‘Proportioning violence’: Ethnographic notes on the contingencies of police reform in Turkey

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.     

KEEPING THE PEACE

This paper locates the emerging professional police force in Copenhagen both in a European‐wide context and in the context of Danish absolute monarchy between 1660 and 1799. The surviving source material on the activities of the new police force itself (from 1683) is reviewed, but the notion of ‘good police’ is placed in a much broader early modern framework involving not only daily security in the city, and matters of criminal and civil law arising naturally in a growing urban environment, but also the relationship between the police master and the many other existing agents of domestic policy in early modern Denmark. The role of ‘good police’ in terms of begging, vagrancy and the workhouse conform largely to contemporary European patterns, but when the police was also (from 1773) given powers to control newspapers and the press, questions of civil rights and obligations were bound to be raised – not least once public opinion became fully aware that the mental condition of Christian VII meant that absolutism could not operate in the normal way. Although the Copenhagen police provided a tool for more co‐ordinated implementation of social policy in the 18th century, there were no sudden changes in domestic agenda.     

‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’: settler voting rights and the elimination of the Indigenous demos in US Pacific territories

Settler colonialism eliminates Indigenous sovereignty, enthrones itself, and thereby makes Indigenous land ‘ours’. It may do this meta-politically, by absorbing ‘them’ into ‘us’. This article explores three recent lawsuits brought by settlers against Indigenous demoi in US Pacific territories. I show that in each lawsuit, settlers brandished a novel ‘tool of elimination’: individual voting rights. I trace how settlers wielded this tool to deliver a ‘one-two punch’, first condemning as ‘illiberal’ restrictive voting laws flowing from Indigenous sovereignty and then championing race-neutral laws that would in effect enthrone settlers. I show that courts hearing these cases were faced with choosing the appropriate ‘framing of justice’ – with whether the relevant rights-bearer was the universal individual voter or the ‘constitutionally prior’ Indigenous demos. Finally, I show that, because the courts ultimately framed these disputes as individual-rights cases, settlers extended control of meta-politics on the US Pacific frontier.     

Blood Sports in Victorian Cumbria: Policing Cultural Change

This article interrogates the concept of the ‘civilizing process’ by examining cultural change through a micro-study of the policing of cock-fighting and prize-fighting, two phenomena of popular culture, which moved from being tolerated to being prohibited in the nineteenth century. It uses as its empirical base the criminal justice system of Cumbria to examine how this cultural change was negotiated, and shows how ordinary policemen were key to the process. Cock-fighting and prize-fighting were contests that attracted crowds of men who bet heavily on the outcome. However, in Cumbria there were important differences of attitude towards these two activities and their management by the police and courts varied. Prize-fighting was dealt with swiftly and effectively, whereas opinions were divided on cock-fighting and the practice continued well into the twentieth century. Local cultures rather than middle-class opinion at the county or national level, determined whether these activities would survive, for regional traditions and practices shaped the effectiveness of the response to prohibited blood sports. It was at the local level where the elimination or toleration of plebeian sports was negotiated, and in this the police and courts were crucial as agents of social change.     

Rational Mechanics in the Eighteenth Century. On Structural Developments of a Mathematical Science

Rational Mechanics in the Eighteenth Century. On Structural Developments of a Mathematical Science. The role of mathematics in eighteenth‐century science and of eighteenth‐century philosophy of science can hardly be overestimated. However, philosophy of science frequently described and analysed this role in an anachronistic manner by projecting modern points of view about (formal) mathematics and (empirical) science to the past: From today's point of view one might be tempted to say that philosophers and scientists in the seventeenth and even more in the eighteenth century became aware of the importance of mathematics as a means of ‘representing’ physical phenomena or as an ‘instrument’ of deductive explanation and prediction. But such modernisms are missing the central point, i.e. the ‘mathematical nature of nature’ according to mechanical philosophy. Moreover, the understanding of this mathematical nature changed dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century for various (i.e. mathematical, philosophical and other) reasons – a fact hardly appreciated by former philosophical analysis. Philosophy of science today should offer a more accurate analysis to history of science without giving up its task – not always appreciated by historians – to uncover the basic concepts and methods which seem relevant for the understanding of science in question. This paper gives a ‘structural account’ on the development of rational mechanics from Newton to Lagrange that tries to give justice to the fact that rational mechanics in the eighteenth century was primarily understood as a mathematical science and that – starting from this understanding – also tries to give good reasons for the fundamental change of the concept of science that took place during this period.     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

