Book (Police, Provocation, Politics)
Book: Police, provocation, politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Cornell University Press, 2022.
Praise & Reviews
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
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
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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