Project title
Force experts: afterlives of police reforms in Turkey
Research question
What do police do with reform, and what does reform do to police and the public.
Project description
In Force Experts, Hayal Akarsu examines the persistence of police violence despite global efforts at reform, including investments in community policing, democratic training, and non-lethal technologies. Based on 18 months of fieldwork funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2015–2017), Akarsu explores why such reforms have failed to curb abuse and instead argues that they provide regimes with new toolkits to extend power, manufacture legal impunity, and garner support.
Focusing on the Turkish police, Akarsu shows how officers adopt transnational reform standards to redefine violence as professional expertise—becoming what she terms “force experts.” Rather than functioning outside security systems, reform itself operates as a security technology, producing new forms of governmental power that reshape everyday experiences of policing and control.
Her ethnographic research follows police academy trainees, tracks reform networks across Ankara, London, and Belfast, and accompanies police officers in community settings. Force Experts brings together the anthropology of expertise and techno-political governance with scholarship on power and violence, offering critical insight into the workings of populist authoritarianism and contributing to broader debates in security studies.
Selected publications
- Akarsu, Hayal. 2024. “‘We’re tired of this Weber guy!” – Force experts, police reforms, and the violence of standardization.” American Anthropologist 127: 5-19.
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28028 - Akarsu, Hayal. 2020. “Citizen Forces: The Politics of Community Policing in Turkey.” American Ethnologist 47 (1): 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12879.
- Akarsu, Hayal. 2018. “Proportioning Violence: Ethnographic Notes on the Contingencies of Police Reform.” Anthropology Today. 34(1): 11-14.
More about myself
About the image below
An artist’s rendering of a poster distributed in 2015 by the Turkish National Police. Promoting the idea of citizen police, this and other posters like it featured photos of police men and women shown as half officer, half ordinary citizen. In this case, a policeman is half-dressed in the clothes of a breadwinning father, carrying the groceries home. The original posters featured the logo of the Turkish police at the bottom left and the heading “170 yıldır sizden biri” ([We have been] one of you for 170 years), referring to Turkey’s first police force, organized in 1845 under the Ottoman Empire.
