The criminalization of physicians and the delegitimization of violence in Turkey

Abstract

In June 2013, protests that erupted in Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey were met with state violence, mobilizing hundreds of native physicians to deliver emergency medical care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in makeshift clinics during these protests, interviews with Gezi physicians and analyses of recent laws restricting emergency care provision, in this article I explore the criminalization of clinical practice through legal and coercive means of the government and the delegitimization of state violence through clinical and expert witnessing practices of physicians. As I show, material, legal, and discursive articulations of the idiom of medical neutrality revolve around the tension between medical praxis as neutrality and medical praxis as political participation. I offer a reconsideration of medical humanitarian and human rights regimes in terms of their consequences for inciting, documenting and restricting state violence.