Police, Provocation, Politics is a groundbreaking contribution to the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance. It combines long-term ethnographic research conducted in one of Istanbul’s many revolutionary neighborhoods inhabited mainly by urban working-class Turkish and Kurdish Alevis with archival research and oral history narratives. The book’s great strength lies in Deniz Yonucu’s ability to situate counterinsurgency practices of Turkish police from the 1960s onward within a global context, revealing how these practices aim to create and maintain conflict in and among dissident communities. Policing in this book concerns itself not only with maintaining social order based on capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism but also with generating disorder. In doing so, the book illustrates various provocative and divisive counterinsurgency techniques applied by the Turkish security state and informed by global counterinsurgencies. It also brilliantly shows how Turkey’s racialized, marginalized, and oppressed populations continue to participate in revolutionary activities despite violent counterrevolutionary...

You do not currently have access to this content.