Private Security Work in Turkey: A Case Study of Precarity,Militarism and Alienation

Abstract

With one of the largest and fastest growing private security sectors in the greater EU area, Turkey offers an interesting case study for examining the effects of neoliberal policing on private security labour. The analysis is based on unstructured interviews (N = 20) with private security guards, media reports and government documents. Focusing on (1) precarity, (2) militarism and (3) alienation, we find that while private security has been decisive in the militarization of urban space and the exercise of authoritarian control in daily social relations, it is also characterized by class contradictions manifested in the lived experiences of security labour. The growth of Turkish private security and its effects are both part of the common extension of pacification yet uniquely conditioned by the emergence of a single-party, authoritarian regime that has deliberately extended its reach, in part, through the expansion of private security.

Keywords

alienation class experience militarism neoliberalism pacification precarity private security Turkey

Introduction

All indications are that the political regime in Turkey has increasingly consolidated itself under a much more authoritarian system of control. In the process, this has exposed the inherently repressive nature of neoliberal capitalism as evidenced in the hegemony of the ‘free market’ and the concomitant rise of the ‘authoritarian state’ in both countries of the Global South (Saad-Filho and Yalman, 2009; Springer, 2010; Wacquant, 2008) and North (Albo and Fanelli, 2014; Boukalas, 2008; Giroux, 2006; Parenti, 1999). In the Turkish case, neoliberalism was linked to authoritarianism at its inception, following a violent coup in 1980 that radically transformed the political sphere and state apparatus along the lines of repressive class politics (Ozan, 2012; Yalman, 2009). During the 1990s the country underwent a prolonged period of crisis that included the paralysis of parliamentary democracy, the insurgent rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) and urban rioting (Onder, 1998; Ongen, 2002). In the 1990s Turkey was characterized as a fragile peripheral economy suffering from poor integration with international finance and global capitalism. Embarking on a successful campaign of restoration in the early 2000s, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) has managed to rule the country for about two decades with demonstrable early success in both electoral politics and global economic relations. Initially celebrated as a success story for democratization by international actors such as EU, NATO and UN, the country was lauded for its smooth integration of an Islamic society into the global capitalist system. But in the last decade, the AKP’s lustre has rapidly begun to fade as the international community has increasingly denounced President Erdogan for his authoritarian rule – including violations of fundamental rights and freedoms; a crackdown on dissident academics, journalists, human rights activists and broader civil society organizations; the violent suppression of political and social organizations of the Kurdish movement, as well as other progressive organizations. A failed coup attempt in July 2016 provided the government with a significant opportunity to accelerate its campaign of repression.¹ The AKP’s electoral victory in June 2018 has further dampened any hope of change to the political regime (for a critical analysis of the contradictory social and political conditions of this electoral victory, see Karaagac, 2018).

Turkey’s authoritarian renewal, therefore, has deep historical roots reflecting the inherently authoritarian nature of neoliberalism and the contested socio-political dynamics prevalent in that country. Having been reinforced by the recent regional and global rise of extremism and far-right politics (Hayes, 2014; Papanicolaou and Papageorgiou, 2013), Turkey’s neoliberal experience represents a paradigmatic case study for the gradual consolidation of an authoritarian regime. As a recent wave of critical analyses points out, the transformation of state coercion has played a critical role in the formation of neoliberal-cum-Islamic authoritarianism in Turkey (Akca et al., 2014; Bedirhanoglu et al., 2016; Berksoy, 2010, 2013; Cosar and Yucesan-Ozdemir, 2012; Gonen, 2016; Gonen and Yonucu, 2011; Hulagu, 2017). Largely reflecting global processes of neoliberal restructuring, these developments have materialized within the socio-historical peculiarities and struggles in the country.

As one of the defining characteristics of neoliberal policing, therefore, private security has (re)emerged (Dolek, 2015) as a particularly favoured form of everyday policing. Reflecting global pressures toward the reassertion of commodification and privatization (Harvey, 2006; Johnston, 1992; Loader, 1999; Rigakos, 2002; Spitzer, 1987), Turkey’s experience with private security is especially revealing as it has reproduced everyday authoritarianism along explicit class lines. The country’s private security services have become a veritable urban army, formed out of the labouring masses, who are being exposed to twin processes of precarization and authoritarian labour management. This relatively untold story of private security can provide us with insights into the social conditions of rising authoritarianism in Turkey and the class contradictions manifested therein.

