An Assessment Of Democratic Policing In The Turkish National Police PDF Download

Political power and gendered (as opposed to gender neutral) politics constantly inform and intimately shape each other. Burgeoning ethnographies of the state draw attention to the daily construction of the state while the feminist state literature has long documented several ways in which the state is gendered, largely focusing on the bifurcated nature of its laws and regulations, effects of state policies on women, and the interactions between women’s movements and the state. Although both bodies of literature have made valuable contributions to our understanding of the modern state and how it operates, the significance of men and masculinities has largely been neglected in the study of the state. This dissertation contributes to ongoing debates in Turkey and elsewhere about the growing authoritarianism of political regimes and police militarization, paying attention to the link between masculinities and democracy/authoritarianism. This study has uncovered what I call “masculinities of the state” in an attempt to identify and understand mechanisms of engendering political processes, institutions and norms. By using a multi-method approach, this study identifies the mutual construction of statehood and masculinities through everyday practices of state officials at different levels of the state: the prime minister and the Turkish National Police (TNP) between 2002 and 2015. This dissertation unravels the multiplicity, historicity, and contextuality of policing, police masculinities and political masculinities in Turkey, rather than seeing the masculinity of a political leader and police masculinities as constant and monolithic. Also, unlike the literature that envisions the police as a direct embodiment of the state or merely as one of the violent arms of the state, this research demonstrates the ways in which policing(s) are historically contingent, and constantly in the making in relation to ongoing political transformations as well as shifting political actors both within the organization and across the state. The analysis of police masculinities in relation to the gendered charisma of a political leader reveals the connections between the law enforcement and the political regime in Turkey. The shifting configuration of hegemonic masculinity of the prime minister and three models of policing and associated police masculinities that have emerged in Turkey inform and challenge each other. A militarized masculinity has become the defining characteristic of the latest model of policing in Turkey, attesting to the links between authoritarianism/democratization and shifting modes of masculinity across state branches. The Turkish case further suggests that reforms to engender a more democratic form of policing may only be temporary in the absence of well-established democratic institutions and a system of checks and balances, and in the face of arbitrary political rule. The logic of equating masculine power with political/institutional power within the TNP and the governing body results in marginalization, and limited presence of women and femininities across state branches, designating the state sites as historically constructed domains of men and masculinities despite the increasing but slow inclusion of women in those domains.