Proportioning violence

Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7640438
AutoresHayal Akarsu (0000-0002-7273-0067, Completing her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Arizona, School of Anthropology and for the next two years she will be a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She studies policing and security in Turkey., autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Volume34
Fascículo1
Páginas11-14
Data de publicação2018-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnthropology Today (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0268-540X • E-ISSN: 1467-8322
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-8322.12403
OpenAlexW2793124950
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas20

In spite of years of efforts in Turkey to reform the police, including an increase in budget allocations for ‘democratic policing training’, ‘capacity building programmes’ and ‘non‐lethal technologies and tools’, police violence persists. How might we conceptualize the relationship between the upsurge of police violence and such investments? In this article, the author suggests that instead of taking ‘reform’ or ‘transformation’ discourses at face value, we look at some of the ways in which police violence is reformatted through the very tools, discourses and idioms of police reform itself. The article draws on 18 months of fieldwork research on police and security in Turkey, where the author observed the on‐site implementation of police reforms in several venues: police academy classes, practical training programmes that also involved ‘international’ security experts, and local police stations and neighbourhoods. The article examines how the processes of reforming expand the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what these reforms were supposed to restrain

Criminal justice · Criminology · Democracy · Ethnography · Police science · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Public Administration