By Deniz Yonucu

Author of

Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (2022).

In Police, Provocation, Politics, I explore the policing and resistance in Istanbul neighbourhoods, where racialized Kurdish and Alevi working-class communities have long resisted state oppression, racism and colonialism. I show how Cold War counter-revolutionary techniques still inform urban policing—not just in Turkey, but across the globe. Similar techniques were used by white settlers in South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement, by the FBI against the Black Panthers in the United States, and by British security forces in Northern Ireland against the Irish Republican Army. The mechanics of policing, in other words, are both global and colonial.

In Istanbul, I saw police officers encouraging violent activities of certain dissident groups even as they punished some peaceful activists. What could be the purpose behind these policing tactics? This kind of policing doesn’t just aim for compliance. The tactics I saw seemed obviously and paradoxically unconcerned with crime prevention.

Police, Provocation, Politics argues that policing isn’t just about enforcing the law: it’s also about managing, manipulating, and often dividing communities, especially those who oppose the established order, from within, to maintain control. In Istanbul, it’s about keeping Kurdish and Alevi communities destabilized, ensuring that they remain fractured and making organized resistance very difficult.

How do the police achieve this? One key strategy is by turning some segments of the communities into sources of insecurity for others within the same community. When insecurity originates from within, even racialized communities can feel the need for the state’s security forces regardless of how oppositional they may otherwise be. That’s why police presence in areas inhabited by dissident and oppressed populations goes beyond typical policing activities like patrols or arrests. Instead, police activity in Kurdish and Alevi neighbourhoods constitutes a system that doesn’t just maintain order but, in some ways, intentionally disrupts it. It’s an old strategy, one with roots in colonial and Cold War tactics: managing dissent is often about provoking internal conflict rather than stopping it outright.

Despite these sophisticated strategies, I also saw incredible resilience.

Neighbourhood residents had once tried to build a local socialist democracy in the 1970s, and the memory of that effort still fuels strong networks of support among young people in the neighbourhood. They founded a cooperative to help one another with university entrance exams; as a volunteer teacher at the cooperative, I saw the exciting educational activities they developed to help themselves transcend their class background.

Similarly, many people remembered those who had lost their lives while fighting for justice. These “martyrs” serve as lasting symbols and as sources of “inspirational hauntings:” the memory of past struggles can motivate current and future generations to keep fighting against oppression.

Studying policing as an anthropologist was challenging, and I was anxious to avoid inadvertently supporting the very systems of control I saw and critiqued. Police and other security officers often use anthropological findings to refine their counterinsurgency tactics. This, quite obviously, raises ethical questions. I feel it’s crucial to remain vigilant about how our work might be used, and one way to do that is through an approach called “ethnographic refusal”: selectively refusing to document events to avoid producing tools that can be turned against the vulnerable communities we study.

Deniz Yonucu is a senior lecturer at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency and policing, surveillance, class, racism, resistance, coloniality and memory. My first book, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022) is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize for the best book in urban anthropology. For more information please visit: https://denizyonucu.com/about-me.