Almost three years before the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution, on July 21st 1905, residents of Istanbul, state officials, foreign dignitaries, and tourists had gathered in Be?ikta? for the highly ritualized Friday prayer service, one of the few occasions the sultan Abdülhamid II could be seen in public. A massive explosion shook the square prior to the sultan’s ‘traditional’ ride back to his palace, killing instantly twenty-six people including civilians and members of the imperial guard. The sultan survived the attempt on his life unscathed due to a prolonged conversation with his ?eyhülislam at the gates of the mosque. The subsequent investigation into the matter revealed a detailed plan by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in collaboration with the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and a Belgian anarchist to set off a number of spectacular explosions throughout the Ottoman capital as well as Izmir and Salonica. By focusing on the failed assassination attempt, which has often been treated as a side note in the historiography of the Hamidian period or Armenian nationalism, this paper will examine the organizational dynamics of the strand of revolutionary violence directed at symbols of the existing social-political order in the Ottoman Empire as part of the multi-faceted opposition to the Hamidian regime. It will also be situated within the context of the growing popularity of the “propaganda by the deed” in the previous decade which was marked by the assassination of heads of state and high-ranking government officials in the Russian Empire, the United States, France, Spain, and Italy. The government’s response to the proliferation of revolutionary networks in urban centers, and its concerted efforts to frame their suppression as part of a pan-European struggle against Anarchism will also be taken into account.

Urban ethnographies invigorate our understanding of neo-liberal forms of state violence, spatial segregation, racial/ethnic tensions, criminal activities or subversive mobilizations by bringing the local and particular into fore. This ethnographic inquiry is a contribution to this literature in its examination of alternative legitimacy and sovereignty schemes historically developed in the urban marginalized areas of Turkey and the meanings attached to them in the current neo-liberal moment. It suggests that the neo-liberal urban policies of the 1990s were accompanied by a shift in dominant representation of the urban margins from “liberated areas” to “dangerous places” where immoral economies with a degenerate culture reign at the present. The ethnographic study conducted in Gazi district of Istanbul reveals also a new phase in the inhabitants’ social and political imaginaries about “degeneration.” The persistence of illegal and criminal forms notwithstanding, the focus of this paper is specifically on the different discourses of degeneration that the inhabitants of Gazi produce to assess the current practices of radical leftist groups, and the neoliberal sources or attributes of such discourses and practices. What is striking at the current moment is the way in which the sovereign acts of the radical leftist groups, which were once celebrated and considered morally and politically acceptable and legitimate despite their unlawfulness, are now claimed to exist in a close proximity to privatized forms of criminality and illegality. The paper argues that particular appropriations of the discourse of degeneration indicate not only the extent of ongoing negotiations and contestations for acquiring legitimacy in the urban margins, but equally importantly, a new lexicon that the inhabitants employ to cope with ramifications of neo-liberal discourses, technologies and insecurities directed toward these margins.

The term “Reasonable suspicion” sets some kind of “zone of indistinction” within the law for supposedly delineating the legal standard procedures of arrest and warrants. As it is well known, “reasonable suspicion” has no binding force compared to “probable cause” which gives an officer or agent clear grounds to keep someone in custody, to conduct any type of check, or to secure a warrant. Although in training material of police and in legal scripture it is coded that for reasonable suspicion there should be “specific and articulable facts”, we know the definition and content of these specific and articulable facts is ambiguous and may change. Especially in the neo-liberal era it is almost impossible to notice how “reasonable suspicion” is utilized against subjects considered “dangerous” in Turkey. These subjects may be Kurdish youth, members of left-wing circles, and/or unexpectedly protesters of any kind. Just the suspicion of a protest has made the arbitrary arrests and/or harassment of citizens into norm. The one definite aim of this is to make people obedient and let them conceive the clear and present dangers of protesting when they stand up for better life conditions and freedom. This paper will first analyze the theoretical grounds of “reasonable suspicion” in the Turkish case at a legal and theoretical level by relating it to neoliberal securitization discourse. Second, it will use concrete examples such as lynch attempts, profuse use of tear gas and severe beatings in peaceful protests, harassment of “unwanted” minorities in urban sprawl, among others. And third, it will show how the legitimization of these practices under the term of “reasonable suspicion” to suppress the scars of the repressed citizen.