EUME
2020/ 2021

Deniz Yonucu

EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2015-17

War on Politics: Policing, Counterinsurgency, and Political Space in Istanbul

Previous Fellowships: 2017/ 2018, 2016/ 2017, 2015/ 2016

received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, law and society studies, and urban studies, with a focus on the Middle East. More specifically, her work focuses on urban violence, crime, counterinsurgency and policing, sectarianism, and human rights. Situating the criminalization and racialization of urban working-class youth within the wider context of the Cold War counterinsurgency tactics which inform current security practices, she illustrates in her first book manuscript, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press), how counterinsurgency works to inform and shape dissent. Before re-joining EUME in 2020, Deniz Yonucu was a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She held research positions as a 2015-17 EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Deniz Yonucu’s research was funded by various institutions including the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the British Council’s Newton Fund, and SALT Research. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Current Anthropology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Social & Legal Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, among others. She has also published various op-ed articles related to her area of research on openDemocracy, Jadaliyya, PoLAR Forum and beyond. 

2020/ 2021

War on Politics: Policing, Counterinsurgency, and Political Space in Istanbul

This project illustrates the links between counterinsurgency, criminalization, and the processes of racialization. The manuscript is based on extensive ethnographic field and archival work carried out between 2010 and 2016. Much of this research was conducted in working-class Alevi neighbourhoods of Istanbul, neighbourhoods that have served as strongholds for dissident leftist organizations since the 1960s, and in Istanbul’s Special Assize Courts, which specialize in “crimes against the state.” War on Politics situates the criminalization and racialization of urban working-class youth within the wider context of those Cold War counterinsurgency tactics which inform current security practices and offer a spatial analysis of what Deniz Yonucu calls “provocative counterorganization.” Drawing on an ethnographically rich case study from Turkey and engaging with other examples from the Global South (notably, Latin America and South Africa), Deniz Yonucu argues that, because counterinsurgency is in its essence a war on political dissent, it is not solely a project of pacification but also of social engineering which seeks to refashion dissent against the state through the active (re)production of criminal(ized) and racialized bodies and spaces. This research thus contributes to the literature on security and securitization by framing these social processes from the vantage point of counterinsurgency’s productive concern not merely with “suppressing the enemy,” but also with fundamentally shaping it and its relation to society. It also offers an analysis of increasing political violence and sectarian polarization in contemporary Turkey by demonstrating the role that urban violence has played in the making of sectarian identities in Turkey.

2015-2017

Violence and Counter-Violence in Istanbul’s Working-Class Alevi Neighbourhoods: Crime, Policing and Counter-Police Policing

Yonucu is currently working on her first book project, tentatively entitled Violence and Counter-Violence in Istanbul’s Working-Class Alevi Neighbourhoods: Crime, Policing and Counter-Police Policing. In addition to her dissertation, she has also included another research within the scope of her manuscript, because she wanted to consider the impact of the massive 2012 Gezi Park protests in the Alevi neighbourhoods. During the protests, all murdered youth were Alevis, and after the protests, the police violence specifically targeted their neighbourhoods. This was then met by the counter-violence of the residents. In order to examine these dynamics, Yonucu conducted a brief post-dissertation research on the emerging forms of counter-violence in these neighbourhoods between April 2014 and February 2015. She now is in the process of integrating these research findings into her dissertation. In the manuscript, she argues that the contemporary security regime is not necessarily limited to that of the state police, and that the provocation of counter-violence is key to the state security apparatus today.