Revolution, counterinsurgency, and the new ethnography of policing

Abstract

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. The book exemplifies a rising tendency within the new policing studies to embrace methods of anthropological ethnography and explore worlds beyond the Anglo-American horizons of the older Anglophone canon. Yonucu examines policing in Istanbul, as displayed around the Gezi Park Uprising of 2013. She contextualizes this signal event within a wide-ranging ethnographic and historical discussion of political tensions and governmental strategies which shaped the mode of policing it revealed. Theoretically, her analysis is organized by reference to a conceptual opposition proposed by the philosopher Jacques Rancière, in which “policing” and “politics” are treated as categories defined by their polar opposition. The mode of policing documented in the book is, by this analysis, a means of counterinsurgency organized as “provocative counterorganization.” This term of art names a strategy of targeting a local community's political resources for autonomous self-governance. By destroying the local institutions which sustain social tolerance and enable the creative working-through of problems (i.e., Rancière's “politics”), counterinsurgency creates a situation in which monopolistic violence (i.e., Rancière's “policing”) becomes the only resource available to deal with the resulting chaos. Yonucu's analysis is compelling, illustrating Rancière's abstract distinction in rich ethnographic detail while showing the many ways that this theoretical binary helps us to make sense of the broader ethnographic and historical qualities of life in 21st-century Istanbul.

As my contribution to this forum, I would like to address the Rancièrean framework Yonucu puts to such effective use. How does Rancière's idiosyncratic definition of “policing” fit into the ongoing paradigm shift in policing studies? What is to be gained—and what might be lost—if we define the category of “policing” as anti-political? Just as the many insightful contributions of Yonucu's book showcase the positive affordances of Rancière's framework, perhaps attention to some of its silences and omissions can help us reflect on what it occludes. For example, the book contains little information about how the political constitution of the Turkish state structures its police bureaucracy, about the division of powers between centralized and localized administrative bodies, about the municipal politics of Istanbul, and the way that these overlapping political systems interact to allocate resources and assign accountability for decisions at different levels in the policing system. Anyone who has taken a vocational course on the administration of justice knows that such boring technicalities are the primary content of professional knowledge. Rancière's critical project rejects the authority of professional expertise, framing the entire issue of “political” constitution as not merely separable from policing, but constitutively opposed to the meaning of the category itself. This is striking. If we approach policing through a conceptual framework that separates it from the political technicalities of its actual practice, do we not lose something?

Rancière's philosophy is radical in the literal sense of the word. He seeks to disrupt the root kinship between the categories of “police” and “politics,” that is, their common origin in an anthropology that defines human beings “animals of the polis” (zoon politikon). The long-duree intellectual tradition against which Rancière writes was integral to the way the erstwhile paradigm of policing studies functioned as a “big-tent” interdisciplinary conversation. Exemplary of this, Jean-Paul Brodeur's Policing Web (2010) inventoried dozens of different institutional forms, ranging from the iconic municipal patrol departments which feature as “The Police” in global pop culture, through a multitude of more specialized state and non-state security agencies, into less commonly noted vectors of police power like corporate HR Departments and surveillance technology firms. Encompassing this empirical diversity within the definition of policing was central to the theoretical agenda Brodeur identified at the heart of policing studies as an intellectual project. An accurate understanding of the pluralistic and contradictory reality of human political life, he argued, must describe “policing” as completely as possible. Toward this expansive archival goal he proposed a taxonomic framework which analyzes police power as varying along two dimensions. The first is the conventional distinction between state and non-state provision. The second dimension was Brodeur's signature contribution to policing studies: the contradiction between overtly political “high policing” and the putatively non-political forms of “low policing.”

The Brodeurian paradigm policing studies thus worked to illuminate the expansive and eclectic assemblage of empirically existing forms of police by situating them within a two dimensional taxonomic space of state/non-state and high/low, then studying how the tensions between state-organized and non-state-organized modes of collective action are rendered more complex and intense as they are refracted through the fundamental contradiction between the overt politics of active dissensus and the covert politics of presumptive consensus. In practice, this approach suggests a classification of policing agencies which concentrate in the center of this two-dimensional space and shade off into the twilight institutions at its “fringes.” One of Brodeur's most succinct description of the outer limits of the policing assemblage—conceptually, the threshold at which policing gives way to something else—characterizes its “edges” as marked by “military policing at one end and extralegal policing at the other” (2010, p. 309). Brodeur's formulation suggests a category of policing that is clearly delimited—not the all-encompassing “fetish” that some critics see in the Foucaultian idea of Omnes Et Singulatim (1981; cf. Garriott, 2013)—while, unlike Ranciere's formulation, being at the same time fundamentally and constitutively political.

