Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

State‐produced disorder from counterinsurgency to gentrification

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ciso.12495

1548-744X

Stefano Portelli,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

"The state is coming! The state is coming!" some children in one of Istanbul's marginal areas screamed back in the 1970s, when they saw the coming of the bulldozers that were going to demolish their homes. The women would then "pour into the streets and start collecting stones in their skirts to throw at the bulldozers"; hundreds of people would chant slogans claiming their right to live in the neighborhood, one of the countless self-built areas of Istanbul, called gecekondu (literally "grown overnight"). "Gecekondu is our right!" they would scream. "We will take it against all odds!" Deniz Yonucu recalls this image in a chapter titled "The possibility of politics" (2022, p. 35). After each demolition, the residents would reorganize to rebuild the houses that had been demolished; their work "extended beyond the fight for housing to include collective world building practices that opened up space for individual and social transformation" (p. 36). Twenty years later, the revolutionary youth that defended the neighborhood "began to be perceived by residents as the culprits who were disrupting order" (p. 90). I cannot imagine a clearer instance, although in urban form, of what Graeber and Sahlins called "the constitutive war between king and people" (2017, pp. 398–464). In the three cities where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, I have found various forms of disruption of conviviality and interethnic relationships associated with state-led planning policies. The barrio of Bon Pastor in Barcelona, a hub of anarchist politics until Franco's fascist golpe in the 1940s, remained a "contact zone" (Pratt, 1991) that bridged the boundaries that elsewhere divided Catalan, Spanish, and gitano (Roma) communities, at least until the bulldozers started tearing it down in the early 2000s. In Rome, the 1970s relocation of slum dwellers to public housing in the outskirts turned self-grown shantytown communities, that had developed massive squatting movements and a range of often radical educational experiences, into stigmatized havens for drug dealers and gangs. In Casablanca, waves of evictions from the central city are forcibly inducing drastic changes in cultural and religious practices, such as the Gnawa ritual complex, that have hitherto enabled very different sectors of the population to cohabitate (Portelli, 2021, 2023). I see a connection between the divisions generated by the counterinsurgency techniques that Yonucu describes in Istanbul's Alevi neighborhoods and the disruptive effects of neoliberal urban planning. It is not only that public funding for policing often increases as funding for public housing shrinks (Rodriguez, 2024). Urban displacement and demolitions reinforce the internal boundaries, as Candan and Kullouğlu claim (2008): all the "small istanbuls" shrank in on themselves as the city expanded, with a resulting loss of spaces of contact. Al-Sabouni (2016) even claimed that in Syrian cities the loss of "contact zones" caused by urban planning and real estate speculation fueled the ethno-sectarian divisions of the civil war. This pattern of spatial "generation of disorder" which Yonucu so sharply identifies, tracing its genealogy and referring it to Rancière's paradigm, bounces from war zones to peace—though with different degrees of intentionality—and from the frontiers of colonization to the internal frontiers of gentrification. If anthropology, as Herzfeld argues (2010, p. 453), is "the comparative study of common sense," Yonucu's work addresses how the state's production of common sense hides its production of disorder. Her fundamental insight is that the "protection of society" on which the police builds its legitimacy indeed entails the protection of certain social groups, but at the cost of systematically targeting others, especially those who envisage or practice forms of political autonomy or prefigurative politics. The idea that the police actively produce disorder may seem counterintuitive. Yet it is the perspective of countless residents of stigmatized communities worldwide. These people desperately try to communicate to the rest of society that the state does not work as it claims to, and that the police do not act as they should. It is on these grounds that we can see in Yonucu's book a masterpiece of militant ethnography, one that provides evidence for a radically counter-hegemonic interpretation of institutions, deliberately positioned on the side of those who challenge them. Residents of peripheral neighborhoods in Rome, for instance, are well aware of how policing includes the promotion of internal conflicts and of a constant state of emergency, all factors that contribute to silencing their voices and claims and to the increase of crime. Italy experimented with the so-called "strategy of tension" in the 1970s in which the intelligence services actively pushed right-wing groups to commit terrorist attacks in order to criminalize the radical Left, and incentivate a demand for authoritarian law-and-order (Aureli, 1999; Clement & Scalia, 2021). Marginalized Romans today have no difficulty understanding how a smaller-scale version of this strategy turned their former "sanctuary spaces" into stigmatized spaces of urban decay and "war among the poor". Territorial stigma not only guarantees impunity for ever-increasing police intrusiveness; it also works as an asset, as emergency leaves investors with carte blanche for new developments, justifies welfare cutbacks, and allows politicians to create networks of patronage by promising to protect the "good citizens;" even charity and third-sector organizations capitalize on the urgency of dealing with allegedly unruly places. Through the "rigidification of boundaries between various groups" (p. 159), policing not only makes radical politics impossible but also opens spaces for business and the extraction of value. Boundaries are at the center of social dynamics, as Barth famously showed (see also, more recently, Stavrides, 2019). Yonucu's book itself stems from challenging boundaries: during the 2011 uprisings in Istanbul, intellectuals and working-class people met in Gezi Park and confronted the police together, only to be redistributed once again to their respective neighborhoods through police violence. Yonucu reacted to the new "great divide" (p. 138) through ethnography—another way of creating unusual alliances across boundaries. I share the book's optimistic conclusion that, despite the amount of suffering produced, policing is structurally unable to prevent "the possibility of politics." Violence creates suffering but can also produce a backlash that generates new alliances. As martyrs become "spirits" that animate new forms of resistance and political reorganization, protesters may also become researchers, able to develop new ideas that can challenge the boundaries and evoke new ways of overcoming the "partition of the sensible" induced by policing.