The central aim of this exploratory study is to critically interrogate the contradictory and contested class relations underlying the organization of private security labour in Turkey. We examine the structural exposure of the urban poor to the precarious labour market, which is also characterized by the authoritarian organization of labour management strategies that crystallized in the historical formation of the sector. Our analysis is mainly derived from lived experiences of security guards in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, and suggests that the proliferation of private security has widened the likelihood of daily and arbitrary violence, increasingly delivered with impunity, and that this violence has become a defining feature of the general policing project assertively undertaken by the AKP.

Private Security Work under Turkish Neoliberalism

The history of private policing pre-dates the formation of centralized, state-sponsored police in the modern Anglo-American system (Emsley, 1987, 1999; Rigakos et al., 2009). While state policing formations and notions of police science were well entrenched in continental Europe, these public forms were eventually met with competition from private policing agencies (Button, 2007; Johnston, 1992; Rigakos, 2000; Shearing and Stenning, 1983). Today, it is a well understood empirical reality that the private sector outnumbers the public police sector in almost all capitalist economies (de Waard, 1999; Jones and Newburn, 1995; Rigakos and Ergul, 2013; van Steden and Sarre, 2007). It is thus no surprise that the size of the private security sector has typically vacillated alongside developments in securing wage labour, extracting surplus value and enforcing class relations as evidenced through the strong correlation between economic inequality and total policing, both public and private, per population (Rigakos and Ergul, 2017). The increased concentration and inequitable distribution of wealth is now directly linked to the rise of private security (Rigakos and Ergul, 2011).

Neocleous (2011) has argued that policing is historically tied to the exploitation of land and resources – what Marxists refer to as ‘primitive accumulation’. Rigakos (2016) theorizes that there can be no pacification without dispossession, exploitation and the commodification of security systems under capitalism. The relative use and growth of public versus private policing has thus mutated depending on political and economic developments in given countries and time periods yet these developments are also tied to global economic changes ranging from colonial pacification projects (Saberi, 2017), to contemporary ‘police actions’ in occupied territories (Halper, 2015), to inner-city policing strategies (Rigakos, 2011). These policing practices are increasingly understood as inextricably connected to general pacification under capitalism.

In a contemporary context we can say that the current hegemony of security (Rigakos, 2016) under neoliberalism has played a significant role in entrenching capitalism’s natural compulsion toward the commodification of social order. Across Europe, for example, there is now ample evidence of the recrudescence of private security (Eick and Briken, 2014) under neoliberal policies since the 1980s. These neoliberal policies valorize competition, particularly international competition, and have directly resulted in the concentration of private security into ever-larger multinational firms (Rigakos, 2000). There is therefore a heightened ideological push toward the commodification of security on a global scale. These global effects of neoliberalism have similarly influenced the development and growth of private security in Turkey (Dolek, 2015).

The formation of the private security sector in Turkey has been a historical product of the country’s contradictory neoliberal transformation since the early 1980s. The fragile integration of Turkey into a neoliberal world order has produced a recurrent atmosphere of crisis. Functioning as ‘driving forces of neoliberalism’ (Yalman, 2016: 256), these crises have been instrumental in the deepening of proletarianization, dispossession and precarity of workers (Boratav et al., 2000; Senses and Koyuncu, 2007). As experienced in many countries of the Global South, the forceful imposition of structural adjustment programs and the subsequent consolidation of export-oriented accumulation regimes have produced an informalization and flexibilization of labour (Ozdemir and Yucesan-Ozdemir, 2004, 2006). Characterized by the strategic aim of ‘putting an end to class-based politics’ in the country (Yalman, 2009: 308), the neoliberal reform agenda was initially based on the twin policy of wage suppression and de-unionization through the authoritarian containment of labour since the early 1980s. The AKP period has also witnessed an advent of the flexibilization of labour through legal and institutional reform, particularly in labour law – an agenda that has been coupled with the dismantling of the already fragile social security regime in the county (Cosar and Yegenoglu, 2009; Elveren, 2008; Ozdemir and Yucesan-Ozdemir, 2008). Means-tested social assistance schemes have also been instrumental in fabricating the material conditions of consent to AKP-induced neoliberalism (Bozkurt, 2013). Scholars have noted that two decades of AKP rule have radically dismantled public provision, constitutionally guaranteed rights and benefits of labour in the country while at the same time subjecting all segments of the working class to the disciplining mechanism of market under finance capital.² A recent report by the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Union (Devrimci Isci Sendikalari Konfederasyonu, DISK, 2017) vividly demonstrates that the decades-long neoliberal reform process has had a devastating impact on the working classes in Turkey. According to the report, Turkey is among the worst OECD countries in terms of working hours, social insurance, unionization, social rights and other work-related conditions. As a matter of fact, reports prepared by the Assembly of Private Security Services, representing medium-scale companies coordinated by the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (Turkiye Odalar ve Borsalar Birligi, TOBB) help illustrate the generalized character of precarity within the context of the security sector. The 2012 and 2014 Sectoral Reports reflect TOBB’s reluctant need to acknowledge that the sector is characterized by low and non-standardized wages, high labor turnover, unregistered employment and unpaid overtime allowance (TOBB, 2012, 2014). Private security has thus grown alongside a period of unprecedented precarity, including the dismantling of welfare provisions and an associated rise in unemployment and temporary employment levels in the country.³

