Police Reform in Turkey: Human Security, Gender and State Violence Under Erdogan by Funda Hulagu

Author:Funda Hulagu [Hulagu, Funda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Middle Eastern, Social Science, Political Science, World, Middle East, Turkey & Ottoman Empire, History, Law Enforcement, Security (National & International), Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781838604141
Google: SuUMEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52960817
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2021-01-28T12:12:58+00:00

4

State violence against politically active women

Gezi Protests represent the ultimate moment when the state violence relatively dormant in the reform era has started to unfold in a very rapid manner. In other words, Gezi catalysed the full transformation of moral policing into virtuous violence, the selective act of defining who merits the humane face of the centaur and who does not. Gezi Protests have generated a political panic among the ruling bloc. It transgressed the political boundaries limiting the state. It proved the dysfunctionality of the populist and localist ideologies used for the legitimation of the state in the AKP era. Gezi Protests which started in the late May 2013 and the popular resistance that followed it during the whole June 2013 revealed the contradictions of the Turkish capitalism (Ercan and Oğuz, 2015). Millions of people protested the ecological, political and economic dispossession processes characterizing the restructuring of the state in the AKP era. The massive participation of women to the protests was remarkable.1

The Gezi protesters targeted the political horizon of the ruling bloc that had been limited to the ‘property-owner modest man’. It is not a coincidence that one of the symbolic and widely embraced cult photos of the Gezi Protests was the photo of the ‘lady in red’, a peaceful woman protestor hastily tear-gassed by a police officer (Gürcan and Peker, 2014). Even before the Gezi Protests, women had already been protesting the conservative policies of the AKP government, which was gradually building a very intrusive politics of intimacy – propagating a three children policy for each women, criminalizing the demand and act of abortion, despising single life and advocating for marriage.2 During the Gezi, women spontaneously exhibited a collective agency also showing the limits of the AKP’s moralist policing based on mobilizing families to de-radicalize their daughters and sons. The contradiction between the respective political horizons of the reformist police cadres and the Gezi women became more apparent when for example the governor of Istanbul appealed to mothers to call their children back home. Instead of doing so, hundreds of mothers demonstrated in Taksim Square to support their daughters and sons (Canlı and Umul, 2015).

In the face of this resistance, the political power intensified its selective patriarchy, responding by deepening the schism of ‘agreeable’ and ‘non-agreeable’ women. While it put the ‘agreeable women’ over a pedestal as way of governing them, it declared the ‘non-agreeable women’ as the marginal, non-local, non-national women, who possess no attachment to the Islamist-Anatolian civilization.3

In order to discuss these arguments, this chapter will focus on three processes where it is possible to discern how the gender-cum-patriarchal selectivities of the state differ in terms of manifestation and intensity from but remain identical in terms of spirit with the reform era. The first process includes the gendered police violence during the Gezi Protests and the New Internal Security Law which came just after the Protests. The second process is related with the accelerated rise of the status of the Special Operations Department within the police organization.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.