Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul: Acknowledging the 2023 Anthony Leeds prize in urban anthropology

• Published in: City & society 2024-04, Vol.36 (1), p.5-6
• Main Author: Yonucu, Deniz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Colonialism; Dissent; Drugs; Gangs; Neighborhoods; North and South; Police brutality; Racialization; Surveillance; Urban areas; Vigilantism; Violence; Violent crime
• ISSN: 0893-0465; 1548-744X
• DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12479

Police, Provocation, Politics was originated from a sense of responsibility to illustrate the extent of police violence and surveillance experienced by Istanbul's racialized Kurdish and Alevi working classes. These communities, who refer to their neighborhoods as the “Gazas of Istanbul,” are among the main constituents of leftwing and anti-colonial dissent in Turkey. But during my ethnographic research in these neighborhoods, I realized that visible forms of police violence and repression are just the tip of the iceberg, and that police violence and surveillance operate in remarkably complex, subtle, and at times counterintuitive ways. What prompted me to extend my research beyond the more apparent forms of police violence was the puzzling coexistence since the mid-2000s in these neighborhoods of intense police surveillance and militarized spatial control alongside armed and masked revolutionary vigilantism and gang activities. As an important body of critical urban anthropology literature shows, for many decades now, militarized police and drug gangs have been intrinsic to urban spaces inhabited by racialized and dispossessed communities, both in the Global North and South. In the context of these Istanbul neighborhoods, however, the presence of masked and armed revolutionary vigilantes, who fight both against the police and gangs, adds another layer of complexity to the situation. My sense of puzzlement intensified when I found out that unarmed revolutionary youths who were working to end drug dealing and gang violence in their neighborhoods through a series of public, collaborative, and peaceful activities were all selectively targeted by the anti-terror laws and put behind the bars as terrorist convicts.