‘Don’t let them shoot the kite’: strategic analysis of legal and social instruments in the context of political incarceration of the mother and the child in Turkey. A case study on the likelihood analysis of success regarding judicial activism in front of national, regional, and international protection mechanism

Abstract

In this research, an instrumental case study will be conducted on the practice of the Turkish state to incarcerate Gulen Movement-affiliated mothers with their children under 6 years of age, with an interest of knowledge to determine the efficiency of recourse to a legal struggle to bring advancement of rights for these women. Peculiarities regarding the period of the aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey will be decisive in the prospective success analysis, as the practice of incarcerating women with children intensified at this time frame. Analysis of the potentiality for reaching a positive long-term change will be made using the available political and legal opportunity structures at national, regional, and international levels, in which legal claims can be channeled. The theoretical underpinning of this paper is legal mobilization studies, which offer valuable insights into the interplay between the potential of law to bring prospective long-term advancement of rights and the suitability of the context of interaction. In that regard, inter-subjective and constitutive perception of law, which makes it a double-edged sword (in terms of either a resourceful instrument to further legal entitlements for demanding groups, or a constraint set forth by the status quo) will present meaningful insights on how law does or does not matter for the targeted social change in Turkish case.