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Zeynep Gönen, The Politics of Crime in Turkey: Neoliberalism, Police and the Urban Poor

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorKıvanç Atak
Published date01 December 2018
Date01 December 2018
DOI10.1177/1462474517692187
Subject MatterBook reviews
SG-PUNJ170030 539..561 648
Punishment & Society 20(5)
empathy and direct, personal contact, and are sometimes able to develop as
humans despite treatment by the state that is intentionally inhumane.
Ben Crewe
Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, England
Zeynep Go¨nen, The Politics of Crime in Turkey: Neoliberalism, Police and the Urban Poor, I.B. Tauris,
London & New York, 2016; 272 pp. (including index): 9781784535438, £65 (Hardback)
The expansion of the penal state under the neoliberal social order has particular
implications for the policing of socially outcast populations. Scholarly inquiry into
this question encourages critical thinking in criminology and sociology of punish-
ment but thus far has largely concentrated on urban settings in advanced capitalist
countries. Zeynep Go¨nen’s The Politics of Crime in Turkey is a timely contribution
to the literature with deep insights from ‘‘a semi-peripheral state that historically
relied heavily on authoritarian techniques of control’’ (p. 7). Go¨nen carves out an
exceptionally rare ethnographic study of the policing of common crimes in Turkey.
Synthesizing Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives on crime and policing, the
book sheds light on the transformation of public order policing in the mid-2000s
along the lines of a ‘‘zero-tolerance’’ approach in Izmir, the third most populous
city in the west coast of the country. The author of‌fers a grounded analysis of the
processes that foster the criminalization of racialized poverty, represented by the
impoverished Kurdish residents, by means of an aggressive policing which tar-
gets ‘‘theft, mugging, vandalism, drugs, among a host of misdemeanors and felo-
nies’’ (p. 3).
The book begins with the theoretical premise that the politics of crime is essen-
tial to the reproduction of social hierarchies and, more specif‌ically, class domin-
ation. In view of this premise, Go¨nen embraces the intellectual tradition of Loı¨c
Wacquant, Stuart Hall, Didier Fassin and others who problematize the...

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