Hayal Akarsu: "An Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove": Afterlives of Police Reforms in Turkey

This talk will discuss how police reforms, which were expected to reduce police violence, have instead

strengthened the state’s and the police’s grip on social life in Turkey. Supported by international

organizations such as the EU, the Turkish National Police has invested heavily in police reforms over the

last 15 years. An ethnography of these emerging policing practices and expertise reveals how necessary

but inadequate it is to study policing by focusing on brute force alone. The talk theorizes forms of

police power that unfold through reforms. It shows how the alignment of liberal policy objectives with

decidedly discriminatory and authoritarian policing practices in non-Western contexts is not another

sign of failed reforms. Instead, these realignments reveal the violent undercurrents of liberal reforms,

and foreground the contradictions deeply embedded in modern policing.