While collective rights were being undermined in the course of a neoliberal reform agenda throughout the 1990s and 2000s (Celik, 2015), Turkey simultaneously experienced the insurgent armed rise of the PKK and associated urban riots of poor gecekondu neighbourhoods (shantytowns) legitimating a more systematic use of militaristic policing practices (Balta-Paker, 2010; Ongen, 2002). In the midst of the period of crisis in the 1990s, private security was formed as an extra-legal and aggressive form of parapolicing (Dolek, 2015: 426–432). The nascent private security sector was formed and operated via a largely illicit power coalition composed of capitalists, public organizations and former members of state security institutions from the police, military and intelligence services, who played a major role in counter-insurgency operations (Dolek, 2015: 429). Turkish private security as a policing form has its recent roots in the context of both international geopolitical crises and maintaining domestic, urban social order.

What is often ignored in analyses of the authoritarian consolidation of the AKP as a party-state in the making among critical circles is that the private security sector has been a significant part of this broader neoliberal politics of police (Bedirhanoglu et al., 2016). Indeed, one of AKP’s initial moves was the Law on Private Security in 2004, which set about legally incorporating and sanctioning the extra-legal nature of the sector within established regulatory forms. This was a legislative reform very similar to that experienced in Russia and other former Eastern bloc countries (Volkov, 2002) that underwent the dual process of geopolitical and domestic instability coupled with the rise of a historically unprecedented concentration of wealth into the hands of a new and emboldened bourgeoisie. This assertive law-making strategy pursued by a coalition of state and capitalist groups in the early 2000s (Dolek, 2015: 432–435) meant a statistical boom in numbers of both security companies and security guards, making it one of the largest sectors in the greater EU area generating about USD $4 billion (CoeSS, 2017).

Two points deserve particular attention regarding the reorganization of the private security sector in accordance with the 2004 law in Turkey. Indeed, the law is an important expression of AKP’s historic success in deepening neoliberal reforms (Oguz, 2012; cf. Gill, 2002). First, the law established the legal and institutional mechanisms through which private security has been incorporated into broader neoliberal politics of police. Designed as an explicit part of the AKP’s police reform agenda (Bedirhanoglu et al., 2016), private security was envisaged as an additional security apparatus strictly supervised by the General Directorate of Security and provincial governorships. It was imagined with reference to neoliberal discourse on the dismantling of the public provision of goods. In this regard, Mustafa Gulcu, who was one of the agents engineering the law-making project as a former head of the Department of Research, Planning and Coordination at the General Directorate of Security, explicitly embraced the reform of private security along neoliberal lines:

The public services provided by the state resemble an umbrella that comprises the entire society. Each individual or institution benefits from these [services], in a sense they try to avoid the rain. However, if some under the umbrella want to wear additional rainproofing, which [offers more protection] than the one provided by the umbrella, they will do so. Yet, it is on the condition that they pay for the rainproof themselves [!] (Gulcu, 2002; emphasis added).

Accordingly, the organization of private security is offered explicitly along class lines.

