Ruşen Bingül Işık

BIO:
Ruşen Bingül Işık is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on justice, law, and gender in relation to legal pluralism, minority rights, and authoritarianism in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Ruşen received her B.A. in Anthropology from Mardin Artuklu University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University. Prior to joining the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, she was a Dissertation Writing-Up Fellow in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Her doctoral research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the American Ethnological Society. Her latest article was published in Current Anthropology.

Project Description:

Ruşen’s current project focuses on how alternative judicial bodies (AJBs) resolve disputes in the Kurdish southeast, examining their diverse gendered and religious discourses and practices, the involvement of feminist activists and organizations, and the positionality of these bodies within regional politics and processes of sovereignty formation. It also examines the Turkish state’s differential practices and discourses toward alternative legal actors and their forms of peace and justice, including efforts to eliminate or marginalize some while enabling others.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Mardin and Diyarbakır, her project explores how indigenous mechanisms of mediation and justice-seeking operate alongside state courts in Turkey. Situated in a region where law is deeply contested between Kurdish communities and the state, her research investigates how Kurdish communities respond to forms of state repression by turning to alternative legal and dispute-resolution practices.