Caglar Dolek is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Law and Legal Studies in Carleton University to undertake research for his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Professor George S. Rigakos for a period of ten months. His PhD research is concerned with the historical formation of the police organization as a constitutive, albeit contested, facet of the social marginalization of the urban poor in Turkey. His broader research interests include the critique of political economy, state theory and the historical anthropology of the state, law and policing.
Dolek will be presenting at the upcoming Departmental Colloquium. His paper is entitled “Historical Formation of the Police in the Processes of Social Marginalization: The Case of Altındağ-Ankara, Turkey“.
His PhD research project problematizes dialectical articulation of police formation with social marginalization of the urban poor in Turkey. This research is based on extensive multi-method fieldwork conducted in Altındağ district, which is a region historically known for its shantytowns “harbouring the dangerous classes” or being “the place of danger, drugs and crime” in Ankara, the capital city of the country. Employing historical-anthropological methodology to the study of formations of police and social marginality, Dolek intends to make sense of the three central dynamics of bourgeois police project in Turkey: i) struggles over urban space, ii) struggles over the forms of labouring, and iii) struggles over publicness of organization of security itself. On the basis of the systematic analysis of the fieldwork, it will be contended that these three distinct, but dialectically articulated, forms of struggle historically condition the class character as well as institutionally materialized form of bourgeois police, which in turn has a constitutive presence in the socio-spatial marginalization of the urban poor in Ankara, Turkey.