Second, while the sector has witnessed a dramatic rise in security companies and employees, making it one of the most profitable sectors in the greater EU area, it has also largely served to reproduce illicit networks among corporate actors, public institutions and individual agencies that have been loyal to the AKP government. In an interview conducted in 2010, retired Staff Lieutenant Colonel Oryal Unver, who had been involved in the sector since the 1990s, described how this illicit network functioned as a vehicle for the appropriation of public resources in public procurement. Eligible companies in the procurement process were restricted, and when the contract was awarded additional subcontracting and kickbacks to government officials meant that contracts were underserviced and the surplus was split among AKP-loyal capitalists.⁴

While the formation of capital groups has been largely determined in and through tactics such as ‘seizing the tender’ in the sector, this has also had a decisive impact on the social composition of the labour force. For example, the Police Care and Donation Fund (Polis Yardim ve Bakim Sandigi, POLSAN) deserves particular attention among a large number of individual cases. Having a long history of providing police officers with financial support, POLSAN has experienced a dramatic transformation during the AKP years. It has become involved in many profitable sectors such as construction, software programming and insurance, as well as private security. In 2007, the establishment of POLSAN’s private security branch, Quantum, was explained by a senior police officer with reference to the need to keep retired public police personnel gainfully employed and outside the reach of criminal temptation:

When our retired personnel suffer from economic difficulties and don’t find jobs, they used to get involved in illegal affairs. Now, when they are retired, those friends willing to work will be able to work for the company [Quantum]. Retired police officers don’t have any problem with weapon training; they have their own guns as well; they have long years of experience. Therefore, retired police officers will work for this company. (Zaman Daily, 5 July 2007).⁵

We can therefore summarize the recent rise of the Turkish private security sector in two important yet familiar ways. First, as a particular function of a need to pacify the urban poor and by extension to incorporate them into a service-based, precarious labour pool. And second, as an interwoven set of agencies and personnel that are bound up with the fabrication and preservation of a new social order linked to a deep Turkish corporate, state and military security complex tied to the Erdogan regime.

In the first instance we can say that the private security sector has therefore become a major mechanism for the incorporation of the urban poor into the labour market and their simultaneous deployment as agents of everyday policing positioned against their fellow workers in urban space. This peculiar strategy of ‘policing the poor through the poor’ has been well suited to broader neoliberal politics of police concerning criminalization and stigmatization of urban poverty (see Eick, 2003; Gonen, 2016; Gonen and Yonucu, 2011). In the second instance there appears to be ample evidence in plain view of the connection between the current political regime (the AKP) and key players within the private security sector – a political strategy of building strong and politically loyal private policing organizations (Demir, 2016; Gokdemir, 2017; Uludag, 2015; Yigit, 2016). The party has exploited the post-coup atmosphere as an opportunity for further strengthen the control over the operation of the sector in line with its general policing project (Akca et al., 2018: 56).

SADAT Inc. is particularly illustrative of the international and domestic, military and civilian roles of private policing. SADAT Inc. presents itself as ‘the first and the only company in Turkey, that internationally provides consultancy and military training services at international defence and interior security sector’ (see sadat.com.tr). Founded by 23 retired military officers and sergeants in Istanbul under a brigadier general, the group presents its policy mission in lockstep with the foreign policy chauvinism of the Erdogan regime:

The Aim of SADAT A.S. is to establish a Defensive Collaboration and Defensive Industrial Cooperation among Islamic Countries to help Islamic World take the place where it merits among Super Powers by providing Consultancy and Training Services such as Strategic Consultancy and Training Services to Militaries and Homeland Security Forces of Islamic Countries [sic]. (SADAT, no date)

To further entrench the explicit embrace of the political agenda of the current government, the brigadier general, who founded this company, became the principal consultant to the President in 2016.⁶

These types of public versus private, foreign versus domestic or military versus police conflations are well-established practices of the fabrication of social order founded on the needs of capital accumulation and the support of authoritarianism (as per Neocleous and Rigakos, 2011) and need to be viewed with a critical eye in order to mount a comprehensive critique. At the same time, however, our goal in this article is to ensure that we take into account the everyday experiences of workers who fill the ranks of the private security sector in Ankara. We ought not to take for granted that the arrival of what is fast approaching a totalizing regime is not fraught with fissures and contradictions as evidenced in the lived experiences of security guards.

