‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

Abstract

In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain.

Chameleons of Kurdish Turkey: Ethnographic reflections on a queer counter/insurgency

“…While the surveillance in post-conflict Diyarbakir results in a remaking of police-citizen relations noted by others elsewhere, it also turns queer and trans Kurds into political subjects of the state-PKK conflict through a fullyfledged queer counter/insurgency and by turning people into 'citizen forces' (Akarsu 2018).…”

Re-viewing Video Evidence and Police Violence in the Criminal Courts in Turkey

“…On the contrary, adjustments made in police laws extended the prerogative powers of the police and their right to use firearms in accordance with the global tendencies of “efficient” security policies and antiterror laws. 1 At the time, these transformations were wedded to police reforms by focusing on the issues of human rights, accountability, transparency, and good governance as part of the country's attempt to join the EU (Akarsu, 2018; Babul, 2013). While the reports on police brutality—ill-treatment, torture, and use of lethal force—were rising in the country, the means of documenting such violations seemed to be “progressing” (Sinclair-Webb, 2008).…”