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This essay probes discourses of millennial governance in current late liberal governance and contemporary critical theory. It examines a set of dilemmas for progressive critics when they mobilize discourses of sacrifice and sacrificial love against the millennial imaginary of good and evil. In particular, it asks how discourses of sacrifice and sacrificial love coordinate violence and redemption in such a way that suffering and dying, the mortification of bodies, are read from the perspective of the redeemed end of a horizonal time.

"Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey's Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ethnographic portraits, Açıksöz examines how veterans' experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans' everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans' bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability"--Provided by publisher

This article draws on Girard's general account of sacrificial violence to elucidate the race-thinking that structures contemporary discourses on security in Western security states, particularly in Canada and the United States. With attention to the relation between collective group formation (as we see, for example, in resurgent nationalisms of the era of "terror") and to the structures and processes of inclusion/exclusion that define them, my discussion unfolds Girard's figure and analysis of "the scapegoat" within and against contemporary theories of racial violence and group-based persecution. It profiles the specter of race in the assemblages of fear that imbue security discourse, to consider how security "works" to foster and consolidate communities against its "foreign" others, in ways that produce the very race distinctions that they are conditioned on. In doing so, it will elucidate how Girard's work on sacrificial violence is productive for critically elucidating the affective politics of security discourse, including those that organize and inform the biopolitical formations of race distinctions and racial hierarchy in contemporary security states.

ABSTRACTThe honorific term gazi has a significant place in right‐wing politics in Turkey as a key symbol of Turkish nationalism and Islamism. Historically a title associated with Muslim warriors and Ottoman and Turkish sovereigns, it has gained a renewed visibility in everyday life and politics since the 1990s, when the Turkish state began to bestow this title on disabled veterans returning from the counterinsurgency war in Kurdistan. As the war's toll rose, thousands of young, lower‐class men who were badly wounded during their mandatory military service ended up joining the ranks of the gazis, and their injured lives and honored status would go on to become an important point of nationalist rhetoric and action. In Sacrificial Limbs, Salih Can Açıksöz takes his readers deep into the world of Turkey's contemporary gazis, chronicling diverse aspects of their lives – from their memories of war and traumatic experiences of injury, to their everyday struggles in the intimacy of their homes, at healthcare institutions, at work, and on the streets. Traversing disabled veterans' social and political networks, Açıksöz lays bare a dangerously fragile masculinity and its constitutive interactions with state sovereignty, neoliberal governmentality, and ultranationalist politicization.