This article explores the changing configurations of statehood in the Turkish context through an exploration of men’s engagements with conspiratorial narratives, vigilantism, and extralegal violence against whom they deem to be ‘subversive’ elements. Drawing on ethnographic research on nationalist communities in Trabzon, in northeast Turkey, I trace everyday encounters, imaginations, and utterances to understand how the circulation of conspiracy theories is intricately related to the production and prevalence of societal violence. Rather than dismissing them as untruthful accounts, I explore how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives issue forth pathways through which men act in the name of the state to confront threats against the integrity of the state/nation. The article demonstrates how certain state privileges (e.g., surveillance and legitimate violence) are delegated to civilian actors and how this delegation reconfigures the way the state operates in the Turkish context. Presenting an account of the changing parameters of statecraft, law, and political subjectivity in the Turkish context, findings of this research are of relevance since various other contexts across the globe also experience the adverse effects of the prevalence of conspiracy theories, vigilantism, and extralegal violence. 

This article presents ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of people who circulate conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study of ultranationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, the author suggests that conspiratorial discourses should be examined not solely in terms of their (anti‐)truth qualities but as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. The author then explores how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forges agency and political subjectivity for the men involved, while also inducing sociopolitical effects such as vigilantism and paramilitary violence. This article contends that through the circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, the men reconfigure sovereignty and the way that the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research suggest that the focus should be moved away from the epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them – such as fact‐checking – which presume that exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. Rather, the author suggests that researchers attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete situations, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups and reconfigure the ways that the state operates alongside the law in other similar settings. 

This chapter  by Erol Saglam builds off of ethnographic field research in Turkey and explores the linguistic, spatial, and corporeal methods and forms that masculinity and manhood undergirding heteronormativity. It attends to the rather minute details of the everyday and how seemingly trivial movements, presences, exposures, encounters, and utterances play a constitutive role in the formation of heteronormative masculinities in public settings. Moving from this, the chapter shines light on the ways that this impacts (and is impacted by) the sociopolitical situation in Turkey, providing nuanced insight into the everyday examples of these realities and practices.