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Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey
Human rights are politically fraught in Turkey, provoking suspicion and scrutiny among government workers for their anti-establishment left-wing connotations. Nevertheless, with eyes worldwide trained on Turkish politics, and with accession to the European Union underway, Turkey's human rights record remains a key indicator of its governmental legitimacy. Bureaucratic Intimacies shows how government workers encounter human rights rhetoric through training programs and articulates the perils and promises of these encounters for the subjects and objects of Turkish governance.
Drawing on years of participant observation in programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare workers, and prison personnel, Elif M. Babul argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. In casting rights as requirements for expertise and professionalism, training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do, not necessarily to liberal, transparent, and accountable governmental practices. And even as translation renders human rights relevant for the everyday practices of government workers, it ultimately comes at a cost to the politics of human rights in Turkey.
Drawing on years of participant observation in programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare workers, and prison personnel, Elif M. Babul argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. In casting rights as requirements for expertise and professionalism, training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do, not necessarily to liberal, transparent, and accountable governmental practices. And even as translation renders human rights relevant for the everyday practices of government workers, it ultimately comes at a cost to the politics of human rights in Turkey.
- GenresAnthropologyMiddle East
248 pages, Hardcover
Published October 3, 2017
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November 7, 2019
Bureaucratic Intimacies is a gripping ethnography of the process of translation of human rights in Turkey. Building on seven years of ethnographic observation of various human rights trainings for governmental officials, Babul show how the idea of human rights is divorced from supposedly radical ideas behind it and is made synonymous with “good governance” in order for governmental workers to find the concept of human rights less objectionable.
The first two chapters offer a more historical account, outlining the history of Turkey’s relationship with the EU since 1987 and providing context on the governmental workers’ position in Turkish society. Babul carefully explains the reader how the bureaucratic field in Turkey is set up and how this distinction of governmental workers from “ordinary people” becomes an important aspect during the training programs.
The second part of the book draws on Babul’s data from human rights trainings. She explains pedagogical settings of the trainings and various adult-learning strategies that were used by the trainers. Looking at the organization of the classroom and pedagogical methods, she argues that these educational activities, though aiming to inculcate the workers with respect to human rights by creating a special consciousness, often failed to achieve the desired goal because they didn’t really challenge established hierarchies and sensitivities. Babul then zooms in on the issue of translation and the question of performance of the state by looking at the limits of the sayable and unsayable during the trainings and the ways that governmental workers used cynicism and parody to talk back to the harmonization process.
Babul concludes the book by reconciling the idea of state as a decentralized entity with the question of the origin of state violence: she argues that human rights training programs in Turkey, though attempting to create a community of people who share the values embedded in human rights, create instead a community of “insiders” who share bureaucratic intimacies and secrets. According to Babul, sharing of this “insider” secrets, then, “breeds a certain form of shamelessness that renders the previously embarrassing events openly sayable” (p.181).
The first two chapters offer a more historical account, outlining the history of Turkey’s relationship with the EU since 1987 and providing context on the governmental workers’ position in Turkish society. Babul carefully explains the reader how the bureaucratic field in Turkey is set up and how this distinction of governmental workers from “ordinary people” becomes an important aspect during the training programs.
The second part of the book draws on Babul’s data from human rights trainings. She explains pedagogical settings of the trainings and various adult-learning strategies that were used by the trainers. Looking at the organization of the classroom and pedagogical methods, she argues that these educational activities, though aiming to inculcate the workers with respect to human rights by creating a special consciousness, often failed to achieve the desired goal because they didn’t really challenge established hierarchies and sensitivities. Babul then zooms in on the issue of translation and the question of performance of the state by looking at the limits of the sayable and unsayable during the trainings and the ways that governmental workers used cynicism and parody to talk back to the harmonization process.
Babul concludes the book by reconciling the idea of state as a decentralized entity with the question of the origin of state violence: she argues that human rights training programs in Turkey, though attempting to create a community of people who share the values embedded in human rights, create instead a community of “insiders” who share bureaucratic intimacies and secrets. According to Babul, sharing of this “insider” secrets, then, “breeds a certain form of shamelessness that renders the previously embarrassing events openly sayable” (p.181).
Displaying 1 of 1 review