When I was at primary school, I stood up every morning with all the other students and recited the national pledge of allegiance: ‘I offer my existence to the Turkish nation as a gift.’ At Friday ceremonies, just before leaving the school, I read the national anthem of Turkey and burst out: ‘Smile upon my heroic nation! Why the anger, why the rage? Our blood which we shed for you shall not be worthy otherwise.’ It is hardly surprising, outside school, that I felt the urge to behave like a soldier whenever I encountered one, giving them a military salute. These seemingly trivial practices (signs of normalisation of militarism) encouraged me to question the normalisation of the military's presence in our daily lives. It was during my LLM that I first studied the limitations on the right to freedom of expression on the grounds of maintaining national security, so as to scrutinise the impacts of militarism on individuals’ freedom. My interest in investigating such impacts further led me to investigate how militarism is normalised but also resisted by conscientious objectors.

Resistance to the normalisation of militarism has been the main concern of critical military studies, and academics have recently started looking into conscientious objection in the context of Turkey. Some studies on conscientious objection in Turkey approach objection as a tool used to reject imposed hegemonic masculinity and gender stereotypes (see, for example, Aktas 2014). Others provide a legal analysis of the right to conscientious objection, investigating international standards on the legal recognition of the right to conscientious objection and offering domestic interpretations of the right to conscientious objection. However, they look at the issue from the legal perspective only and attempt to explain the militarisation of society using secondary sources (see, for example, Cınar 2013; 2014). This book, the first socio-legal research on the matter, aims instead to reveal the social and cultural circumstances influencing the law, and to locate the law on conscientious objection and compulsory military service within socio-legal studies. It studies a sociological problem, considering its impact on law and vice versa, thus bringing a socio-legal perspective to critical military studies.