In this rigorously researched, theoretically grounded, and elegantly written book, Deniz Yonucu shows how provoking revolutionary (self-defensive) counterviolence, prolonging cycles of confrontation, and fostering ethnosectarian fragmentation to block alliances among marginalized communities became central tactics of state counterinsurgency in Istanbul’s dissident working-class neighborhoods. Built as shantytowns in the 1960s and early 1970s, these neighborhoods are inhabited predominantly by Alevis, alongside a smaller Kurdish population displaced by the state’s counterinsurgency war against the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in Northern Kurdistan. The author focuses on one such neighborhood, anonymized as Devrimova (literally “the plain or land of revolution”), while also conducting research in several others. Her fieldwork was carried out between 2010 and 2013, with additional visits from 2014 to 2016, followed by further interviews and engagements with interlocutors in exile in Europe in 2017 and 2018. Drawing on ethnography, archival sources, and oral histories from both current residents and those now exiled in Europe, the book provides a layered history of these neighborhoods, which have been sites of revolutionary politics and counterinsurgency policing since the 1970s.
The book highlights crucial continuities and shifts in the state’s counterinsurgency practices as well as in revolutionary politics across this period. One striking continuity is the way counterinsurgency strategies deployed during the 1995 Gazi incidents, when state security forces and their paramilitary associates attacked Alevi communities, resonated with the tactics used in the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi protests, when security forces again targeted Alevi neighborhoods and lives in an effort to confine revolutionary or dissident politics (and counterviolence) to these areas. As Yonucu counterintuitively notes, this containment strategy sought not to eliminate dissident politics and violence but to keep them manageable, and constituted the core of the provocative counterinsurgency approach imposed on Istanbul’s dissident, working-class, predominantly Alevi neighborhoods.
The book draws on a Rancièrian distinction between politics and policing. Politics refers to practices that unsettle existing social, political, classed, and gendered hierarchies, what Rancière terms “the distribution of the sensible” and what the author reiterates as “the distribution of roles and positions in the given order” (p. 34). These (political) practices allow new forms of agency to emerge and new forms of alliances to be forged. Policing, by contrast, safeguards and reproduces that established order. The book demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies, which Yonucu terms “provocative counterorganization,” are designed to block such political disruptions and to prevent alliances between marginalized communities, especially working-class Alevis and Kurds. These techniques not only undermine the possibility of politics but also reintroduce policing by drawing revolutionary groups into reproducing state-like forms of control. A notable example is the selective presence and absence of police in dissident neighborhoods, which has enabled drug gangs as well as masked and armed revolutionary vigilantes to take over local streets. As the revolutionary vigilantes conducted identity checks and asserted territorial control while concealing their own identities, they generated fear and suspicion among residents, and the vigilantes’ defensive counterviolence began to mirror the practices of state policing. Through this dynamic, the author shows how provocative counterorganization simultaneously suppresses political possibility and enlists revolutionary actors to maintain the existing distribution of the sensible.
In addition to its analysis of provocative counterorganization, the book develops conceptually rich arguments grounded in careful ethnography and empirical depth. It introduces theoretically informed concepts such as “violent interpellation” (p. 77), which captures how state violence pushes communities and revolutionaries into fixed subject positions (in this case, an Alevi identity), generating a pervasive fear of attack by the Sunni majority and thereby limiting alliances across marginalized groups, including Turkish revolutionaries or pro-Kurdish activists who come from Sunni backgrounds. Another key concept, “inspirational hauntings” (p. 121), highlights the limits of provocative counterinsurgency by showing how state violence also can reactivate memories of past struggles and figures who challenged counterinsurgency, resisted ethnosectarian hierarchies, and insisted on forging alliances with Kurdish and other anticolonial movements. Together, these concepts offer important analytical lenses for understanding counterinsurgency, policing, and contentious politics not only in Turkey but across the broader Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region and beyond.
One of the book’s notable strengths is its reading of counterinsurgency and policing in Istanbul’s dissident neighborhoods alongside those in Northern Kurdistan. Although the author acknowledges that the scale and intensity of state violence in Istanbul and Northern Kurdistan have been “incommensurable” (p. 66), the book demonstrates clear connections: both became laboratories of counterinsurgency, and tactics developed in one arena were adapted and redeployed in the other. Militarized spatial control and low-intensity conflict techniques, for example, were first honed in Kurdistan before being refitted for predominantly Alevi working-class urban districts. Although a full comparison lies beyond the book’s scope, readers may have benefited from a more explicit periodization of how these tactics circulated across contexts and a discussion of how the limits of provocative counterinsurgency illuminate distinct conditions of racialized domination and the contestations they provoke. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of Northern Kurdistan and Istanbul’s dissident neighborhoods offers a generative research agenda for examining the possibilities and limits of revolutionary violence as a mode of anticolonial struggle.
Although Yonucu shows that provocative counterinsurgency tactics were effective, whether deployed against the pro-Kurdish armed movement or in Istanbul’s Alevi working-class districts, she also suggests that ultimately these tactics did not fully succeed in either context. Various insurgent tactics and revolutionary politics, including forms of revolutionary violence understood as defensive counterviolence, can challenge the fear and suspicion generated by policing and its provocative counterorganization. Although the book does not explicitly theorize forms of revolutionary violence that do not mimic or mirror state violence, it nonetheless offers important clues. The book highlights forms of counterviolence that unsettle existing social, political, and gendered hierarchies, open space for new actors and agencies, render the invisible visible and the unsayable sayable, and forge or deepen alliances across different racialized and marginalized groups. One compelling example centers on the revolutionary Hasan Ocak, who intervened during a 1995 protest in Gazi to expose an agent provocateur attempting to redirect demonstrators toward a mosque. Ocak instead guided the crowd toward confronting the police, and his insistence on rejecting ethnosectarian division and maintaining alliances with Kurdish and other anticolonial groups became a powerful reference point—an example of inspirational haunting. His legacy resurfaced during the aftermath of the Gezi protests, when police again targeted Alevi neighborhoods, and revolutionaries invoked Ocak to identify and contest similar counterinsurgency tactics of provocation.
Finally, the book may offer important insights for critical scholarship on Turkey’s contemporary underground and criminal worlds. Since the 2010s, Istanbul has witnessed the rise of new street gangs armed with long-barrel weapons emerging from working-class and marginalized neighborhoods and not necessarily organized around traditional crime-boss families. These groups have come to play a central role in Turkey’s urban underworld. Yonucu’s account, I suggest, also shows how the state’s counterinsurgency policing and, in particular, its strategies of provocative counterorganization, which relied on indirectly supporting drug gangs against revolutionary groups and using such gangs to provoke the emergence of masked and armed revolutionary vigilantes, provides an important lens for understanding the transformation of Istanbul’s underground and the rise of these gangs since the 2010s.
Police, Provocation, Politics is an ethnographically and conceptually compelling read that significantly reshapes how we understand counterinsurgency and political violence in Turkey and in comparable settings elsewhere. I recommend it to scholars, journalists, and general readers interested in the dynamics of state violence, policing, surveillance, and the trajectories of revolutionary movements and resistance politics in contemporary Turkey and beyond.
