were all innocent during the genocide, but it doesn’t compare. It is also important to see how patriarchal culture strengthened even further after the genocide, since these forms of organized violence create a collective experience that endures through time.” 

Pinar often quotes Rakel Dink, Hrant’s wife, who said at his funeral: “Nothing will occur, my friends, without interrogating the darkness that makes a baby become an assassin.”  

The Turkish Military Cauldron 

Inspired by these words, Pinar began her research in 2007, asking: “What social and political mechanisms enable the transformation of a child into a subject of violence?” This led her to focus on military service.

In her most recent book published in France, “Le Chaudron militaire Turc: un exemple de Production de la Violence Masculine” [The Turkish Military Cauldron: An Example of the Production of Masculine Violence, not yet translated into English], she demonstrates how military service, as a pivotal moment in male socialization, creates conditions for hegemonic masculine domination through a complex process:

“Different masculinities create hierarchies among themselves and adapt to social contexts, transforming themselves and thus enabling their longevity. This makes them hegemonic but adaptive, enabling men to maintain positions of domination.” This hierarchy is legitimized by the military superiors’ justification that “they are stronger”. Rituals and codes become established during this military service. “This helps explain how normative masculinity shapes the organization of political violence and the naturalization of war, as well as the complex mechanisms of social and political structuring of violence.” Absorbed and unquestioned, this violence suppresses autonomy and critical thinking. “Indifference grows, leading both to inaction and alignment with power. […] This place of confinement, in the Foucauldian sense, serves to discipline male subjects, framing them, normalizing them, homogenizing them.” 

Although Pinar focuses on the Turkish military, her critique reveals parallels with militaristic states worldwide, including Armenia. The violence of military discipline enforces a strict hierarchy of relations which then permeates broader society. How can we validate criticism of these relationships while acknowledging the vital need for a strong military to defend Armenian territory? What alternative approaches of thought and action can we develop to avoid the dangers of blindly accepting a deeply militarist-patriarchal culture? 

“Power Demands Sad Bodies”

Resisting in authoritarian Turkey is a difficult task. This is what has led to a dramatic brain drain of Turkish activists, journalists, artists and researchers to Europe. Hopes for a fresh uprising seem distant. But Pinar offers a more nuanced perspective: “I used to say that it’s important to stay in Turkey and struggle. Now I realize territory isn’t necessarily the most important part. Who does it belong to anyway? What matters is that resistors are safe and can reunite in diasporas, in other spaces where they can think more transnationally and create movements. Better to not be jailed or killed, and keep the resistance going.” To think about Turkey as a country to save would be futile. ”We need to stop focusing on nation-states.”  Pinar pauses for a moment between thoughts, gazing at the bright blue sky, bisected by a deep yellow building typical of the old town’s architecture: “Look how beautiful the colors of Nice are.” 

She gathers her thoughts and, with her deep voice (which she once described as “an alcoholic voice”), continues: “Transregional, transnational collaborations could help reclaim territories and spaces––this isn’t a struggle of states, but of citizens.” She speaks of Rojava and Zapatistas, then offers a more modest example: the transborder solidarity that emerged at the French-Italian border, where people helped migrants find shelter and navigate paperwork. I find it inspiring, yet I struggle to imagine what such transregional solidarity could look like in the South Caucasus. While Georgia might once have seemed like a potential hub for trans-Caucasian gatherings, the current repressive measures there diminish this possibility. Thus, we must focus on what already exists and works. 

Pınar dedicated the postface of “Because They Are Armenians” to the activists of Charjoum. She describes them as “a very organized resistance movement with significant autonomy of action, a transnational vision, and an emphasis on social struggles. They mobilize various resources; I love them.” Dialogue exists in less apparent spaces as well. The Feminist Peace Collective, an Azerbaijani organization established in 2020 by local feminists in response to the Second Karabakh War, maintains a strong anti-Aliyev regime position. The recent Azerbaijani government crackdown on journalists and activists demonstrates that such civilian organizations are considered a serious threat. Here is an excerpt from their March 8, 2024 joint statement between Armenian and Azerbaijani feminists: “Our bodies, our region, our communities—they are not bargaining chips for political games. We know this ongoing conflict is not merely between nations but an assault on our existence. We, the women and queers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, find ourselves ensnared in a web of deprivation, violence, and uncertainty, all fuelled by the relentless militarization of recent years. Our bodies, our lives, our present and futures—all sacrificed on the altar of masculine pride and militaristic agendas.”

