Citizen forces

Abstract

In the last 15 years the Turkish National Police have invested heavily in “community policing,” espousing the belief that a strong police‐public relationship will curtail authoritarian policing and police violence. Yet this reform has intensified popular desires for more policing and fostered a new type of citizen‐police subject, what I call citizen forces. The purportedly liberal tool of community policing turned the previously despised figure of the police informer into a respected practitioner of engaged, responsible, and vigilant citizenship. When functioning as ancillary police forces, citizen forces can help consolidate state power and aggravate state repression, especially against suspect Others. Emerging mostly at the neighborhood level, such forms of policing and politicization demonstrate the increasing complicity and mutual constitution of police and citizens, as well as the formation of state‐sponsored vigilantism. [police, policing, vigilantism, informing, reform, citizenship, Turkey]

Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil

“…Tasked with managing themselves and others, "responsible citizens" are commonly folded into public-private arrangements for urban security (Reeves, 2017). Working in articulation with state actors for the maintenance of localized orders, beyond-the-state watchfulness gains capillarity with the spread of security technologies and the persistence of participatory policing schemes and incentives (Akarsu, 2020;Andrejevic, 2005;Jeursen, 2023;Larsson, 2016;Reeves, 2012Reeves, , 2017. Rather than challenging or competing with state control, individuals' sensory capacities and technological devices often widen "the reach of police and state power" (Akarsu, 2020, p. 40), becoming instrumental to the workings of (neo)liberal governance (Andrejevic, 2005;Reeves, 2012Reeves, , 2017.…”

Sensing insecurity as skill: Urban violence and the politics of sensorial enskilment

“…Within urban studies debates in and beyond anthropology, state and non‐state security practices have for long served as sites through which to understand contested forms of governance, citizenship, and inequality (e.g., Akarsu, 2020; Fawaz et al., 2012; Glück, 2017; Mosselson, 2019). In his influential call for critical anthropological engagement with the topic, Daniel Goldstein (2010, p. 487) situates “security” as a wide‐ranging field of discourse and practice that, by filling the gaps and solving the tensions that are constitutive of neoliberal capitalism, serves “as a principal tool of state formation and governmentality.” In resonance with this call, and drawing on a diverse range of geographical contexts, anthropologists of urban security have extensively engaged this vast domain as discourse and as practice, with a special focus on the unequal socio‐spatial orders that it works to make and maintain.…”

Carceral Power in World Historical Context

“…In his work on colonial powers in Puerto Rico, Kelvin Santiago-Valles (1994) demonstrates how racial capitalism and colonialism rested heavily on criminalization and punitive formations in transforming and incorporating Puerto Rico into the systems of exploitation. Similarly, the contemporary police in Turkey adopt Giuliani style zero tolerance strategies (Gönen 2013), and the reform language and tools from core countries (Babül 2017;Akarsu 2020). Supermax prisons were first invented in the United States, and then exported to different parts of the world including Brazil, Turkey, New Zealand, and now El Salvador (Ross 2013).…”