This panel explores how practices, apparatuses and discourses of policing in the modern Middle East have shaped and been shaped by the states and societies of the region. While policing - here provisionally taken to refer to state institutions and practices which are in principle geared towards crime control and public order maintenance - has played a very visible role in shaping social and political life in the Middle East, it remains greatly under-researched. Points of departure for understanding this role may be located in a rich tradition of critical criminology and sociology mainly focused on Europe and North America, which over a period of decades has helped to illuminate how policing may be implicated in such things as forging political subjectivity, defining citizenship and marginality, and fashioning and maintaining specific forms of social, political and economic order. In recent years, an increasing number of anthropologists have brought their own methodological and theoretical tools to bear on these themes, and their efforts have been particularly valuable in opening up new perspectives on policing in the Global South (e.g. Garriott 2013; Karpiak and Garriott 2018). In parallel, a small but growing community of scholars have also begun to debate these themes with reference to the Middle East (e.g. Khalili and Schwedler 2010; Smolin 2013; Feldman 2015; Gönen 2017).
The papers that make up this panel build upon and seek to further advance this promising research agenda. They focus on four very different country case studies, employ a variety of methodologies (including participant observation, interviews and archival research), and are engaged with debates in a number of disciplines (including anthropology, political science, history and political theory). Beyond the broad theme of policing, this diversity of perspectives provides scope for productive dialogue on a number of more specific concerns which run through the papers. These include the ways in which policing practices often straddle the distinction between civilian and military spheres of social life, how policing is implicated in the making and unmaking of political communities, and the extent to which local and national projects of policing are so often situated within expansive transnational landscapes. Beyond offering empirically grounded perspectives on dynamics in the modern Middle East, the panel seeks to develop bases for fresh critical engagement with wider debates about the social and political import of policing in contexts worldwide.
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.
A settler society with unsettled borders, Israel sustains a seven decades long military occupation that requires wide scale policing. Based on the routine management of a military government in Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel makes the case for its unique battle-proven model of population-centric warfare and counterinsurgency policing, exporting its theories, technologies and trained personnel worldwide (Graham 2011, Hajjar 2006, Khalili 2013, Weizman 2011). Rather than understand Israel’s policing model as comprised solely of tactical and technological expertise, my research examines it as a discursive project grounded in reframing Israel’s military occupation as the national security problem of a democratic state. This paper examines policing in the West Bank by the Nahal, a unique brigade of “Fighting Pioneer Youth” in the Israeli military, that is emblematic of both Israel’s “liberal occupation” and its settler-colonial structure. Established in 1948, the Nahal has long bridged civilian and military endeavors, from engaging in combat and building new settlements along the frontier, to collectivist agricultural labor and educational volunteer work. Today Nahal soldiers conduct daily policing in Occupied Palestinian Territory, while maintaining their status as the liberal brigade and “human advantage” of the Israeli military. Nahal soldiers engage in routine debates about the moral code of policing a civilian population, and see their mission as holding the Israeli military accountable to its liberal values. Based on ethnographic and archival research, I theorize the Nahal as constitutive of Israeli settler-colonial security, and argue that the often-overlooked discursive project of Israeli policing in Occupied Palestinian Territory underlies the global travels of its expertise.
Community policing initiatives in Europe and North America are often touted as a means of restoring public trust in the police, and, by extension, in the state more broadly. Despite a limited evidence base, programmes that promote police problem-solving, crime prevention, and partnerships with the public are also commonly identified as vehicles for countering violent extremism and promoting social cohesion. These perceptions have influenced second generation Security Sector Reform initiatives and in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, international development agencies have supported the establishment or expansion of Community Policing programmes in several Arab states including Jordan. Unlike other states in the region, whose ‘civil’ police have a record of brutality against the public, in Jordan, polling both before and after the Uprisings has indicated high public approval ratings for the Public Security Directorate (PSD). Police professionalism has been cited as a contributory reason for regime survival, and the PSD already lays claim to longstanding partnerships between the police and community representatives. In 2013, the organization initiated a new community policing initiative in Syrian refugee camps, whose primary purpose was to liaise between residents, the Jordanian administrative authorities and non-governmental aid organizations working in the camps. The programme’s success led to attempts to replicate it through pilot projects in Jordanian host communities in the north of the country and Amman, but early assessments suggest that realizing genuinely participatory partnerships between the population and the police in these areas is far more problematic. This paper uses Partha Chatterjee’s reflections on ‘Communities in the East’ and the role of social capital within them to critically assess how efforts to introduce Western-styled Community Policing to Jordan over the past decade relate to attempts by the Executive to re-imagine how ‘communities’ are conceived in a Kingdom facing rapidly changing demographics. Using findings from a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted in Jordan between 2010 and 2018 with serving and former police officers, external development and security sector agencies, members of local voluntary organizations and ‘traditional’ tribal and administrative representatives, and refugees, the paper considers how measures introduced under the rubric of Community Policing reflect broader challenges to the governmentality of Jordan’s population.
