Book (Police, Provocation, Politics)

 Book: Police, provocation, politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Cornell University Press, 2022.

Praise & Reviews

Police, Provocation, Politics offers cutting-edge theorizing around the essential topics of surveillance and counterinsurgency combined with extensive, rigorous, and sensitive ethnography to inform political theory in new and exciting ways. The book is also the remarkable product of fieldwork conducted in a volatile and unstable context and under extremely difficult conditions. Anthony Leeds Book Prize Committee.

Police, Provocation, Politics is a milestone for the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance. Deniz Yonucu provides unique and intimate insights into working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul and diverse strategies the Turkish state uses to keep revolutionary groups at bay.

Martin Sökefeld, LMU Munich, author of Struggling for Recognition

Police, Provocation, Politics is both original and necessary. This is a must-read for all who are interested in how state security apparatuses work to sow insecurity and suppress dissent—and how the spirit of solidarity and resistance is nonetheless kept alive.

Anna J. Secor, Durham University

With remarkable ethnographic insight, Deniz Yonucu illuminates the affective lifeworld of revolutionary leftist politics in Turkey. Casting new light on the state's tactics of containing dissent, Police, Provocation, Politics interrogates both the promises and the limits of the current wave of political protest in the region.

Kabir Tambar, Stanford University, author of The Reckoning of Pluralism

I learned a lot from this book. Police, Provocation, Politics offers an insightful and complex discussion of the nature and the constituents of policing in Turkey.

 Yağmur Nuhrat, Istanbul Bilgi University

Through her deeply situated ethnography of a revolutionary community that has found ways of embodying an intergenerational revolutionary politics within and outside the modern state, Yonucu shows abolitionists everywhere ways of embodying liberation.

Darren Byler, American Ethnologist,

Presented with eloquent organization and lucid writing, the book exhibits ethnography at its prime. Yonucu's writing makes an invaluable contribution to both our understanding of the dialectical relationship between contemporary urban policing and politics, as well as the democratization of the scholarly field.

Elif Babül, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology

Police, Provocation, Politics presents a deep understanding of urban policing and surveillance practices and how community members receive and respond to them. Many of the book's themes, arguments, and concepts relate to critical surveillance studies literature and present ethnographically grounded, rich, and innovative insights.

Ozgun Topak, Surveillance & Society

Yonucu's book a masterpiece of militant ethnography, one that pro-vides evidence for a radically counter- hegemonic interpretation of institutions, deliberately positioned on the side of those who challenge them. Stefano Portelli, City & Society

Yonucu pushes us to think in valuable new ways about how efforts by police worldwide to produce specific forms of social order (“capitalist, racist, colonial, and patriarchal”) may hinge on generating and channeling disorder. Michael Farquhar, City & Society

Yonucu not only enhances our understanding of policing strategies in Istanbul but also provides a critical perspective on similar dynamics worldwide, where state, police, military, crime, and gang activities intersect in ways that defy conventional categorization. Caroline Parker, City & Society

The 2020s brought a paradigm shift to academic work on policing. Abolitionist, decolonizing, and other critical/political movements built up enough pressure to crack open the settled framework which had integrated earlier literature into an insular debate. A new search for the proper focus of collective discussion is now well underway. Where this process will ultimately arrive—an emergent “new paradigm”—is not yet clear, but Deniz Yonucu's award winning monograph Police, Provocation, Politics (2022, Cornell University Press) supplies an excellent example of one direction in which we should be looking. Jeffrey T. Martin, City & Society

An inspiring example of the recent generation of urban studies scholarship in Turkey, Police, Provocation, Politics offers a major contribution to the field.

Firat Genc, New Perspective on Turkey

Police, Provocation, Politics makes a timely contribution to the rapidly growing critical scholarship on discriminatory and authoritarian policing, surveillance and security practices designed to disrupt, maintain or generate specific and selected socio-political orders.

Zoha Waseem, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Police, Provocation, Politics is a groundbreaking contribution to the anthropology of policing, surveillance, and resistance

Orkide Izci, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

One of the strengths of the book is to present [counterinsurgency] from a relational perspective, taking into account the interactions between certain sectors of society and the security forces. Christophe Wasinski, Cultures and Conflicts

The book offers a valuable contribution to global literature, serving as a case study that investigates the interconnected formal and informal boundaries of police violence within the context of the official security force of the state. Ayhan Işık, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association

This book is a model of how field research should be conducted and how to structure the presentation of results—not only to engage with other scholars but also without providing information that could be used against the protagonists of the research. It combines extensive fieldwork, ethical and political clarity regarding the role and responsibility of the researcher. Stefano Portelli, Napoli Monitor

An astute analysis of the mutually constitutive relationship between police/military forces and sources of political dissent and resistance in working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul.

Bahram Tavakolian, Choice

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