The Legacy of the Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine: Counterinsurgent Policing in Istanbul The paper I would like to present examines the police violence unleashed in working-class Alevi spaces and over Alevi bodies during and after the Gezi uprisings of Turkey in 2013 and the concurrent racializing government and media discussions about Alevis from the vantage point of the enduring legacy of Cold War counterinsurgencies. More specifically, drawing on over five years of fieldwork in the urban margins of Istanbul, the paper shows how the legacy of the “low intensity conflict doctrine” still works to inform and shape dissent by provoking counterviolence and ethnosectarian tension. Utilizing a concept I call provocative counterorganization—that is, the provocation of individual and communal fear, intercommunal conflict, and ethnosectarian and ethnoracial discord by ruling elites in order to refashion a population’s dissent against the state—I suggest that counterinsurgency is in its essence a war on politics, concerned with shaping political dissent and its relation to society. Looked at from this perspective, the concentration of violence in working-class Alevi spaces and bodies during a nationwide uprising and the accompanying media focus on Alevis were in fact provocative counterorganization attempts that enabled the rapid division and separation of the diverse populations that had come together in the Gezi Uprisings.