Osman Balkan

Osman Balkan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. His research and teaching interests cohere around the politics of global migration, borders, race, ethnicity, identity, and necropolitics. Balkan’s scholarship is informed by his transnational background as a second-generation immigrant who grew up between the United States and Turkey. He studies how migratory experiences shape racialized identities and is broadly interested in how societies grapple with diversity and difference. Inspired by what Stuart Hall famously called “the multicultural question,” his research attends to the ways in which various intersecting axes of identity—such as race, religion, and national heritage—impact the ability of minoritized populations to seek cultural recognition, claim political membership, and feel a sense of belonging in contemporary European societies.

Balkan’s work leverages multiple interpretative and qualitative research methods including ethnography, participant-observation, interviews, and critical discourse analysis of media resources. His fieldwork to date has been centered in Germany and Turkey and his first monograph, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press as part of its LSE International Studies Series.Dying Abroad is the first book to explore in detail how immigrant communities navigate end-of-life decisions in countries where they face structural barriers to full citizenship and equal social standing—a phenomenon Balkan terms “death out of place.” It argues that states, families, and religious communities all have a vested interest in the fate of dead bodies and illustrates how the quotidian practices attending the death and burial of minoritized groups in migratory settings are structured by deeper political questions about the meaning of home and homeland.  

Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul between 2013 – 2017, Dying Abroad builds on extensive and immersive ethnographic research of Germany’s nascent Islamic funeral industry (where Balkan worked as an undertaker) as well as interviews with bereaved families, religious leaders, government officials, death care workers, and representatives of Islamic civil society organizations. Focusing on the experiences of longstanding Turkish and Kurdish origin communities, it demonstrates that burial in Germany is a symbolically powerful means to assert political membership and belonging in the diaspora. Yet the widespread practice of posthumous repatriation to Turkey for burial illustrates the continued importance of transnational ties and serves as an indictment of Germany’s exclusionary socio-political order. In both situations, the corpse is central to grounding political claims for recognition. The act of burial confers a final sense of fixity to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life. When the boundaries of the nation and its demos are contested, burial decisions are political acts.

However, end-of-life practices unfold within overlapping and sometimes conflicting political institutions and value systems. As such, they involve a range of formal actors and informal networks. By tracing the actors, networks, and institutions that determine the movement of dead bodies within and across international borders, Dying Abroad offers insight into the processes through which relations between authority, territory, and populations are managed at a transnational level. Engaging with a wide range of theoretical approaches to questions concerning the body, sovereign power, and necropolitics, as well as transnationalism, identity, and diaspora politics, the book illustrates how posthumous practices anchor minority claims for political inclusion and challenge hegemonic ideas about the boundaries of nation-states and the place of immigrants within them.

Balkan is currently at work on a second book manuscript which explores how countries remember and come to terms with acts of political violence and terrorism. Tentatively titled, Unwanted Bodies: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Memory, this project highlights how the constitution, consolidation, and territorialization of moral, religious, and political communities are underpinned by rituals of public mourning and collective grief. Inspired by Judith Butler’s work on precarity and ungrievable life as well as on-going debates in the field of memory studies, this project offers a comparative analysis of the complex negotiations surrounding the burial and memorialization of victims and perpetrators of political violence in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

Case studies include the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, the Boston Marathon Bombing, the aftermath of a failed military coup attempt in Turkey, the exhumation and reburial of Francisco Franco in Spain, and the sea-burial of Osama Bin Laden by the U.S. military. By focusing on the materiality of the body as well as public rituals of collective mourning, this project contributes to on-going debates surrounding the politics of monuments and memorials. It aims to advance scholarly discussions about the organization of collective memory by showing how states and other political actors manage the afterlives of unwanted bodies as they commemorate the past and attempt to shape the future.

Balkan is involved in several cross-disciplinary research networks. In 2017, he co-founded (with Tani Sebro), the American Political Science Association’s Political Ethnography Working Group, a network of scholars of politics whose work employs ethnographic, interpretive, and qualitative research methods. He is a twice elected member of the Executive Council of APSA’s Migration and Citizenship Section and serves on the editorial teams of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism and International Political Sociology. In the summer of 2021, Balkan co-led a research methodology workshop sponsored by APSA’s Middle East and North Africa Section on visuality and political ethnography.  He is currently chairing the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods Section’s Hayward Alker Award Committee.

Balkan’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Theory & Event, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization as well as in public facing outlets such as Project on Middle East Political Science and The Immanent Frame. He has published book chapters in edited volumes such as Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance, Muslims in the UK and Europe, and The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss.

Balkan earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and his B.A. in Political Science from Reed College. He can be reached at can be reached at obalkan1@swarthmore.edu. His personal website is http://www.osmanbalkan.com and Twitter handle is @osmanchego.