The situation depicted in Police, Provocation, Politics brings these opposed “edges” of policing that Brodeur identified into a direct relationship. It is an antagonistic relationship, to put it mildly. Yonucu tells a story of epic struggle between a hero and a villain. The hero is the revolution, the villain the state. Both sides engage in activities that Brodeurian police studies would classify as “policing.” Heroic revolutionary policing is practiced by a group of “young people … engaged in an unarmed and participatory form of extra-legal justice/vigilantism in their neighborhood as active members of the Neighborhood Association” (2022, p. 96). The association oversees a system of local vigilantism which includes maintaining lists of people and businesses considered unwelcome in the neighborhood, laboring or lobbying in various ways to transform these targets of community concern, and, occasionally, “[going] out with batons to chase glue sniffers or to threaten or beat up known criminals” (Ibid. p. 101). Yonucu historicizes this policing praxis within a 50-year tradition of informal self-help which effectively aligns it with the ideals of the abolitionist movement. Her description suggests a self-consciously decolonial project of the sort Amanda Porter termed “counter-policing” (2016), that is, one which seeks to “desecuritize the problem of rising crime, decriminalize segments of society deemed criminal, and destigmatize their communities” (Yonucu, 2022, p. 112). Yonucu identifies the origin of this policing tradition with the founding of the neighborhood itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, a leftist movement managed to establish a relatively autonomous self-governed community of Alevi (an ethno-religious minority) within the larger space of greater Istanbul. The heart of their government was a people's committee. This committee worked, in conjunction with its people's court, to administer justice by organizing its policing functions—including patrol, surveillance, and arrest—through specialized subcommittees. It was a policing apparatus designed not only to manage internal conflict, but also to segregate the neighborhood from the outside world. By Yonucu's telling, this form of revolutionary self-governance “opened up a powerful political space … where the wretched of the earth were able to experience being active agents of a world in the making” (Ibid. p. 47). Although the historical inspiration for this commune-based mode of policing is not detailed, it appears consistent with the Maoist model that took shape in China during the 1930s and 1940s, and became globally influential through the “Third World Movement” for decolonization during the Long 60s (Martin, Forthcoming).

Between the neighborhood's memories of insurgent solidarity and the arrival of the ethnographer many years later, something changed. Exemplary of this change is the arrest of the youthful heroes mentioned above, rounded up en masse after a fistfight with an undercover police officer. The ethnographer talks with them during a moment of freedom during their prosecution. In this dialogue, the young vigilantes and those around them characterize their arrest as an inflection point marking a shift from the hopeful qualities of politics past to a relatively grim future horizon. Yonucu depicts this change as the transformation of the neighborhood's informal policing system from “Vigilantism 2.0” to “Vigilantism 3.0.” Where the unarmed consent-based practices of Vigilantism 2.0 carried forward the progressive spirit of the people's committee (Vigilantism 1.0), Vigilantism 3.0 involves masked and armed men operating without clear allegiance, let alone accountability, whose practical repertoire includes spectacular brutality, for example, leaving tortured corpses on display around the neighborhood (p. 110).

If the book can be said to have a focal agenda, it is explaining the nature of and reasons for this dystopic transformation. Rancière's categories allow Yonucu to depict the change as a reactionary displacement of life-affirming “politics” by the necrotic violence of “policing.” She draws on this framing to advocate for sustained investment of hope in the eventual success of revolution. Valorizing martyrdom in response to “absolute injustice,” she suggests that the spirit of solidarity and resistance which characterized Vigilantism 2.0 has the potential to transform the social world in such a way that the bad habits of Rancièrean “policing” might finally yield to a form of life organized by permanent “political” praxis. Another world—one without police—is possible.

The Brodeurian approach to policing, by contrast, would depict the situation she documents as one in which the “edges” of the category have collided in the middle of a space left empty by evacuation of everything in its center. This interpretation suggests a less hopeful orientation to the future. A revolutionary insurgency can indeed push the category of policing to its limits (and beyond), but only temporarily. When the exceptional violence of war is exhausted, the normal routines of police work repopulate the center of the category with gravitational necessity. This is true even in situations like that of 1949 China, where revolution succeeds in in institutionalizing the commune-based system of “Vigilantism 1.0” as the basis of the post-revolutionary order (Zhou, 2023). The reason for this, at least according to the older paradigm of policing studies, is that policing is a field of discretionary action, and discretion is fundamentally “political” in the sense of expressing the human capacity for self-constitution (cf. Martin, 2018). In other words, the micropolitical technologies of conflict management which Rancière's binary excludes from his polemic definition, are the most important thing about the entire phenomena. And if policing is not the antithesis of politics but, rather, an ancient name for one of the ways zoon politikon has learned to live with itself, then declaring war on police is not a means to the end of a world without them.