New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Sezai Ozan Zeybek, "Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

·41 min·2 clips

Zeybek argues animals in war can be weapons, soldiers, targets, and indirect casualties.

1. New Books in Military History speaks with Dr. Ozan Zeybek about Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025. 2. Host Dr. Miranda Melcher frames Zeybek as a human geographer whose work links modern Turkish history, military-related conflict, and non-human animals. 3. Zeybek says the book asks what justice means when human rights, citizenship, and labor rights do not apply to animals. 4. He explains that his own life trajectory includes signing a 2016-17 petition as a peace academic against the demolition of Kurdish neighborhoods. 5. He says that petition led to oppression and prosecutions, his ex-partner lost her job, and both eventually left Turkey for Germany. 6. Zeybek describes the book as a way to rethink family, neighborhood, nation, labor, and property through more-than-human perspectives. 7. He argues that humans are not self-contained beings, because biology already shows entanglement with bacteria and other organisms. 8. The book centers cattle, dogs, and goats rather than surveying every animal in Turkish history. 9. In the Kurdish conflict chapter, Zeybek traces a guerrilla war that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s and left around 40,000 people dead. 10. He says around 1 million people were forcibly displaced by the Turkish army in the 1990s, often with one week’s notice. 11. Zeybek describes interviews in which villagers said military forces burned homes, killed animals, and destroyed vineyards and agricultural fields. 12. He argues that the violence targeted an entire ecosystem, not only human beings. 13. He says the displacement also coincided with a shift from Kurdish village husbandry to industrial livestock production. 14. Zeybek notes that in eastern Turkey sheep and cattle numbers dropped sharply and then rose again within about 10 years. 15. He says the later increase came through different actors, different financing, and industrial sites backed by European Union funds and larger banks. 16. In the war argument, Zeybek distinguishes animals used as weapons, animals used as soldiers or auxiliaries, animals harmed indirectly by poisoned habitats, and animals killed because they belong to the enemy. 17. He also argues that ordinary animal agriculture and pet systems can function as a general warfare against animals because the conditions remain violent. 18. Melcher’s interview style is direct and concept-driven, and Zeybek answers with long analytic explanations plus concrete cases from Turkey. 19. Readers interested in Turkish history, animal studies, and political ecology would get the most from this conversation. 20. Readers looking for a short, lightly edited, purely biographical author chat may want to skip it.

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