Description
Drawing on my recent book Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul, in this presentation I will a) discuss how policing is not limited to providing and maintaining order but also entails the generation of disorder and b) illustrate already existing abolitionist practices on the ground. Situating Turkish policing within a global context, in the first half of the presentation I will elaborate on the complex and mutually constitutive relationship between the maintenance of the social order and, in defense of that social order, the creation of the conditions for perpetual conflict, disorder, and criminal activity by the state security apparatus. I suggest that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations. The second half of the presentation will focus on the long enduring abolitionist practices among Turkey’s racialised working-classes. I will show how the distrust in the state and its security apparatus has paved the way for alternative justice strategies some of which can be considered as abolitionist practices.
