It is only recently that Turkey's accession process into the European Union (EU) has garnered anthropological interest. Elif Babül's meticulously researched and lucidly written Bureaucratic Intimacies is the first full-length ethnographic monograph on this emerging topic. The book will appeal to readers interested in not only Turkish and European politics but also broader scholarly debates on human rights, transnational governance, standardization, bureaucracy, and cultural intimacy.
EU membership is predicated on not only a candidate country's integration into a market-oriented economy but also its commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Given the Turkish state's historical notoriety in human rights violations, one of the most significant aspects of Turkey's EU harmonization has been the improvement of its human rights record through both legal/administrative reforms and human rights training programs aimed at reconfiguring the habits, attitudes, and dispositions of government workers. During its first two terms, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government implemented a series of reforms such as those abolishing the death penalty and introducing harsh punishments for torturers. Unfortunately, this era of progressive politics has proven to be short-lived. The AKP has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn following the 2013 Gezi Park protests, during which the police severely injured and killed some protestors. Ironically, the Turkish police were participating in an EU-funded training program on the prevention of disproportionate use of force while the revolt was taking place. Babül sets out to make sense of this paradox. How can seemingly democratic initiatives such as human rights training programs “coexist with (and sometimes even lead to) violent state practices and an illiberal form of governance” (p. 34)? Why hasn't the EU harmonization process led to a more progressive and human rights–friendly form of governance in Turkey? Some would be tempted to dismiss Turkey's participation in these EU-initiated human rights training programs as lip service. Babül, on the other hand, provides a nuanced critical scrutiny of these projects themselves and problematizes our assumptions about their progressive transformative potential for the advancement of human rights.
To understand these EU-initiated training programs, Babül carried out participant observation for seven years (2007–14) in eleven different training programs targeting judges and prosecutors, the police, prison guards, teachers, religious officials, and health care professionals. The EU believes that projects aimed at strengthening the state apparatus as a rational legal bureaucracy are necessary for consolidating democracy and human rights in Europe and its periphery. Bureaucratic Intimacies demonstrates how these training programs reframe human rights violations as administrative problems that can be fixed once the governmental field has been reconfigured around good governance, professionalism, and expertise. Such an approach implies the state is the guardian rather than the violator of human rights, which contrasts with the perspective of Turkish human rights advocates who “accuse the state of promoting an institutional culture that normalizes state violence” (p. 65).
Rather than inculcating a commitment to human rights as universal, inalienable, and indivisible, these programs are predicated on translating human rights into the local political vernacular to make them more palatable to Turkish bureaucrats, who have been socialized into perceiving the human rights agenda as inimical to national interests. Since human rights have often been associated with the political discourse of revolutionary-leftist and Kurdish political activists, demands for improving Turkey's human rights record have often been dismissed by Turkish state actors “as a cover for treacherous activity against the ‘indivisibility of the nation and the state’” (p. 128). Because of this demonization, human rights defenders have formed alliances with transnational advocacy groups. This, however, has further marginalized human rights advocacy “as a foreign-born/sponsored activity and an imperialist plot” (p. 129).
With rich ethnographic insights, Babül illustrates how these training programs aim to disassociate human rights from their assumed radical political connotations and enable Turkish bureaucrats’ interactions with Western powers to seem less threatening. In order to do so, these projects instead reframe human rights as “a requirement for expertise and professionalism to which all government workers should subscribe in order to better perform their jobs” (p. 3). This approach arises from the EU's conviction that these abuses are not systemic but individual cases and that institutional standardization would hinder these abuses.
In order to ward off nationalist backlash from the trainees who tend to be wary of impositions from outside powers, training programs employ a particular pedagogical approach utilizing participatory learning. This approach relies on the belief that participants will be more willing to respect human rights if their existing convictions and value systems are not confronted but accommodated. Rather than referring to real-life political situations, they utilize hypothetical scenarios as case studies. For example, in a training session run in cooperation with Amnesty International, participants were asked to play a board game about a spaceship crew stranded on a deserted planet, which aimed to have players “make decisions about balancing individual rights with group needs in dire circumstances” (p. 114). Throughout the book, Babül documents a variety of other ways in which these training programs make a concerted effort not to offend the nationalist sensitivities of bureaucrats while advocating for a human rights agenda. But do they succeed in their efforts? The answer Babül provides is compelling and sophisticated.
She argues that, in contrast to the naming and shaming strategy of human rights activists, the pedagogical approach of these training programs “breeds a certain form of shamelessness that renders the previously embarrassing” and unacknowledged human rights violations openly speakable (p. 181). Turkish government workers confide and confess their “off-the-books practices,” which are in turn presented by European trainers as the primary cause of human rights violations. As a retort, Turkish government workers depict Western powers as “the perpetrator of gross human rights violations, all the while posing as an apostle of human rights and democracy” (p. 134). When they feel bothered by the didactic nature of these training sessions criticizing the lack of good governance in Turkey, trainees often bring up the human rights violations in Iraq, Palestine, and Bosnia in which Western countries were complicit. Moreover, while confessing their collective secrets in the presence of Europeans, these bureaucrats police the border between what can and cannot be said. Some interrupt the translators and ask them not to translate controversial sentences whereas some others even accuse translators of revealing national secrets.
Thus, these training programs generate frequent performances of what Babül calls “bureaucratic intimacies.” Drawing on Michael Herzfeld's conceptualization of “cultural intimacy,” Babül describes bureaucratic intimacy as an intimate sense of belonging and solidarity characterized by displays of “collective secrets that are internally uniting and externally embarrassing” (p. 177), as well as a nationalist cynicism toward the assumed hypocrisy of the foreigner. As a result of constituting a breeding ground for these bureaucratic intimacies, these human rights training programs do not lead the trainees to question and confront human rights violations, nor do they produce any administrative and moral-ethical consequences for the bureaucrats complicit in these abuses. Rather than a community of committed believers in universal human rights values, they generate a suitable setting for a community of knowers of bureaucratic secrets and embarrassments regarding human rights abuses. In the end, these human rights trainings fail to eliminate the “environment of impunity and unaccountability that continues to shape the governmental realm in Turkey” (p. 34).
Babül's erudite ethnographic account is a much-needed intervention that challenges the dominant understanding that EU accession leads to the advancement of human rights in candidate countries. Providing both theoretical depth and a rich ethnography, it is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses alike.
