Policing and Police Reform in Turkey since 1980: Regime Transitions and Policing Transformations

Extant scholarship examining how political transitions affect policing have suggested that police forces in transitional states continue to be characterized by repressive and predatory practices, and have primarily investigated the causes of such continuities. Drawing on a case study of the endurance of authoritarian police practices following the transition from military to civilian rule in Turkey in 1983, I argue that the scholarly literature has largely neglected the role of mixed regimes and incomplete transitions in influencing the course of police reform in democratic transitions. The dissertation also analyzes how Turkish policing has responded to successive political transformations, including the end of tutelary democracy (accompanied by emerging competitive authoritarianism), and over the last decade the consolidating authoritarian rule of the AKP (Justice and Development Party).This study brings to light how the police, an institution that is generally treated as subordinated to regime leaders, can pursue an independent policy agenda that can sometimes include a reformist element. Thus, in Turkey, reform-minded officials within the police pursued substantive democratic transformations in policing in exchange for their cooperation with the AKP government’s attempts to delegitimize the political role of the military, even in the face of the AKP’s ‘authoritarian turn’ after 2006. This experience demonstrates how the police themselves can be instruments of democratic change in policing through their degree of independence from political leaders due to their control over coercion or can sometimes exhibit greater loyalty to democratic principles than the governments they serve. My findings also demonstrate how the police can shape regime transitions, a question that neither policing scholars nor political scientists have fully explored, by revealing how policing has catalyzed Turkey’s authoritarian transformation over the last 15 years. My analysis of the AKP’s reassessment of the source of threats to its survival and its response to that changed assessment resulting in different changes to policing during the authoritarian transformation in the country also represents a contribution to the (mostly criminology) policing literature by applying insights from the political science scholarship on coercive institutions in autocracies, which theorizes how authoritarian leaders organize their coercive institutions to remain in power.

Department dc:contributor.department

Criminology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• San, Serdar

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Light, Matthew A.

• AKP
• Authoritarianism
• Policing
• Political Transitions
• Turkey
• Turkish National Police

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/130581

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/130581