City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-11-15DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12502
Xuyi Zhao
{"title":"A timespace of zero-COVID in Southwest China: Building community, governing time","authors":"Xuyi Zhao","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12502","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, I take the organization of universal COVID testing as a point of departure for understanding the lived experiences of China's zero-COVID policy and look at “the Community” (<i>shequ</i>) as a dynamic interface between the state and urban residents during the liminal time of a global pandemic. Drawing on Bryant and Knight's notion of “vernacular timespace” (2019), I analyze the timespace of zero-COVID as a state-regulated future orientation interwoven with collective anticipation of crisis, bureaucratic temporal governance, and contestations over time as a form of agency in everyday life. Instead of assuming a unitary form of present-future relationship that was homogeneous and unchallenged, I argue that the collective anticipation of a public health crisis was constantly shaped, managed, and contested throughout the processes of pandemic community building. This research hopes to enrich reflections on the interplays of time, power, and legitimacy in post-pandemic urban governance.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"160-170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-11-13DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12501
Samuel Shearer
{"title":"“This place is fake:” green capitalism and the production of scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda","authors":"Samuel Shearer","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12501","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is about green capitalism, demolition, and the production of housing scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda. It follows Kiyovu cy'abakene—a real place that was near zero-carbon, built with renewable resources, owned and operated by Kigali residents—as it was first reimagined as a rhetorical “slum” and then converted into an actual one by force. And it follows the design and construction of Batsinda Housing estate, a sustainable solution to a fictional “crisis” of inadequate housing in Kigali. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I argue that in Kigali, and many cities like it, the destruction of built environments is not only about local elites who wish to demolish “slums” or “informal settlements” to build “world-class” luxury cities. The demolition of neighborhoods and the displacement of people who live there is also done in the service of making new markets for green commodities through the production of scarcity. To manufacture effective demand for green commodities while maintaining their monopoly over what constitutes “sustainable,” Kigali's international teams of managers and consultants must render alternative, ecologically sound, African-owned neighborhoods and building technologies “unsustainable.”</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"146-159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-11-08DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12499
Deniz Yonucu
{"title":"Police ethnography, abolition, Rancière and political theology","authors":"Deniz Yonucu","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12499","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I want to express my gratitude to Caroline Parker, Jeffrey Martin, Michael Farquhar, and Stefano Portelli for taking the time to read and engage with my work. Their thought-provoking comments will stay with me as I continue to write and reflect on topics related to the anthropology of policing, the ethical and methodological challenges posed by police ethnographies, world-building and abolitionist practices among the oppressed, and the role of the spectral in resistance. I am delighted to learn that my analysis of policing and resistance resonates with urban contexts in Latin America, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. Although there is growing literature on the global nature of policing (Bradford et al., <span>2016</span>; Go, <span>2023</span>; Machold, <span>2024</span>; Schrader, <span>2019</span>), I believe there is a need for comprehensive global comparative ethnographies that explore both policing and abolitionist practices. I sincerely hope that <i>Police, Provocation, Politics</i> will contribute to fostering a comparative anthropological dialogue on policing which is not limited to the police institution and on world-building resistance practices rooted in long histories of defiance across both the Global North and South. In this limited space, I will concentrate on three key points highlighted by the reviewers in their insightful questions and comments: (a) the methodological implications of decentring the police as ethnographic protagonists; (b) the potentials and limitations of the Rancièrian perspective in anthropological approaches to policing; and (c) the martyr and the political theology of resistance.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"141-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.12499","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142860635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-09-19DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12497
Jeffrey T. Martin
{"title":"Revolution, counterinsurgency, and the new ethnography of policing","authors":"Jeffrey T. Martin","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12497","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The 2020s brought a paradigm shift to academic work on policing. Abolitionist, decolonizing, and other critical/political movements built up enough pressure to crack open the settled framework which had integrated earlier literature into an insular debate. A new search for the proper focus of collective discussion is now well underway. Where this process will ultimately arrive—an emergent “new paradigm”—is not yet clear, but Deniz Yonucu's award winning monograph <i>Police, Provocation, Politics</i> (2022, Cornell University Press) supplies an excellent example of one direction in which we should be looking. The book exemplifies a rising tendency within the new policing studies to embrace methods of anthropological ethnography and explore worlds beyond the Anglo-American horizons of the older Anglophone canon. Yonucu examines policing in Istanbul, as displayed around the Gezi Park Uprising of 2013. She contextualizes this signal event within a wide-ranging ethnographic and historical discussion of political tensions and governmental strategies which shaped the mode of policing it revealed. Theoretically, her analysis is organized by reference to a conceptual opposition proposed by the philosopher Jacques Rancière, in which “policing” and “politics” are treated as categories defined by their polar opposition. The mode of policing documented in the book is, by this analysis, a means of counterinsurgency organized as “provocative counterorganization.” This term of art names a strategy of targeting a local community's political resources for autonomous self-governance. By destroying the local institutions which sustain social tolerance and enable the creative working-through of problems (i.e., Rancière's “politics”), counterinsurgency creates a situation in which monopolistic violence (i.e., Rancière's “policing”) becomes the only resource available to deal with the resulting chaos. Yonucu's analysis is compelling, illustrating Rancière's abstract distinction in rich ethnographic detail while showing the many ways that this theoretical binary helps us to make sense of the broader ethnographic and historical qualities of life in 21st-century Istanbul.</p><p>As my contribution to this forum, I would like to address the Rancièrean framework Yonucu puts to such effective use. How does Rancière's idiosyncratic definition of “policing” fit into the ongoing paradigm shift in policing studies? What is to be gained—and what might be lost—if we define the category of “policing” as <i>anti-political</i>? Just as the many insightful contributions of Yonucu's book showcase the positive affordances of Rancière's framework, perhaps attention to some of its silences and omissions can help us reflect on what it occludes. For example, the book contains little information about how the political constitution of the Turkish state structures its police bureaucracy, about the division of powers between centralized and localized administrative bodies, about the municipa","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"136-138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.12497","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-09-17DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12496