Method

The data presented in this article are based on in-depth interviews with 20 private security workers ranging in age from 25 to 36. All but two of the respondents were men. Respondents were selected through a snowball sampling process (Berg, 2001: 33) whereby guards would refer the researcher to others who might be interested in participating in the study or the researcher would approach workers and ask them for their participation. Some of the interviews were conducted on site if the respondent felt safe enough to have such a conversation during his/her work time. Others were conducted in public places like cafes or parks by appointment. The interviews were conducted in an unstructured manner allowing more room for the experiences of security guards and their individual life stories. The interviews would often take the shape of lengthy conversations ranging from 45 minutes to two hours with the average lasting one hour. The identity and workplace of each respondent was kept confidential for both political and academic reasons of research ethics. The names mentioned here are pseudonyms assigned to each security worker.⁷

The interviews and fieldwork were supported by a systematic review of: (a) news reports from national and local newspapers; (b) reports of public institutions, capital groups as well as trade unions; (c) public statements and media speeches of relevant figures in the sector; and (d) online forums that security guards often use to discuss their work-related frustrations and demands. The objective was to incorporate these different sources into an analysis of the rise of the private security sector and its relationship to the class experiences of security guards in Turkey. These additional sources provided linkages between the experiences of individual security guards in Ankara, the broader politics of neoliberal policing, and precarity and dispossession in the country.

In the remainder of this article we consider the effects of neoliberalism on private security workers in Ankara, Turkey, under three thematic areas: (1) precarity; (2) militarism; and (3) alienation.

Precarity

In July 2017 the independent parliamentarian Aylin Nazliaka applied to the General Directorate of Security under Turkey’s Right to Information Act for access to statistics on private security that had been made unavailable since 2014. The statistics released by the Directorate were quite extraordinary. The number of persons with private security certificates had surpassed 1 million; the number of persons with identification cards neared 700,000; and the number of persons thought to be currently employed in the sector was reported at about 300,000 (Gokdemir, 2017; Tartanoglu, 2017). These numbers point out a fundamental dynamic concerning the social composition of the labour force in Turkey: a considerable portion of the country’s workers has been incorporated into the private security sector under conditions of deepened precarity and social insecurity.

Labour incorporation into the security sector was originally materialized through ‘ad-hoc strategies’ of informal employment (Sonmez, 2011: 110), which has become a characteristic feature of neoliberal reforms in the country (Kus, 2014). Private security work has increasingly been presented as ‘a new hope for the unemployed youth’ in the country during a period of recurrent economic crisis and rising levels of unemployment (see Milliyet, 2010; T24, 2009; Yeni Safak, 2005). Cevat Turan, Director of Organization of Security Services Associations (Guvenlik Servisleri Organizasyon Birligi, GUSOD), expresses how the rise of unemployment was celebrated as a real opportunity:

Involvement in our sector will increase with the rise in unemployment levels in the near future. Should the government implement some policies concerned with unemployment and empowering the real economy, employment of personnel having received private security training will be enabled. (T24, 2009)

These strategies of incorporating the urban poor into ever-deepening precarity was described in a 2014 Report by TOBB. The 2014 Report complains about a ‘decreasing quality and inefficiency of services’ provided in the sector because of ‘unfair competition and unregistered employment’. It goes on to state that ‘unregistered employment is much more widespread in workplaces operating on contract and subcontracting [employment regimes], which are implemented in some phases of production with the mission of decreasing labour costs’ (TOBB, 2014: 10).

Precarity and labour market fluidity binds the experiences of security guards, especially in answer to the rather innocuous question: ‘How does a person become a private security guard?’. A security guard working in a luxury housing complex hosting business people, high-level bureaucrats, and parliamentarians in Ankara describes his experience of cyclical unemployment:

After high school, I worked for my father, who is a street vendor selling vegetables out of our Dodge [van]. After quitting this job, he continued to sell glassware with the same van. I was working for my father. Then, I worked for a dry cleaning company. I worked there not for a long time. It lasted just for six months. Then, I went to undertake my military service in 2006. After military service, there was no job for me! I was thinking about where I could work. Then, one of my friends told me that he would get a security certificate, and advised me to do the same … I received my identity card in 2008. (Tarik, 29, male)

