Gülden Özcan and Ersin Vedat Elgür

Gülden Özcan & Ersin Vedat Elgür (GÖ&EVE): Before getting into the details of your work, we would like to discuss with you the university as an institution and the current positions of academics in relation to politics. At the very beginning of your book Imagining the State you mention how the number of polemic style books and articles has been decreased and indeed almost become invisible as a result of academic research and evaluation practices that had been taking away the self-​confidence of academics under capitalism. With your work in general in a sense you re-​claim this right of producing polemical texts in the world of academia which has been dominated by the culture of capitalism. You not only claim but also practice this right by writing polemical books such as Imagining the State, The Fabrication of Social Order, Critique of Security and most recently, perhaps the most controversial of all, your edited book called Anti-​Security. In these works while dealing with the conventional assets of the discipline of political science such as the state, law, fascism and civil society on the one hand, you also introduce new terms, or rather the terms that only certain disciplines take issue with, to the area of political science such as police power, security, monstrous, the dead and pacification on the other hand. Can you tell us the kind of experience you have had while being in academia and producing such work? Also, our journal Kampfplatz, too, aims to offer a space for polemics (as, we hope, its name tells it all) and thus aims to have a kind of publication policy that stays away from academic rituals. Do you think there are ways to stay out of the academia in the act of producing knowledge, or is it possible to institutionalize knowledge-​production besides the academia? What would be the place for such activity: independent journals, independent academy-​like institutes, or perhaps community libraries?