Connections exist if we know where to look. Pınar remembers: “When I came to Armenia in 2016, many young people—anarchists and LGBT+ activists—told me they were in touch with activists in Turkey. You could feel something was happening in the country. Then 2018 [the Velvet Revolution] happened. Whether it succeeded in the long term… that’s another question. Still, we’re the product of all past mobilizations. We can’t change a system quickly, but we can continue.” A revolution is always something to be remade.

Among the quotes Pınar favors is one from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “Power demands sad bodies. Power needs sadness because it can dominate it. Joy, in consequence, is resistance because joy doesn’t give up. Joy as a life force leads us to places where sadness never can.” I first heard her quote Deleuze at that lecture in Paris. Though I agree with the potentially subversive and destabilizing character of joy, I remain skeptical. I can’t help but contrast her words from a Turkish point of view and the Armenian experience. Here, this strategy of joy recedes as the specter of war, pogroms, cultural erasure, and genocide looms near. This especially true now, when our collective traumas remain unaddressed nationally and constructive dialogue between citizens seems absent from everyone’s agenda. When trauma is swept under the rug, how can we move forward without a meaningful, organized politics of mourning—one that goes beyond mere ceremonies and finger-pointing? In this context, can we take a step back from our suffering to show support and solidarity with others subjected to violence? How can we proceed when our own government shows exasperation, even hostility, to those most needing our solidarity: the refugees of Nagorno-Karabakh, whose wounds remain fresh from ongoing ethnic cleansing?  

I share my doubts with Pınar, to which she responds: “We must not let pessimism of intelligence overcome us. The key is to act. Oppressed people reveal only parts of their feelings and thoughts. Their inner experience is different, and in this hidden space lies a form of resistance invisible to those in power. Suffering and wretchedness are not the same. Resistance can manifest through many different manifestations of joy: humor, dancing, gatherings, and more. It’s about reviewing and renewing our ways of mobilizing. If the word ‘joy’ seems inappropriate, maybe ‘creation’ is better. What’s important in the quest for justice is loyalty.” If we follow Selek’s hopeful reasoning, the potential for emancipatory social transformation through ordinary people’s organizational capacity always exists. Recognizing our ability to act becomes essential in challenging the notion that only governments can create political and social change. 

“The State’s reason is always militaristic. According to it, being reasonable means adapting to the irrational,” writes Pınar. Armenia’s vulnerable position means every government concession attracts justified, fearful speculation about our safety. Aliyev uses this fear as leverage. Azerbaijan’s territorial claims against Armenia inevitably weaken people’s morale and strength. In this context, we’re forced to accept the irrational and endure the unbearable to survive. There is no room to collectively question the roots of a system that forces us to live in constant fear. Yet, if we currently can’t confront these roots directly, perhaps we can start cutting some of its branches—create doors from its wood and open paths toward other means of reflection and action. We could refuse to let a single national narrative and its blind spots dominate. We could reshape our means of actions and our struggles in relation to others’ internationally, like some Armenians do. We could collectively question our position as unwilling accomplices to a militarist culture that is itself a source of violence: between soldiers, with various cases of suicide and internal violence; against women through domestic violence; against LGBTQ+ people and its many, pernicious consequences; and the lasting trauma that affects soldiers’ lives. Yet militarization remains at the heart of Armenia’s identity—a supreme value, a loyalty to the fallen, a requirement to shape future soldiers and their existential role for the nation. But how do we address this fundamental yet simple question to a society that isn’t ready to hear it: why are we dying in the first place? 

This article was written before recent events in Turkey following the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and the massive protests that followed.

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