Deniz Yonucu’s Police, Provocation, Politics presents an anthropological exploration of the meanings behind, and shifts in, the Turkish state’s policing and counterinsurgency strategies in contemporary Istanbul. Combining archival work and oral history narratives with extensive ethnographic research, her analysis provides valuable insights into the production of Istanbul’s “racialized and dissident” populations and spaces, which have been highly securitized and stigmatized since the 1990s. By analyzing how practices produced by a counterinsurgency doctrine of low-intensity conflict, the legacy of a combination of Cold War counterinsurgencies and colonial governmentalities, have been deployed, maintained, and reframed within the context of a predominantly Alevi-populated neighborhood of Istanbul, Yonucu opens an analytical frame to understand the underlying reasons behind, and conditions for, the multiple forms of violence, permanent conflict, and ethnosectarian frictions happening there. Yonucu’s perspective therefore broadens our understanding of politics through examining the spatial and affective dimensions of the complex interplay between governance, policing, and antisystemic grassroots activism.
Police, Provocation, Politics argues that practices of counterinsurgency have been key to the political marginalization and spatial confinement of the revolutionary left in post-1980s Istanbul through strategically provoking and reproducing a vicious cycle of violence. By the early 1990s the radical left forces had managed to dispel the grim conditions of the aftermath of the 1980 military coup and taken critical steps to refashion leftist dissent, particularly in the working-class gecekondu neighborhoods of the city. Primarily led by outlawed socialist organizations that pursued urban guerrilla warfare methods, these dissident forces mobilized the mainly Alevi and Kurdish rural migrants against the shattering combined effects of rapid neoliberalization and manifest state oppression, informed at that time by the dominant Turkish–Islamist ideology. Against this backdrop, the Turkish state adopted novel tactics of counterinsurgency – including checkpoints at neighborhood entrances, stop-and-frisk body searches, house raids, extralegal detention, patrols with armored vehicles, and so forth – to create the conditions of controllable violence, which, in turn, rendered these urban spaces as “no-go areas.” The resulting permanent violence had the effect of marking the symbolic borders of these neighborhoods more visibly, thus constructing the Alevi and Kurdish populations as the primary harbingers of the anxieties and dangers associated with the rapidly changing metropolitan life in the eyes of urban middle classes. In this regard, counterinsurgency tactics equate to more than the ordinary tools of oppression and should be conceptualized as a form of governmentality that “actively wages a preventive and permanent war on politics” (p. 13). This main argument is based on Yonucu’s particular approach that presents politics as a subversive intervention in the given ways of organizing social order, inspired by Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of politics as the antithesis of “the police,” which is primarily related with the distribution of things and bodies in space. Her analysis delicately demonstrates how police surveillance and militarized spatial control, which seek to provoke counterviolence within dissident groups, ultimately dissolved the very conditions of politics and prevented Alevi and Kurdish populations from establishing viable political ties both within and outside their stigmatized neighborhoods.
Pursuing this line of argument, the book chronologically traces the changes in policing practices in parallel to the broader social and political dynamics of the neighborhood of Devrimova, which is a pseudonym for a dissent neighborhood in the outskirts of Istanbul, from the mid-1970s to the Gezi Uprising in 2013, across six chapters. Focusing on the experience of the people’s committees and courts as examples of socialist direct governance, Chapter 1 discusses how Devrimova had become a sanctuary space for Alevis in the rapidly urbanizing Istanbul prior to the 1980 coup d’état. Drawing on a concept of a “cultural archive of oppression and resistance” to explain the Alevi communities’ engagement with socialist politics, Yonucu argues that through such forms of direct governance Devrimova residents managed to “vernacularize the communist experiments” and created outlets of politics wherein “productive, liberatory, and transformative debate, dialogue, and disagreement” (p. 30) flourished. In Chapter 2, Yonucu explores how Devrimova transformed from a sanctuary, where both residents and revolutionaries saw themselves at home, into “a semi-open prison” thanks to the introduction of new spatial counterinsurgency techniques, which the Turkish state had previously directly transferred from Western colonial states and perfected against the Kurdish movement in the southeast of the country. This chapter illustrates how techniques of spatial policing both rendered Devrimova a hostile territory but also failed to undermine the Left’s political support, thus igniting feelings of resistance among the residents.
