Lynch as a form of collective violence in Turkey since 2000s

Lynch, as a mechanism of justice and punishment, can be defined as an execution by mass with a quick judgement, and punishing the person or persons that the mass considers to be "guilty". There is neither a court nor a judge. There may not be even a crime. This act of brutality, which is characterized by the absence of law, contains the claim of justice of the mass. Lynch can be understood as a defiance to the state law, and establishing a right immediately against the inadequacy of the state law, and it is a reflection of the creation of one's own justice. But is this the case in practice? Or, on the contrary, is lynch formalized through the state's official language, official discourse, legal system and the main institutions of the state? Does it constitute a part of an area where everyday opinions, mental structures and sensitivities are produced and regulated, and this regulation is determined to whom and when will it run by a management strategy? When the period from the foundation of the Republic to the 2000s is considered within this theoretical framework, the practices of collective violence and lynching manifest themselves in a series of social events directed against various ethnic, political or religious minorities. The legacy of severe forms of violence and human rights violations in the period of intense conflict in the Kurdish geography in 1990s is added to this. The 2000s can be seen as a period, in which neoliberalisation and the concept of security derived from neoliberalism spread to daily life and created different mechanisms of violence and oppression or fed the existing mechanisms in Turkey. The constitutional state and the perspective of civil society is ambiguous and there is also a significant inrease in the number of lynchings in this period. In this study, lynchings in Turkey in the 2000s are evaluated in the context of violence, collective violence and the role of the state and of law in the use of violence. The relationship between lynch and the ideology of nationalism is also discussed. The study aims to understand the violence of the mass, and to analyze the dynamics underlying these lynchings. The analysis includes five lynching cases. The statements of the parties in these cases generate data, and content analysis method is used for data analysis in this study which is based on the qualitative research methods. The main purpose is to understand how the parties of lynching present themselves, the action itself and its reasons. Social bases of the lynch are discussed within the context of both sides of the lynching.