Caroline M. Parker
{"title":"Provocation and urban disorder","authors":"Caroline M. Parker","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12496","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.12496","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <i>Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul</i>, Deniz Yonucu examines state security and policing practices in the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of “Devrimova” (a pseudonym), home to Turkish and Kurdish Alevis, many of whom are active in leftist and socialist groups. Simmering violence and shootings in Devrimova and similar working-class neighborhoods, occasionally erupting as in Gezi in 2013, is often blamed on “criminal gangs,” “Alevi anger” or Alevi-Sunni sectarian tensions (pp. 72–77). Without downplaying Turkey's deep ethnosectarian and ethnonationalist divisions, Yonucu argues that an underappreciated dimension of Istanbul's urban disorder is <i>counterinsurgency</i>. This refers to police-instigated violence that is covert, designed to provoke counter-violence, and whose ultimate purpose is to undermine leftist solidarity. Refined by British and US intelligence units over the course of the Cold War, these strategies are referred to by the author as “provocative counterorganzation” (p. 72). According to Yonucu, they constitute a cornerstone tactic in contemporary urban policing, which does not seek to straightforwardly <i>maintain order</i> but to “produce manageable conflict” (p. 113) and, in so doing, keep would-be revolutionaries busy with ongoing problems of insecurity.</p><p>The central claim that police provocateurs covertly inflict and incite violence might shock some readers. However, those familiar with British security tactics in Belfast during the Troubles, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) actions against the Black Panthers, or White South African policing during the anti-Apartheid movement (see Haysom, <span>1989</span>; Marx, <span>1974</span>; Sluka, <span>2000</span>, all cited in Yonucu, <span>2022</span>) will recognize this argument. What truly astonishes is Yonucu's skill in executing such a project. Throughout the book, many of her acquaintances are unjustly arrested, often on fabricated terrorism charges, with numerous activists forced to flee the country or endure police violence or imprisonment. Raised in Istanbul, Yonucu is keenly aware of the dangers her research poses to herself and her interlocutors. Her creative work-arounds are praiseworthy and, since her argument holds in other places where policing blurs lines between legitimate and illegitimate authority, her methods offer useful signposts for contemporary policing studies.</p><p>Rather than interviewing or observing police directly, Yonucu first traces policing strategies through archival research. She draws on memoirs of state security officers, writings of high-ranking security officials, and records from the Turkish National Assembly's discussions on counterinsurgency during the Cold War. The historical evidence is compelling. At the height of left-wing mobilization in the 1970s, to name one example, the commander of the Special Warfare Department wrote a high-profile article intended only for military reader","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"134-135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.12496","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142255738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-08-12DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12494
Christopher Sheklian
{"title":"Stational liturgy and the minority right to the city","authors":"Christopher Sheklian","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12494","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Armenian Apostolic Christians in Istanbul implicitly assert their “right to the city” through the liturgical itinerary that moves around the megalopolis of Istanbul. Though the right to the city has been taken up in a plethora of ways, its applicability to religion and religious practices is underexplored. While many Armenians in the Republic of Turkey explicitly take up the language of rights, the urban liturgical movements described in this article do not sit easily with either ideas of universal human rights or the minority rights framework operative in the Republic of Turkey. The concept of the right to the city, which already sits at the limits of conventional notions of rights, helps articulate how these religious practices claim an urban minority presence. By considering Armenian Christian liturgical practice in Istanbul simultaneously as “stational liturgy” and as a claim to the “right to the city,” this article offers an ethnographic account of urban minority presence-making that encounters the legal strictures of rights discourse without being fully enmeshed in them. In so doing, the article uses the ethnography to make a broader argument about the limits of rights discourse to account fully for forms of presence-making that are grounded in minority traditions.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 2","pages":"116-128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142045149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-07-13DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12493
Cansu Civelek
{"title":"The formation of a “model city in the Anatolian steppes”: Leapfrogging effects of spatial fix in Eskişehir, Turkey","authors":"Cansu Civelek","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12493","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.12493","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The prevalence of neoliberalism has produced varied effects on cities ranging from rapid growth to gradual disempowerment. Instead of considering neoliberal urbanization as a fixed, predetermined process, I discuss the possibility of leapfrogging in urban repositioning. Particularly, I examine Eskişehir's repositioning process in response to disempowerment, placing particular emphasis on the “spatial fix.” Rather than being passive recipients of neoliberalization, local ruling elites might develop political agency to not only counter but also capitalize on disempowerment. To overcome financial and political constraints vital for the spatial fix, Eskişehir's mayor leveraged multiscalar networking strategies and symbolic revitalizations at particular historical conjunctures. Accordingly, Eskişehir's municipality, ruled by the center-left opposition party, sought to redefine the city as a stronghold of secularism with the claims of Europeanization and modernization. They introduced the “Eskişehir model” as a contrasting narrative to the ruling AKP's urban vision rooted in Islamist-nationalist agenda. These mechanisms reveal that ideological-political clashes at the national level can serve as windows of opportunity for local ruling elites to counter disempowerment. As the ethnographic research shows, these mechanisms had leapfrogging effects not only on repositioning and fostering political power but also dissembling existing inequalities, disparities, and segregation beneath the celebrated Eskişehir model.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 2","pages":"102-115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.12493","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141612461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}