Experiences of unemployment and temporary employment tends to scatter unskilled labour from one job to another. As a matter of fact, such cyclical experiences have become one of the characteristic features of the Turkish labour market, subjecting workers to a structural discipline based on their inability to hold a permanent job (Ozugurlu, 2011, 2009; see also Celik, 2015; Ercan and Oguz, 2015; Kosar and Muftuoglu, 2015). In this light private security becomes a desirable option within a much broader strategy of escaping from the unemployment trap. Canan, a 32-year-old woman who works as a security guard at a municipality in Ankara describes her experience of escape in the following way:

I have worked for many places, from supermarkets to a construction company; I worked for a telephone company as a salesperson. My last job was at a construction company … for one-and-a-half years. Because the company had business expansion, they moved to Istanbul. I had to quit the job because I couldn’t go there … After a while, with encouragement from my relatives, I became a security guard. I had never thought of this before. They told me that this would be an appropriate job for me, which would have some certainty. That is why I applied to this job. (Canan, 32, female)

At this point, it seems appropriate to underline that private security work is perceived as a more advantageous job in terms of social security. This perception is grounded in the more formalized appearance of the sector as compared with other spheres of informal employment. Such terms as ‘decent job’ (Tarik, 29, male) ‘a job with social insurance’ (Canan, 32, female) were often uttered by security guards when they explained their reasons for working in the sector. Yet, this perception of private security as a ‘decent job’ is contradicted by the real work experiences of security guards. In fact, the sector is based on contracted work as the central form of employment, characterized by long working hours, low wages and the absence of any labour protection.

Concerned with this rather negative image of the sector, and grounded in the increasingly widespread perception that ‘one can become a security guard if she cannot find any other jobs’ (Akin, 31, male; cf. TOBB, 2014: 45) the TOBB Report calls for a professional reorganization of the sector to alter this image. Of course, the remaking of this image refers to a basic process by which the labouring masses are being incorporated into this flexible working environment. In this regard, the assessment by Akin seems illustrative. Having worked as a security guard in many places in Ankara including a shopping mall, factory and hospital, he provides us with a striking description of what flexibility actually means in the lives of security guards:

You can easily find a job in this sector, but not under conditions you want to have. You can find a job under really hard conditions. You can easily find a job that has 12 or 14 hours of work per day; it is hard to get a job requiring eight hours of work. This is because in security sector there is almost no eight-hour job …

He sums up his experience by identifying the exploitive relations he sees himself bound up in:

Therefore, there is no possibility of being unemployed in this sector. However, your job will mean that you will be overtly exploited, oppressed, forced to work for minimum wage under hard conditions. (Akin, 31, male)

While the 2004 Law on Private Security provides limited workers’ rights and benefits, its implementation through subcontracting networks exacerbates the working and living conditions of thousands of workers. Working both as a security guard at a public hospital and a bodyguard at special occasions, Ismet’s description of the actual implementation of the law summarizes this point in depth:

The labour code says that you will work for 40 hours in a week. They make us work for 54 hours. The Law on Private Security says that security guards work for 45 hours in a week, but we work for 54 hours. They behave to us as they wish. They don’t give us overtime pay. Our work contract says that our salaries are paid in the first week of the month, but we receive on the 20th day. The hospital provides the subcontracting company with 400 liras for allowances for clothing. But we are given only pants and shirts. How would I know? Such kinds of problems … (Ismet, 29, male)

The sector is thus characterized by high rates of labour turnover. Employment in the sector is experienced as a never-ending process of trying to save one’s current job while having the desire to get another in a different workplace, preferably in a public institution. Here, the strategy of escaping from the unemployment trap is used in a different form within the confines of the sector itself. Public institutions are perceived as workplaces providing more ‘enduring’ and ‘decent’ employment opportunities for security guards. Boran, who was working as a security guard at one of the public universities in Ankara at the time of the interview, describes this perception:

Public institutions generally comply with regulations of the law [on Private Security]. I have many friends working as security guards, who are being forced to undertake many extra duties during work time like cleaning and parking cars. They are being used for many things. They run errands. They are working in places like luxury houses, big shopping malls, etc. That is why [public] institutions are preferred. (Boran, 28, male)

As a characteristic feature of precarity in the security sector, low wages, generally at the level of minimum hourly rates, render it difficult to make ends meet. Canan’s story is illustrative of cases of late payment in this regard:

