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.