Would it be too dramatic to say that Turkey is turning into a necropolis, a state of the dead, for the Kurdish, the Alevi, 1 workers, leftists, the LGBTI community, students, women, and chil- dren? Hundreds of occupational deaths of workers, murders of women and trans people, sui- cide bombings, and the curfews and special force operations in the Kurdish cities and towns in southeast Turkey exemplify how the state jeopardizes and exterminates the lives of its citizens. Through territorialized violence, the prevalent necropolitics renders these appalling deaths acceptable, ordinary, and in certain cases even enjoyable for the “common citizens.” This morbid production of and regulation over death strikingly reveals the necropolitical character of state power. The spectacular dimensions of this power to kill and reign over the protocols of burial attest to the systematic elision of the possibilities of collective life and democratic politics in Turkey. In an attempt to trace how this organized work of death performs publicly in Turkey, I will analyze a child’s murder by the state, that of Berkin Elvan, a 14-year-old boy who was shot by a tear gas canister during the Gezi Park protests in June 2013. His coma, which lasted 269 days, his death on 11 March 2014, and the public mourning processions for him have been of high political value, both for the head representative of the state, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and for the thousands of people who were attacked by the police during the funeral service. In explaining this political aspect of Elvan’s death and his funeral, I adopt Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, which connects exceptional sov- ereignty, expansiveness of death, and closure of political space (1998). I will briefly explain how the rhetoric of democratization has been employed in order to enable Turkey’s neo- liberal transformation and the emergence of a necropower to sustain it. I then provide a close reading of Elvan’s funeral as a performative event that crystallizes this necropower through the dialectic between sovereignty and bare life. I also turn to Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics at the core of normative politics as “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003:39), by which the sovereign produces territorialized and rationalized destruction of human bodies and disposable populations. Necropolitics, I argue, operates in performative and spectacular ways, taking hold of after- death in its interventions into dead bodies, burials, and grief. Following Judith Butler’s 3 SACRED CHILDREN, ACCURSED MOTHERS Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey Eylül Fidan Akıncı