The propagation impact of protest cycles: The POL DER experience in Turkey during the seventies

This study analyzes a historical attempt to organize the police officers in the seventies around an association called Pol Der short for Polis Derneği (Association of Police Officers) and its relationship to contemporary political tendencies. The study aims to contextualize the Pol Der experience through investigation of the connection between state and coercion, reviewing the different manifestation of this link and explaining the ambivalent role of the police in the public space. The relationship between the policing function and social mobilization in the public space is generally contentious, the police force that was made up of citizens usually act to the benefit of the state and the ruling class because of the material conditions. The main topic of study is the relationship between the monopoly of violence and its immediate functionaries. Security, order, acceptable and non-acceptable, regulation of urban space and popular demands, labor regimes, all of these concepts when studied through the lens of state theory necessitate the involvement of the analysis of the policing functions in order to better understand them. Because of the object of the study is a police organization from the seventies, the development of the police force is studied from the late Ottoman era onwards and the periodic transformation of the policing functions is analyzed in relation to contemporary political divides and the prevailing raison d'état. Moreover, the continuities in the policing function is also underlined throughout its enlargement and contraction according to the periodical necessities of the state's coercion and search for political legitimacy. The Pol Der experience emerging from social politicization and turbulent social context is worthy of study since it represents a police organization that opts to take sides with the general public in its implicit or explicit contentious relationship with the state authority and Pol Der also openly campaigned for this political position. On the basis on this study, answers were sought to questions such as the political possibilities of the situation that emerged when the police, who were appointed as the representative of the state in the public sphere to maintain the order, entered into a conflictual relationship with that very order, or the social and political dynamics that triggered the rise of these possibilities. Lastly, the contemporary organizational prospect of the police also investigated based on the earlier experience of Pol Der. Keywords:Policing, security, order, force, social movements, public area