Police, Provocation, Politics

In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu 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, Yonucu 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, Yonucu 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.

Yonucu 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.

Deniz Yonucu is Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University. She is a cofounder and coconvenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR). Follow her on X @denizyonucu.

Police, Provocation, Politics presents a deep understanding of urban policing and surveillance practices and how community members receive and respond to them. Many of the book's themes, arguments, and concepts relate to critical surveillance studies literature and present ethnographically grounded, rich, and innovative insights.

An inspiring example of the recent generation of urban studies scholarship in Turkey, Police, Provocation, Politics offers a major contribution to the field.

Through her deeply situated ethnography of a revolutionary community that has found ways of embodying an intergenerational revolutionary politics within and outside the modern state, Yonucu shows abolitionists everywhere ways of embodying liberation.

Presented with eloquent organization and lucid writing, the book exhibits ethnography at its prime. Yonucu's writing makes an invaluable contribution to both our understanding of the dialectical relationship between contemporary urban policing and politics, as well as the democratization of the scholarly field.

Police, Provocation, Politics makes a timely contribution to the rapidly growing critical scholarship on discriminatory and authoritarian policing, surveillance and security practices designed to disrupt, maintain or generate specific and selected socio-political orders.

Police, Provocation, Politics is a groundbreaking contribution to the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance

An astute analysis of the mutually constitutive relationship between police/military forces and sources of political dissent and resistance in working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul.

Anna J. Secor, Durham University:

Police, Provocation, Politics is both original and necessary. This is a must-read for all who are interested in how state security apparatuses work to sow insecurity and suppress dissent—and how the spirit of solidarity and resistance is nonetheless kept alive.

Martin Sökefeld, LMU Munich, author of Struggling for Recognition:

Police, Provocation, Politics is a milestone for the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance. Deniz Yonucu provides unique and intimate insights into working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul and diverse strategies the Turkish state uses to keep revolutionary groups at bay.

Kabir Tambar, Stanford University, author of The Reckoning of Pluralism:

With remarkable ethnographic insight, Deniz Yonucu illuminates the affective lifeworld of revolutionary leftist politics in Turkey. Casting new light on the state's tactics of containing dissent, Police, Provocation, Politics interrogates both the promises and the limits of the current wave of political protest in the region.

Yağmur Nuhrat, Istanbul Bilgi University:

I learned a lot from this book. Police, Provocation, Politics offers an insightful and complex discussion of the nature and the constituents of policing in Turkey.