State power in blue

In this article I explore how geographers might go about studying the everyday contexts of police power, given specifically the emphasis today in political geography on the practice of state power. Rather than endorse police practice as a relatively accessible and straightforward realm for researchers, I emphasize instead the uneventful and sometimes disappearing aspects of police work which makes it hard to excavate and interrogate, especially for non-police. Reflecting on various fieldwork experiences, I argue that the basic methodological tools that geographers have at their disposal to bring down the ‘blue wall’ of police practices can do the opposite: produce a tentative mode of knowledge which grasps, qualitatively and quantitatively, at the problem of the social and force relations of policing. I conclude that rather than a fix to the cruddiness of police power, accepted qualitative and quantitative methodologies constitute the ‘blue wall’ of police practice.     

‘Your work is of no use to us…’: Administrative interests in ethnographic research (West New Guinea, 1950–1962)

Abstract

The extent of customary land in Samoa and the laws pertaining to its protection create a presumption of state dependence on the regulation of custom in effecting state policies within local contexts. The principal means of regulating custom in Samoa has been and continues to be through state court adjudication of conflicts over customary land and chiefly titles. The transitive nature of ‘custom’ and conceptions of ‘custom’ in Samoa created an opening for court influence in the construction of custom, if not custom's partial reinvention through the agency of the courts. This occurred principally through the courts’ privileging principles of English common law in confirming asserted land rights generally considered unenforceable at the time of Samoa's political partition. The courts re‐interpreted as customary, conceptions of land rights the colonial state's influence attempted to effect within Samoan society. But the source of the changes, and the courts’ role in promoting them, tended not to be equally reflected upon. To the extent such influence is ignored in analyses of Samoan land tenure and customary law, and reproduced within state policies and court adjudication of conflict, custom's social construction is left unexamined, assumed to be more general than it is, and likely to exacerbate tensions and conflict within Samoan society rather than reduce them.     

Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840s–1914

This article examines how police–public relations have evolved during the nineteenth-century expansion of formal policing. Following recent critiques of the ‘state monopolization thesis’, it dismisses the idea of a ‘policeman-state’ progressively assuming dominion over the governance of crime, generating vicious antagonism between police and public, and effectively coercing the latter into obedience. In order to chart changes in police–public relations across the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the analysis draws on Antwerp police statistics from 1842 until 1913. It assumes that movements in different types of offences reflect the initiative of different actors and also constitute a valuable index of conflicts between police and public. The article argues that although police activity in Antwerp did significantly increase towards the end of the nineteenth century, priorities in crime control were not merely dictated from ‘above’ (the police and authorities) but also delivered from ‘below’ (the people). It shows how police interventions were shaped by shifting policy concerns, by the interests of different urban interest groups, and by the practical constraints of police work. Finally, it counters the idea of a repressive police disciplining a hostile public with evidence of growing public use of the police and of complex popular attitudes towards the ‘blue locusts’.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 1. February 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 1 Front Cover Anthropologists have long ignored or criticized mainstream popular culture, so we have not always realized that something as seemingly mundane as a Hollywood film could contain valuable insights for teaching and thinking about the issues that matter to an anthropological perspective on the contemporary world. Given science fiction's intersections with anthropology in using other ‘worlds’ to gain perspective on our own, science fiction films could be particularly good resources for engaging wider audiences with anthropological insights. While there have been occasional examples of such cross‐fertilizations, such as the writings of Ursula Le Guin, the potential of science fiction as a source for anthropological thinking has been by and large neglected. In this issue, David Sutton shows how the recent film Arrival provides one striking example of the overlap between science fiction, anthropology and popular culture. Films such as this, offer much food for thought and for engagement with anthropological understandings of topics ranging from linguistic relativity to culturally constructed temporalities. At a time when anthropology itself has gained increased visibility in popular culture, it behoves us to think through, rather than reject out of hand, the ways that we might highlight these increased opportunities to promote anthropological understandings. Back Cover: ‘WE ARE ALL POLICE’ A scene from the taxi station at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, December 2016, after several deadly attacks against police and military members. Turkish flag stickers read as: ‘We are all police; we are all soldiers’. Scholars across disciplines have recently expanded state‐centred understandings of security (i.e. national security) by looking at the human and non‐human elements of security, including everything from food and ecological systems, to political economy, poverty and even everyday life itself. What kind of critical tools do we need to develop in order to understand our increasingly ‘securitized’ world infused with a growing (and increasingly repurposed) police force that includes both human and non‐human agents of policing? In this issue, Hayal Akarsu focuses on the technicalization of police violence through reform and the expansion of police power into unconventional domains. She shows how the very practice of reforming expands the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what such reforms are supposed to restrain. While her research remains contextualized within the specific histories of the Turkish police, it has relevance beyond Turkey, as many practices once considered as ‘harsh policing’ have increasingly enjoyed the support of the public in different parts of the world. In such a milieu, an ethnographically nuanced analysis can provide us with a more subtly attuned vantage point, enabling us to understand how technologies of security and policing with seemingly liberal genealogies like community policing or broad democratic police reform can coexist or be aligned with ‘non‐liberal’ and even authoritarian modalities of government.     

‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.     

Heritage destruction and cultural rights: insights from Bagan in Myanmar

Recently, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has stated that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a violation of cultural rights. The Rapporteur examines a timely issue but bases her statement on narrow understandings ‘heritage’ as irreplaceable and ‘destruction’ as ideologically motivated and aggressive. This reinforces hegemonic ideas about heritage and what constitutes its destruction. In this article, I discuss the case of Bagan in Myanmar to illustrate the limitations of the Rapporteur’s statement. In Bagan, whether and how ‘heritage’ should be protected has been the topic of controversy. By implication what is – or is not – considered intentional destruction is contested. Ambiguity about the meaning of cultural rights, the dissonant nature of heritage, the subjectivity of destruction, and complex multi-layered motivations behind ‘destructive’ practices make overarching statement about the destruction of cultural heritage and cultural rights violations too bold and call for more nuance and contextualised research.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

Beyond race: constructions of ‘Europeanness’ in late-colonial legal practice in the Dutch East Indies

This article proposes to introduce the study of European identity into colonial history and vice versa. It analyses the ways in which the legal classification of the population functioned in late-colonial Indonesia. A close inspection of this case reveals that the oft-cited fundamental colonial difference between ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ was in reality not nearly as clear-cut. The concept of ‘Europeanness’ – as opposed to ‘Whiteness’ – is highlighted as the category at the center of colonial hierarchy. This leads to a re-evaluation of the relative significance of various differentiating categories in the colonial context, most importantly race and class. The author concludes that by not taking ‘Europeanness’ seriously as an independent category, scholars of ‘cultural racism’ have tended to overemphasise ‘race’, with the consequence of oversimplifying the complex, multi-layered nature of the colonial social hierarchy.     

Publicizing insecurity,privatizing security: Chinese wholesalers' surveillance cameras in a Paris suburb (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Since the early nineties, several hundreds of Chinese immigrants have settled in what has become known as the ‘Chinese wholesalers area’. For the past two years, Chinese wholesalers in Aubervilliers have been calling on public authorities to address the problem of street robberies and violent thefts, which they experience on a daily basis. Yet, they have been encouraged by the authorities to ensure their own protection, by – amongst other things – installing surveillance cameras to film the streets. This is illegal according to French legislation on camera surveillance. Knowing this, why have surveillance cameras been adopted as a solution? This question guides the ethnographic analysis presented here of a situation where the installation of surveillance cameras was locally negotiated by the main actors involved – namely, the wholesalers’ representatives and the police.     

Whores Aboard and Laws Abroad: English Women and Sexual Slander in Early Colonial New South Wales

In the nineteenth century, a gendered reform movement – the Slander of Women Acts – swept through the British common law world, making it easier for women to sue for defamatory allegations of sexual immorality. By examining two slander cases brought by women in early New South Wales and radical reforms passed in 1847, this article locates the Australian colonies within this global campaign. Arguing that slander worked to reinscribe a woman's colonial category, police ‘savage’ speech and rectify respectability for economic purposes, it shows how ideas of reputation and its protection diverged across the UK, USA and Australia at this time.     

