Souveraineté et gouvernementalité : la rivalité gréco-turque en Thrace occidentale

Résumé 0

Sovereignty and Governmentality : The Greek-Turkish Rivalry in Eastern Thrace The question of the largely Turkish-speaking Muslim minority of Western Thrace is usually seen as a simple component of the “Turkish-Greek dispute”. With two competing state logics inscribed in the social body, it is worth retracing the processes that have resulted in the production of a “Turkish” minority and the politicization of village, linguistic and cultural membership. The case study presented here locates itself in the tradition of work concerning the “demographic engineering” that prepared and accompanied the creation of nation states after the fall of the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires. The production of state knowledge includes ethnic and statistical categories, censuses and cartography, the normalization of place names and even biological experiments. In the case of Eastern Thrace, an additional dimension emerged relating to the joint-management of the Muslim population by the Greek and Turkish authorities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, we use the term ‘co-governmentality’ to describe the present configuration – non-conflictual, even though inherited from the Cypriot crisis – in which territory and population are related to one another as attributes of state sovereignty shared by two states. ■