Shedding light on Turkish counterinsurgent policing’s provocative, affect-and-emotion generating, divisive techniques that are informed by colonial school of warfare, this talk presents a spatially informed analysis of the policing of Gezi Uprisings. More specifically, it tackles the police violence unleashed in working-class Alevi spaces and over Alevi bodies during and after the Gezi uprisings of Turkey in 2013 from the vantage point of the enduring legacy of Cold War and decolonial era counterinsurgencies. Utilizing a concept, provocative counterorganization—that is, the provocation of individual and communal fear, intercommunal conflict, and ethnosectarian and ethnoracial discord by ruling elites in order to refashion a population’s dissent against the state—the talk suggests that counterinsurgency is in its essence a war on politics, concerned with shaping political dissent and its relation to society. Looked at from this perspective, the concentration of violence in working-class Alevi spaces and bodies during a nationwide uprising were in fact provocative counterorganization attempts that enabled the rapid division and separation of the diverse populations that had come together in the Gezi Uprisings.
Mi 12 Mai 2021 | 17:00–18:30
Policing the Gezi Uprisings: Space, Gangs, and Provocation
Deniz Yonucu (Einstein Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and Society, TU Berlin / EUME Fellow 2020/21), Chair: İlkay Yılmaz (Freie Universität Berlin)
Deniz Yonucu received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Cornell University and is currently an Einstein Research Fellow in the Center for Technology and Society at the Technical University of Berlin and at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her work focuses on urban violence, crime, counterinsurgency and policing, sectarianism, and human rights. Her first book, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul which will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2022, presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Deniz Yonucu’s research was funded by various institutions including the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the British Council’s Newton Fund, and the DAAD. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Current Anthropology, IJURR, 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. In September 2021, she will join Newcastle University’s Sociology Department as a Lecturer in Sociology of Crime.
In accordance with the measures against the spread of the coronavirus, this seminar session will be held virtually via ZOOM. Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de to receive the login details. Depending on approval by the speakers, the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available via the account of the Forum Transregionale Studien on SoundCloud.
