Hayal Akarsu's book manuscript, Force Experts: Afterlives of Police Reforms in Turkey, analyzes how European-Union inspired police reforms are interwoven with authoritarian governance in Turkey as human-rights violations by the police once again bring police reform to the global spotlight. Based on 18 months of Wenner-Gren Foundation funded fieldwork (between 2015-2017) on so-called non-violent tools and practices of police reforms, she traces what police do with reform and what reform does to police and the public, if not preventing violence. Her fieldwork included following one cohort of Police Academy trainees over a year; participating in international standardization and good governance projects in Ankara, Istanbul, London and Belfast; and accompanying police in local police stations while interacting with communities in neighborhoods of Ankara and Istanbul. Rather than addressing police reforms as a matter of success or failure, her work analyzes the kind of subjectivities and socialities brought forth by such reform efforts among both police and the public.

Alongside this book, the project has been producing a series of publications. An article in American Ethnologist explores how reforms fostered a new type of citizen-police subject, what Akarsu calls citizen forces, inflicting state-sponsored vigilante violence on marginalized and racialized Others, such as political dissidents, Kurdish migrants, and Syrian refugees. In another article in Anthropology Today, Akarsu discusses how security and policing policies with seemingly liberal genealogies can coexist with authoritarian modalities of government – precisely what these reforms had aimed to restrain. A third article, which Akarsu is revising for resubmission to American Anthropologist, examines how police reform policies are incorporated into policing practice and cultures by rendering violence technical and calculable, while also allowing it to be seen increasingly as a legitimate part of police work. Akarsu was recently awarded Rice University’s prestigious Chair’s Lecture Prize, and will present this work in October 2021 in the Department of Anthropology at Rice.

Akarsu’s commitment to interdisciplinary and cross-regional collaborations has also resulted in several other publications and writing projects, which seek to reorient the Euro-American focus of much police and security research. An essay in Society & Space discusses topologies of policing and disproportionate distribution of state care and violence in society, and is part of an invited special issue on Police Geographies. Another piece in Exertions explores what constitutes digital rights and discusses the effect of digital technologies on police work, and is part of an invited special issue on Police Labor. With a similar commitment to cross-regional methodological conversations, Akarsu is also co-editing a special issue (under preparation), which gathers scholars working on elites, white-supremacists, military and police in contexts like South Africa, Kenya, Germany, India and the US, discussing ethnographies of policing, military, and “repugnant others.” In rendering her research more accessible to wider audiences, Akarsu has also written pieces for Brandeis University’s Middle East Brief series, foregrounding the human costs of abstract security projects being tried out in the Middle East.

Akarsu’s next book-length project on green criminology builds on her interest in the everyday effects of the global politics of rights, policing, and security, while moving into more environmental issues. With an EU-accession chapter on environmental governance open since 2009, Turkey has been reformatting its laws and regulations about environmental crimes for more than a decade. Such synchronization attempts between European and Turkish legal regimes have also opened up green criminology as an idiom through which environmental justice groups articulate and press their claims against state and corporate dispossession. This project will offer unique insights for environmental studies by putting it into conversation with political and legal anthropology. By doing so, the project will show how specific legal procedures and practices can rework the political and moral legitimacy of environmental rights.

Overall, Akarsu’s research projects on police reforms, security and environmental governance employ ethnographic methods to understand how such reforms travel across different scales, from international negotiations to national bureaucracies to neighborhood organizations, showing how transnational flows and governance are imbricated with culture and power.