The Sticky-Stalker State Subject: Surveillance of Dissent in Turkey (original) (raw)
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Counter-surveillance and alternative new media in Turkey
Information, Communication & Society, 2018
This study, drawing on alternative media and networked social movements, explores the counter-surveillance practices and oppositional imaginaries of activist citizen journalists (ACJs) in Turkey to combat the surveillance strategies of the authoritarian Turkish government. After the failed coup attempt in July 2016, the ruling party has become more suspicious of dissent of any kind. However, the ACJs who use mobile communication and social media as channels for journalism and counter-surveillance continue their critical journalistic work in this context. Using ethnographic data collected from interviews with these media activists, this study focuses on oppositional imaginaries regarding the surveillance culture as well as counter-surveillance tactics, both offensive and defensive. To do so, we conducted 22 in-depth interviews with the representatives of alternative new media (ANM) initiatives and ACJs who were gathering, producing and disseminating news at the time of the study (between January and July 2017). Backed by the available literature on interdisciplinary approaches, data were gathered from the interviews, thematically coded and critically analysed. The whole process of news-making that criticises the authoritarian surveillance state stands out as an offensive tactic. On the other hand, defensive tactics are very closely related to the safety of journalists, their sources and data. The paper argues that the variety of offensive and defensive tactics should be increased and they should be substantially improved. The study also sheds light on the need for more detailed and extensive interdisciplinary research.
Surveillance, Normalisation, and Repression
European journal of Turkish studies, 2014
One of the most fertile developments in contemporary thought has been to place the production of individuals at the heart of its enquiries, thus breaking with philosophical currents positing an a-historical individual. The aim of this special issue 1 is to enquire into how exactly this process transpires within organisations that normalise, repress, and conduct surveillance of individuals who are either part of an institution or else the object of their operations. The work carried out by institutions using techniques 'relating to the surveillance, diagnosis, and possible transformation of individuals' (Foucault 2004: 7) studied here is intended to halt or prevent deviant behaviour, in the sense used by Howard Becker for whom 'deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender"' (Becker 1963: 9; italics in the original). 2 The diverse nature of the institutions analysed here (the army, the police, a political organisation, and a consulate), all within a 'Turkish context', 2 is heuristic insofar as it is thus possible to compare different levels of coercion and test more general hypotheses relating to the similarity of practices and their transfer between institutions. Some are institutions of the sovereign State (the police, the army, and a consulate), whilst others are illegal (the PKK); some are open and exert weak coercive power (the consulate) whilst others are total (the army and PKK), that is to say 'cut off from wider society for
Online Surveillance in Turkey Legislation Technology and Citizen Involvement
Efe Kerem Sözeri Vrije Unversiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. eksozeri@hotmail.com The AKP government has constructed an online surveillance regime (not to mention censorship) via various legal and technical means. This article analyzes the emergence and expansion of online surveillance within the context of the AKP's authoritarian practices that are interwoven with its nationalist and populist politics. It begins with an overview of legal and technical initiatives aimed at enhancing online surveillance, data collection and retention. It then focuses on the AKP's recent strategies designed to bolster this online surveillance regime such as the institutionalization of online " snitching " via a newly-introduced social media app that enables citizen-informants to " report terrorists " to the authorities. The article argues that the AKP's recent strategies and rationalities to regulate the conduct of online users are aligned with principles of " go...
Proactive Policing, Crime Prevention, and State Surveillance in Turkey
Long criticized for human rights abuses, the Turkish National Police underwent significant reforms in the early 2000s as part of Turkey’s effort to join the European Union. International donors and experts encouraged Turkey to import best practices of community policing and proactive crime prevention from the West. These reforms, it was thought, would protect human rights, improve governance, and further the democratization of the country. In this Brief, Hayal Akarsu argues that this remodeling of the Turkish police had the paradoxical effect of strengthening state surveillance in Turkey. Importing proactive policing practices enabled the Turkish police to infiltrate into the everyday lives of ordinary people to an extent that it had never before done. Granting the police discretion to punish "potential criminality" in public spheres facilitated arbitrary policing, and police-led social projects focused on "social risks" brought the police into the private homes of citizens. Instead of democratizing policing in Turkey, these reforms actually provided the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) with a new toolkit to strengthen its hold on power.