When our salaries are not paid on time, we are ruined. We live on family support and debts from friends. When I have my salary, it goes to those debts I took from my friends. 50 liras to this friend, 100 liras to that friend.… And for the credit card of course.… I could not pay my credit debts. With my last salary, I had to pay two-month debt with a huge interest. If you make late payments for credit card, you pay 40 to 50 liras more. Why should I pay more debt because of the late payment of my salary? Am I too rich? I am keeping an account for 50 liras so that I might pay for my expenses for cigarette or travel. (Canan, 32, female)

The precarious work experiences of these security guards are part of a wider social process by which the labouring masses are disciplined through indebtedness (Karacimen, 2015). Thereby, mundane practices of debt management create a vicious circle for the labouring masses, subjecting them to ever-deepening precarious working and living conditions.

The structural discipline of precarity is coupled with a characteristic authoritarian organization of labour process and, as we shall see, daily, arbitrary and increasingly violent practices that are deeply intertwined with a politics of polarization engineered by the AKP. Coupled with the ‘deunionization and symbiotic syndicalism in collective labour relations’, the authoritarian social organization of labour in the security sector represents one of the most vivid examples of ‘authoritarian flexibilization’, which has become a characteristic feature of AKP’s labour containment strategy in the last two decades (Celik, 2015). This is enabled by the fact that the public sector has always been the biggest employer in private security. Thus, employment in the sector in any form has increasingly been determined on the basis of one’s loyalty to AKP as a party-state in the making. One can see that if access to more secure, government employment is increasingly determined by party considerations then this in turn deepens the process of authoritarian labour management. Security workers are being formally incorporated as everyday agents of conservative-authoritarian politics under neoliberal policing in Turkey.

Militarism

Integration within the wage-labour system has always been a process wrought with resistance as early as the first general police systems were introduced (Rigakos et al., 2009). Even the police themselves as ‘blue-coasted workers’ (Reiner, 1978) inhabit a world of class contradiction. The contemporary integration of the urban poor into security work has indicated similar tensions (Eick, 2006). Not surprisingly, these types of contradictions have been characterized by deep ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1977). In Turkey, these class injuries are exacerbated by the presence of a party-based capitalist authoritarian order which, as we have already outlined, is embedded within the military-industrial complex determining policing projects in the country. It was common practice throughout the 1990s for former Turkish commandos to be actively recruited directly into the ranks of private security, often under the authority of former military leaders who owned the company. The capitalist groups assertively exploited such an opportunity to recruit those ex-commandos into the nascent private security sector, as evidenced in the job advertisements published in nationwide newspapers (see Cumhuriyet, 1994).

This recruitment leads to the dual process of state–corporate cooperation in producing security while simultaneously processing civilians into soldiers through required military service and then directly into the ranks of for-profit security. This raised obvious contradictions in terms of national service and the subsequent treatment such personnel received. Emin Pazaroglu, General Manager of Pronet, one of the biggest security companies in the country, provides a vivid account concerning how labour incorporation strategies using the military were destined to be problematic:

[Employment] of security personnel had been undertaken like human trafficking especially in the 1990s. Those unskilled people, who made their military service as commandos, were accepted to security companies. After 10-day training, they were positioned to secure many places as security guards. What happened then? It is a total waste of time to expect security service from a person for whom you do not provide training, you make to work 15 hours a day, you pay minimum wages, and you deprive of social rights. The result was to have either problems with trespassers [at the place that is secured] or unwanted security flaws. (Pazaroglu in Gokce and Morgul, 2007: 67)

Given that ‘commandos’ had long been established as highly professional units within the Turkish Armed Forces with advanced training in close, armed conflict, Pazaroglu’s pronouncements are doubly revealing in that these same commandos are nonetheless considered unskilled and incompetent, and therefore unsuitable for the transition to the exploitive relations of security. This has also meant the transposition of militarist strategies, which were originally designed amidst the counter-insurgency warfare against the Kurdish movement, into neoliberal urban space and everyday policing in Turkey. In other words, private security partly owes its rise to the creep of counter-insurgency warfare directly into the everyday policing of neoliberal urban space targeting the poor.

