Bear witness: embedded coverage of Turkey’s urban warfare and the demarcation of sovereignty against a dynamic exterior

This essay discusses Turkey’s state television TRT’s factual series Bear Witness (launched in November 2015 and ongoing), which covers the most recent wave of operations by counter-terrorism units in urban centers across the country’s southeast. The series is marked by a bold claim to truthful and impartial coverage, which it seeks to undergird by way of a stylistic and methodological combination of the genres of true crime, citizen journalism, and military surveillance. Bear Witness provides insight into how the state might reconceive sovereignty through televised propaganda in an age when both warfare and its reporting have become ubiquitous and instantaneous: against a spatial and temporal exterior presented as having dynamic boundaries that constantly threaten to engulf the interior across which the state seeks to hold sway.