Chapters 3 and 4 shift the lens toward analysing the fragmenting impacts which counterinsurgency practices had on revolutionary leftists organizations. In the aftermath of the bloody Gazi incidents of 1995, Chapter 3 demonstrates how many of the outlawed socialist organizations correspondingly adopted a novel political and military strategy, a change that Yonucu conceptualises through using the notion of “violent interpellation” in reference to Louis Althusser. She argues that “the Gazi incidents marked the beginning of a new counterinsurgency strategy in Istanbul that combined overt repressive state violence with urban-centered and affect-and-emotion-generating provocative counterorganization techniques to quell the growing left-wing mobilization” (p. 73). As such, Yonucu suggests explaining both the development of a radical schism between Alevi and Kurdish constituencies, and the widening gap between the residents and revolutionary groups in Devrimova as an effect of counterinsurgency strategies adopted by the state starting in the mid-1990s. She expands her analysis of the fragmenting effects of counterinsurgency on the dissident groups in the next chapter but, this time, through examining three different phases of neighborhood vigilantism performed by socialist activists. This vigilantism has emerged to counter the increasing involvement in crime, gang violence, and drug use that developed in Istanbul’s low-income neighborhoods, including dissident areas like Devrimova, as a result of their dramatic impoverishment brought about by decades of neoliberal policies. Yonucu traces how antigang vigilantism evolved from an initially more participatory and nonpunitive form, to a violence-provoking, armed struggle performed by masked militants in response to the state’s selective use of amended antiterror law. Such selective interventions by the police, Yonucu argues, which targeted primarily residents and activists respected by the local community, resulted in the further militarization of grassroots politics and the continuation of manageable low-intensity conflict in dissident neighborhoods.
In Chapter 5, Yonucu takes the prism of masculinity to explore the dialectics between the introduction of psychological warfare tactics – including the employment of undercover police, spies, and informants – and the young male revolutionaries’ response to such tactics. While the police, as “provocative agents,” sought to disturb community relations through agitating feelings of mistrust, local revolutionaries publicly defied such interventions by constituting themselves as fearless subjects. However, Yonucu demonstrates that such acts of the “ethical making of the self” not only made activists more visible and vulnerable to state violence but also reproduced patriarchal social formations of masculinity. Lastly, Chapter 6 analyses how the Gezi event was experienced in the margins of the city. Providing “examples of the ways in which the violence unleashed on Alevi working-class urban spaces and bodies at the height of the nationwide Gezi uprising proved to be effective provocative counterorganization” (p. 140), Yonucu traces the ways in which spatial and discursive tools, which she calls a “sectarian imaginary” as in the case of the Gazi incidents of 1995, fragmented antigovernment sentiments along ethnosectarian and class lines. Read together, these six chapters reveal “how counterinsurgent policing intervenes in lived spaces so as to inform, transform, and counter dissident activities and subjectivities and fragment otherwise allied dissident forces” (p. 9).
An inspiring example of the recent generation of urban studies scholarship in Turkey, Police, Provocation, Politics offers a major contribution to the field. Drawing on impressive ethnographic richness, produced from more than a hundred interviews, it provides important insights into the relation between politics and urban space. Rather than taking space as a mere container of broader social and political dynamics, it skilfully demonstrates that the spatial and the political mutually constitute each other at different levels, ranging from the psychic to the societal. To do so, it pays particular attention to the everyday experiences of residents and militants in Devrimova, taking us from the meeting halls of activists to the balconies of run-down apartments where women observe and discuss daily workings of local revolutionary politics. This combination of a relational understanding of the space-politics nexus with ethnography-inspired methodological tendencies of the recent urban research provides the book with a perceptive angle on contemporary policing practices in Istanbul. One criticism can be made of Yonucu’s decision to “refrain from making contact with any and all state security officers” (p. 18), particularly regarding the scarcity of primary archival material and first-hand testimonies on the Turkish state’s counterinsurgency history that are able to satisfactorily elucidate the ties between global and national counterinsurgency institutions and actors. Nevertheless, the book seeks to fill this gap by comprehensively unveiling the experiences of those who endure such counterinsurgency and policing practices.
Police, Provocation, Politics presents a powerful analysis of a particular conjuncture of recent political history of Turkey — the 1990s, which have been labelled, correctly but perhaps simplistically, as dark times in popular commentaries. Incorporating valuable ethnographic data, collected under challenging conditions, with the rich theoretical insights produced in relation to colonialism and conflict cities, it explores the multilayered aspects and convoluted nature of violence in a city where marginalized and securitized populations and spaces have become increasingly invisible, politically and scholarly, in the last two decades.
