Introduction

Abstract

This chapter looks at the coexistence since the mid-2000s in Istanbul neighborhoods of intense police surveillance and militarized spatial control alongside armed and masked revolutionary vigilante activities and gang activities. The chapter examines the conditions of possibility of this conflictual and yet long-enduring coexistence. It argues that this seemingly paradoxical coexistence can only be understood within the context of the Turkish state's policing and counterinsurgency strategies, which are informed by Cold War counterinsurgencies and the colonial school of warfare and which have worked not merely to violently repress the Alevi and Kurdish Left but also to violently refashion a population's dissent against the state. The chapter combines archival work and oral history narratives with more than four years of ethnographic research in a predominantly Alevi-populated working-class neighborhood of Istanbul. Ultimately, the chapter illustrates the complex and mutually constitutive relationship between the maintenance of social order, and the creation of conditions for perpetual conflict, disorder, and criminal activity. It situates Turkish counterinsurgent policing within a global context and shows how the Turkish counterinsurgency has been informed by global counterinsurgencies—including British counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Northern Ireland, the French counterinsurgency in Algeria, and US counterinsurgencies at home and abroad.