Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

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 ethno-sectarian 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 Cold War and decolonial era counterinsurgency strategies 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 those that are emergent. Yonucu suggests that provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents and their containment in the places of racialized and dissident populations cannot be considered disruptions of political order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.