In Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey: Governing Through Smoke, Ebru Kayaalp unpacks the neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish tobacco market following the financial crisis of 2001. Providing a nuanced analysis of economic transformation, Kayaalp also examines changing state-citizen relations in post-2001 Turkey. Instead of taking neoliberal reforms as a fixed package of tools, Kayaalp shows how these policies, reforms, and institutions change and fracture as they are applied on the ground. It is difficult to identify any single agenda of neoliberal transformation and restructuring of different economies, despite the fact that similar neoliberal ideas and policies as well as institutions and technocrats circulate globally. Through her ethnography of the Turkish tobacco market, Kayaalp discusses how the actual consequences of neoliberal transformations overflow the intentions of policy makers and create new relations, agencies, and structures. In addition to scrutinizing the human agency involved in neoliberal reforms, Kayaalp further discusses how the material qualities of tobacco and its packaging (e.g., hard-box cigarettes), as well as technologies of production, influence political and economic transformations. Putting political and economic anthropology into dialogue with science and technology studies, Kayaalp presents a unique analysis of neoliberal transformation in post-2001 Turkey.

The book is organized into three sections: politics, markets, and citizens. While in the first section Kayaalp examines neoliberal reforms through technocrats, legal models, and market regulatory bodies, in the second section she explores the making of the tobacco market by looking at market transactions among farmers, private companies, and state agencies. Then, in the third section, Kayaalp discusses how the neoliberal restructuring of the tobacco market influences changing citizenship regimes in Turkey.

The first section, focusing on politics, begins with a chapter entitled “Travel of Experts, Policies, and Institutions,” where Kayaalp unpacks the story of Kemal Derviş, a former World Bank technocrat who was invited to supervise Turkey’s neoliberal reforms following the financial crisis of 2001. Here, she brilliantly draws attention to the circulation of technocrats in addition to that of neoliberal ideas, policies, and institutions, comparing the economic reforms of Kemal Derviş with those of Turgut Özal, initially a technocrat who later became Turkey’s prime minister and president and who conducted large-scale neoliberal transformations in Turkey during the 1980s. Uniquely, Kayaalp shows how policy makers’ perceptions of and discourses on corruption appear as one of the central dynamics behind political and economic projections. Although corruption was tolerated for the sake of consolidating the free market economy in the Özal era, in the Derviş era it was framed as the most serious economic problem to be struggled against. In the second chapter, Kayaalp examines the legislative processes behind neoliberal reforms, showing how the prospect of Turkish accession to the EU has often been mobilized to legitimize neoliberal reforms, despite the fact that such reforms are not a requirement for EU membership. Opening “the black box of the law” (35), as she terms it, Kayaalp discusses how parliamentary discussions on tobacco market reforms are centered around the role of international institutions such as the EU in the domestic economy, but do not actually address the technical and scientific specificities of tobacco production, which are seen as non-political processes. In the third chapter, “Policy in the Making,” Kayaalp examines how Turkey’s market regulatory agency, the Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority (Tütün ve Alkol Piyasası Düzenleme Kurumu, TAPDK), established its authority vis-à-vis private cigarette companies and the state’s tobacco company, TEKEL (not an acronym but a word literally meaning “monopoly”), which was later sold to British American Tobacco. Through an analysis of a legal dispute over hard-box cigarette packaging machines between TEKEL and TAPDK, Kayaalp also shows how the technical specificities of tobacco production can play important roles in the actual implementation of legal reforms.

In the second section, on markets, Kayaalp looks at the implementation of neoliberal reforms. The fourth chapter is entitled “Remaking the Tobacco Market,” and analyzes the novel contract system, which requires tobacco farmers to sign purchase contracts before the harvest season. This newly introduced system has, as an unintended consequence, created an informal market of purchase contracts between farmers and cigarette production companies, and in this way hit particularly hard the sharecropper farmers unable to afford to add the cost of informal purchase contracts to their farming expenses. In the fifth chapter, Kayaalp discusses how the making of the official tobacco market simultaneously shows what is also not part of the official market, such as informal market exchanges as well as corruption in the tobacco market in eastern Turkey. However, the chapter raises more questions than it answers, especially concerning how the informal illegal tobacco market is entangled with the armed conflict between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). Among questions thus raised are the following: what political, military, and economic collaborations are formed among military officers, civil servants, traders, and paramilitaries? What political and moral justifications have been deployed to legitimize these collaborations? Using these questions, Kayaalp could have further elaborated on how the deployment of state violence has shaped not only state-citizen relations, but also everyday market exchanges in the Kurdish region of Turkey.

In the last three chapters, Kayaalp looks specifically at state-citizen relations. In the sixth chapter, entitled “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Resistance,” she examines the privatization of the state’s tobacco company, TEKEL. She analyzes how neoliberal reforms have been legitimized through a discourse on the social assistance programs provided under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). In doing so, Kayaalp detects a dual character in the AKP’s neoliberal policies, in which the state deploys harsh economic reforms, such as privatization resulting in unemployment, while also expanding the scope of social assistance programs. She explains this apparently contradictory duality as a specific shape that neoliberalism has taken in Turkey. Emphasizing the AKP’s strategy of generating electoral support by providing social assistance to certain social groups, Kayaalp argues that the AKP-run social assistance programs identify and favor certain citizen groups who have been designated as pro-party or conservative, while discriminating against others, such as divorcées and TEKEL workers. However, it is not clear whether what Kayaalp is suggesting is an analysis of party clientelism in which the AKP merged Islamist conservatism with neoliberal reforms, or an analysis of neoliberalism that has recently taken particular shape on a more global scale by mixing the implementation of social assistance programs with severe economic reforms. In fact, there has been a recent body of work that detects and examines the recent development and expansion of social assistance programs alongside neoliberal reforms in various places.Footnote ¹ Putting her analysis in dialogue with this body of work, Kayaalp could further discuss to what extent the AKP-led social benefit programs might also be seen as part of a global trend in the neoliberal transformation, in addition to being the continuation of the established political clientelism.

In the seventh chapter, “Making Healthy Good Citizens,” Kayaalp brilliantly shows how the global health discourse on anti-smoking, which presumes rational individuals who are responsible for pursuing a healthy life, has merged with the AKP’s political conservatism and evolved into a particular neoliberal subjectivity: the healthy non-smoking Muslim. In the eighth and final chapter, Kayaalp accounts for how tobacco and the tobacco market became a field in which certain discourses and debates on Turkish nationalism were articulated and reframed over a time period extending from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Reading the history of Turkish tobacco as a history of nationalism in Turkey, Kayaalp’s account shows how an economic-historical perspective can contribute to our understanding of political events and projections by showing how those events and projections have been received and reframed by different actors, such as tobacco farmers and traders.

Several recent studies have looked at tobacco and tobacco markets from historical and anthropological perspectives.Footnote ² Having made a nuanced contribution to this body of work by raising questions on the materiality of tobacco, neoliberalism, and nationalism, Kayaalp’s Remaking Politics, Markets, and Citizens in Turkey is a must-read for students of modern Turkey focusing on political economy, economic anthropology, and science and technology studies.