Reproduction in transition: cross-border egg donation,biodesirability and new reproductive subjectivities on the European fertility market

Today, there should be little doubt that new reproductive technologies have ‘diversified, globalized, and denaturalized’ human reproduction (Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008). Not only have assisted reproductive technologies developed and spread throughout the world at a rapid pace, but this significant development has also given rise to a global market of cross-border reproductive care (CBRC). This article seeks to investigate CBRC between Sweden and the Baltic states, in which Swedish infertility patients travel to private fertility clinics as recipients of egg donation. This article argues that the restructuring of the European space (occurring in and through both the so-called ‘transition’ of the former Eastern Bloc and the expansion of the European Union) constitutes crucial conditions of emergence for the trans-European market of infertility care, which not only results in new modalities of reproductive mobility but also articulates a new set of interrelated European gendered reproductive subjectivities. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which such ‘new reproductive subjectivities’ – here exemplified by a sample of cross-border donor egg recipients – are articulated in relation to notions of ‘choice’ and what I call ‘biodesirability’, and how such notions cannot be exempt from its specific post-socialist European context.     

‘Dulling it down a bit’: managing visibility,sexualities and risk in the Night Time Economy in Newcastle,UK

Drawing on qualitative interviews with young women in the UK, this article highlights how gendered and sexualised negotiations of visibility intersect and continue to be important in the ways in which young women self-regulate bodies and identities to manage risk in the Night Time Economy (NTE). Adopting visible markers of normative, heterosexual femininity on a night out can be understood as simultaneously mitigating against the risks of experiencing certain types of harassment, whilst increasing the risks of experiencing others. This article reaffirms the relevance of negotiations of visibility in shaping non-heterosexual women’s dress as a strategy for managing the risk of homophobic abuse and demonstrates some of the ways in which all young women – regardless of actual or perceived sexual identification – are required to police their bodies in order to manage the additional risks of ‘heterosexualised’ harassment in the NTE. These include threats of sexual violence and harassment primarily associated with women’s positioning as subordinated gendered subjects rather than with the policing of ‘non-normative’ sexualities, with findings suggesting that young women are more concerned with managing the risks associated with a heterosexualised male gaze rather than a homophobic gaze. ‘Everyday’ experiences of harassment are trivialised and normalised in bar and club spaces, and adopting markers of normative, heterosexual femininity was felt to increase the risks of receiving this kind of ‘unwanted attention’. Clearly, young women face challenges as they attempt to negotiate femininities, sexualities and safety and manage intersections of gender and sexuality in contemporary leisure spaces.     

Liberal decorum and men in conflict: Rome, 1871 – 90

This essay examines court cases involving insult to a public official, which came before the local courts in Rome in the second half of the nineteenth century. It underlines the gendered character of this particular offence, which was committed almost exclusively by men. The analysis correlates two aspects of these cases: the first is the context of the offenses, characterized by the application of a detailed set of local police regulations, and experienced as a limitation of masculine personal liberty. The second aspect relates to the institutional organization of the police forces and the masculine identity of the officers themselves. The combination of these two elements during interactions between population and the police forces meant that the subjects' gender became more significant than other variables (such as social class), to the extent that these interactions took on the inflections of a performative ‘face-off’. In this way the variable of gender brings into question the traditional reading of public order in the Liberal era as the product of a policy of containment of the popular classes.     

Ideology,clientelism and the ‘fascistization’ of the Italian state: fascists in the Interior Ministry police

Abstract

This is a study of fascist police personnel under Mussolini's dictatorship. Based on an examination of the personal files of the Interior Ministry police, the article questions how far the recruitment and/or promotion during the mid-to-late 1920s of fascist police officers and officials, several of whom had been involved in the black-shirt movement before the March on Rome, represented an effective ‘fascistization’ strategy. If their presence led to a ‘fascistization’ of the police of sorts, they generally distinguished themselves neither as ‘good’ policemen nor as ‘good’ fascists. The professional attitudes and ideological outlooks of fascist policemen should be considered in the broader context of clientelism and factionalism which characterized public life in Italy and which played a key role in career advancement in the state.