Reforming the Police: Violence, Security, and the Social in Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the introduction of new conceptions and practices of security and policing in Turkey, as the proliferation of police-related crises once again brings police reform to the global spotlight. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in local police stations and neighborhoods in Ankara and Istanbul, Police Academy classes, practicum trainings, governmental and non-governmental policy circles, and security technologies fairs, I explore the implementation of new standards, legal codes, training protocols, and policing technologies in the field as they are adopted and put into practice. My research shows that such recalibrations of policing not only involve an effort by police to change their institutional image and culture, but also fashion a set of new governmental technologies that aim to shape the way citizens behave and experience themselves, the state and security. I also show how the reform of policing can expand the boundaries and nature of police violence and policing practice, which has become a major site of ethical and political negotiations in the increasingly securitized political landscape of the country. The dissertation specifically explores five ‘police reform’ projects undertaken by the General Directorate of Security, and the Turkish National Police, in Turkey: (1) reform of police education and training; (2) infusion of new policing frameworks into practicum training that was made mandatory for every officer on duty; (3) harmonization projects in tandem with EU-entry negotiations; (4) ‘social projects’ conducted by the Turkish National Police; (5) community-oriented projects that aim to bring police and society together through ‘harmony’ meetings. Rather than addressing police reforms primarily as a matter of success or failure, the dissertation explores the kind of socialities and subjectivities generated by such reform efforts, and types of interventions, techno-political arrangements, legal frameworks, and ethical dilemmas embedded in these processes. It takes police-citizen encounters as a crucial site for social-scientific inquiry in order to observe how dynamics of citizenship, power, security and governance are constantly challenged, reflected upon or reworked, providing us a more subtly attuned vantage point from which to account for the understandings and experiences of the public coming into contact with policies and institutional reform in everyday life.