Focusing on the case of young socialist vigilantes who were arrested and imprisoned as ‘terrorists’ in 2007, this article illustrates how vigilantism in working‐class neighbourhoods of Istanbul with a high Alevi population evolved from an unarmed, public and participatory form of vigilantism to an armed one, and discusses the role of the anti‐terror law in this transformation. The article illustrates the ways in which the anti‐terror law, by narrowing the space for civil politics, paved the way for youth engagement in violent forms of extra‐legal security practice in spaces occupied by the historically stigmatized working‐class Alevi population. The article also argues that, over the last decade, Turkey’s ruling elites have used the anti‐terror law to wage a war against the oppositional politics conducted by the country’s historically stigmatized populations (such as Kurds and Alevis). Not only has this war put politically active and respected local figures from these communities behind bars, it also ‘polices’ (à la Rancière) these communities. Accordingly, the article illustrates how the law that considers attempts at self‐governance as a threat to state sovereignty effectively intervenes in local politics and space, leading to the reconfiguration of political space at the local level.
This book 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, the book 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, the book 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. The book 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.
This article, which draws on the case of 10 young socialists from the urban margins of Istanbul, who were arrested as the result of an anti-terror operation in 2007, provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of Turkey’s anti-terror law by examining the threat it poses for the population. Contrary to widespread complaints about a supposed state of lawlessness in Turkey, the article suggests that law, indeed, exists as an overwhelming and ever-present force in the lives of country’s alleged internal enemies (i.e. Kurds, socialists, Alevis, non-Muslims), hanging over their lives like the sword of Damocles. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s debate on the similarities between law and myth, the article demonstrates that the ambiguity, illegibility and unpredictability of Turkey’s anti-terror law bestows upon the law a mythical and/or sovereign force that controls one’s present and future, and hence one’s fate. The article also argues that the anti-terror operations that started to take place in the urban margins against Kurdish activists and socialist Alevi youth as early as 2007 were harbingers of a growing lawfare in Turkey, which gradually shifted to the center over the course of years.
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