International Criminology, 2022
To fulfill the requirements of European Union membership, Turkey promised to improve policing policies and practices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was hoped that the police would embrace the concept of being "citizens in uniform," serving the whole community and not merely the privileged few or state interests. However, in early 2021, during the student protest against the controversial appointment of a staunch supporter of the ruling party as the rector of Bogazici University, police adopted a heavy-handed approach responding to the protests, including a widespread abuse of power. Using the "cyber-ethnographic" method and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including the author's 28 years of professional lived experience at the Turkish Police Academy, this essay claims that there has been a move to an authoritarian stage in the politics of the police. The study explores why students are labeled as deviants and terrorists and encounter other forms of discrimination and exclusion. The essay argues that the promise of the police as 'citizens in uniform' has been ignored and the police have been reverting to 'létat c'est moi.' The responses of the authorities to the student protests have been brutal: categorizing, marginalizing, blaming, criminalizing, and demonizing the students based on their ideological, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities. The article concludes that assaults on academic freedom, on the right of peaceful assembly and LGBTQ rights aim at homogenizing and controlling all areas of Turkey.
Policing and the surveillance of the marginal: Everyday contexts of social control
Theoretical Criminology, 2013
While the surveillance practices of the private security industry have become a central preoccupation of scholarship, the surveillance power of the state has been greatly enhanced through multiple procedures of information gathering to support practices of control and management. In this article, we draw upon two different research projects to examine the surveillance work of the police and other public sector groups working in partnership, as well as the activities of police officers operating covertly. In so doing, we expose the often unintended, but nevertheless invasive and comprehensive power of state agencies to gather details of individuals in the residual working class, within mundane and innocuous policing practices. Our central argument is that these developments have occurred alongside a displacement of social policy through crime control, and represent both an acceleration and intensification of existing state approaches to the surveillance of the problematic individual....
In the last few years several artistic projects have been inspired by surveillance practices and the social processes they capture. In the same way that Surveillance Studies have debated the differences between different forms of counter-surveilllance, many of these projects offer different understandings of what it means to recreate, co-opt or expose surveillance, and so they relate to surveillance in different ways. By selecting six of these art projects and looking at what they say about power, technology and agency, this paper uses art as a stepping stone to explore questions that remain open in the academic debate -what does it mean to subvert the surveillance society? What are the differences between recreation, co-option and exposure when raising awareness of the day-to-day aspects of the surveillance society? By looking at different surveillance-related artistic projects and the issues they raise, this paper explores how counter surveillance, sousveillance, privacy and data protection have been presented in artistic practices, and mirrors them against recurring themes and arguments in Surveillance Studies. While most academic debates are based on academic contributions, this paper brings new insights into the current state of Surveillance Studies using artistic practices and the reflections they bring about as a starting point, to find surprising similarities between these two perspectives –and their current shortcomings.
This essay discusses Turkey’s state television TRT’s factual series Bear Witness (launched in November 2015 and ongoing), which covers the most recent wave of operations by counter-terrorism units in urban centers across the country’s southeast. The series is marked by a bold claim to truthful and impartial coverage, which it seeks to undergird by way of a stylistic and methodological combination of the genres of true crime, citizen journalism, and military surveillance. Bear Witness provides insight into how the state might reconceive sovereignty through televised propaganda in an age when both warfare and its reporting have become ubiquitous and instantaneous: against a spatial and temporal exterior presented as having dynamic boundaries that constantly threaten to engulf the interior across which the state seeks to hold sway.