Lecture
“We’re tired of this Weber guy!” – Police Reforms and the Violence of Standardization
- Date
- Wednesday 15 October 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- B0.36
Bio:
Dr. Hayal Akarsu is an assistant professor of anthropology at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD from the University of Arizona and an MA from New York University. Her research examines how imaginations of risk and threat securitize and police social and natural life, from police reforms to digital policing and environmental crimes. Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropology Today, and Society and Space, among others. She serves as associate editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). Dr. Akarsu is currently president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and a member of the EASA Working Group on Human Rights and Academic Freedom.
Abstract:
Since the mid-2000s, the use-of-force continuum—a global standard for providing law enforcement with guidelines on the proportionate use of force—has been central in Turkish police training and reporting practices. Liberal police accountability tools, like the use-of-force continuum, rely on standardization to prevent police violence. Yet these techniques still result in maimed bodies and psyches and police impunity. Rather than taking the standardization of police force simply as a failed project, a sham, or a mere techno-fix, I examine how powerful actors like police align with such standards and how they start thinking and acting through them while repurposing them. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 among the Turkish National Police, I show how the transnational standardization of police force has in fact enabled police in Turkey to redefine and ultimately reclaim the violence they are professionalized in as what I call “force experts.” Force defies standardization in both theory and practice; however, what sanctions police violence now is not just technical standardization but the expert framing of the democratically reformed police force. This is the violence of standardization, especially in contexts where governments retool reforms to criminalize suspect Others whom they perceive as a “threat” to their rule.