In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones.

Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.

About the Author

Deniz Yonucu is Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University. She is a cofounder and coconvenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR). Follow her on X @denizyonucu.

Reviews

An astute analysis of the mutually constitutive relationship between police/military forces and sources of political dissent and resistance in working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul.

* Choice *

Police, Provocation, Politics presents a deep understanding of urban policing and surveillance practices and how community members receive and respond to them. Many of the book's themes, arguments, and concepts relate to critical surveillance studies literature and present ethnographically grounded, rich, and innovative insights.

* Surveillance and Society *

Police, Provocation, Politics is a groundbreaking contribution to the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance

* Journal of Middle East Women's Studies *

Police, Provocation, Politics makes a timely contribution to the rapidly growing critical scholarship on discriminatory and authoritarian policing, surveillance and security practices designed to disrupt, maintain or generate specific and selected socio-political orders.

* International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *

Presented with eloquent organization and lucid writing, the book exhibits ethnography at its prime. Yonucu's writing makes an invaluable contribution to both our understanding of the dialectical relationship between contemporary urban policing and politics, as well as the democratization of the scholarly field.

* PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology *

Through her deeply situated ethnography of a revolutionary community that has found ways of embodying an intergenerational revolutionary politics within and outside the modern state, Yonucu shows abolitionists everywhere ways of embodying liberation.

* American Ethnologist *

An inspiring example of the recent generation of urban studies scholarship in Turkey, Police, Provocation, Politics offers a major contribution to the field.

* New Perspectives on Turkey *


Awards
Winner of Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology 2023 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501762161
Author Deniz Yonucu
Format Paperback
Page Count 222
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 16mm