The AKP’s historic peculiarity is grounded in its successful incorporation of a broader neoliberal politics of police. Under conditions of moral panic, a veritable ‘war on crime’ largely engineered over petty crime (Gonen and Yonucu, 2011), increased demand for private security so powerfully that it touched almost every sphere of social life. Indeed, the ideological justification for a market solution to the problem of crime rested on making the urban poor into productive security personnel. Bulent Perut, Director of the Federation of All Associations of Private Security (Tum Ozel Guvenlik Dernekleri Federasyonu, TOGF) provides an assessment of this rather ambitious project:

We are taking seriously the burdens faced by the state. We recruit those people remaining idle or looking for a job, for whom becoming criminal is a high possibility. We transform them into people fighting against crime. We both generate employment and provide a serious effect in and contribution to crime fighting. When there was a possibility for a man to get involved in a crime, to become a robber; he is repositioned [now] as a person chasing robbers. (Perut in Hurriyet, 2010)

The problem of incorporating the poor and preventing them from becoming ‘indigent’ (Colquhoun, 1806) or an unruly and resentful ‘rabble’ (Hegel, 1996 [1821]) has long plagued policing from its inception. Today, the contradictory nature of private security employment operates within a similar politics of crime that inevitably reverts to what has elsewhere been described as an ongoing ‘low intensity warfare’ against the poor (Neocleous, 2000a; Rigakos, 2016).

Control over private security and the indoctrination of security workers within an increasingly militarized and authoritarian regime has meant the use of despotic labour practices (Yucesan-Ozdemir, 2010) directly affecting the lived experiences of private security guards. Speaking on his work experience in a gated community in Incek, an upper-class settlement located outside the city centre of Ankara, Galip provides a detailed account of how this authoritarian labour regime determines the lives of security workers:

My workplace was a place where high-ranking people [a retired member of the Turkish Military] were working as our superiors. He comes, and bothers you with such questions as ‘why are you sitting here?’, ‘why aren’t you saluting me?’ … Complaints never end.… He was excessively disciplined person; or it was not discipline but a kind of torture. After a while, we were feeling that enough was enough.… That company’s superiors are just like this. If you work for that company, you cannot sit during work time, you cannot put your hands in your pocket, you cannot talk on the phone. (Galip, 27, male)

Another respondent, Ozan, expresses similar frustration with his work experience being shaped by the imported militarism of ex-soldiers in daily encounters:

He was a retired soldier. When an important person comes, he behaved just like a soldier by standing at attention, making a formal salute … he was a person behaving with a soldier’s discipline. He was a retired master-sergeant, and expected us to behave in the same way during work-time. (Ozan, 33, male)

This authoritarian labour regime in private security has been reinforced by strategies of surveillance in the workplace. It is almost a universal practice that security workers are under constant surveillance during work time. This testimonial was pulled from a Turkish website:

The employer uses us as he wishes, and we cannot raise our voices [against him]. There are surveillance cameras in the workplace and dining hall. The employer monitors these cameras at intervals, and when he sees us showing exceptional behaviours, he calls us into his presence, and barks at and insults us. In some instances, we are obliged to give a written statement [in defense of our actions]. This makes us get mentally depressed, and so we do not work under healthy [psychological] conditions. ( hukukforum.com , 2011)

It is not uncommon for security guards to use online forums and social media as a strategy for jobseeking as well as to share their experiences of frustration with work. Security guards also utilize these online tools to call for legal aid or guidance. Indeed, the security guard quoted previously finishes his post by asking for advice about what he ought to do in light of the conditions he was exposed to in the workplace.

These online channels are not only illustrative of the work-related frustrations of security workers, but are also indicative of the contested composition of the labour force in the sector. Coupled with the historically established paramilitary organization of the sector, the recently exacerbated politics of polarization has had decisive impacts on the composition of the labour force in the sector. For instance, it has increasingly been the case that security companies make vacancy announcements with explicit calls for recruitment of ex-soldiers and police officers.⁸ Given what we have seen, it can be contended that the authoritarian and militarized labour regime that characterizes the private security industry in Turkey is intertwined with processes of precarious labour, the militaristic organization of labour and the incorporation of surveillance strategies into the workplace. At this point, it becomes important to consider this phenomenon with reference to the neoliberal politics of policing and its cumulative effects on the alienation of security labour.

Alienation

In Security/Capital, Rigakos (2016) considers, among other things, how security labour has been transformed over time – from tribal rotation, to feudal obligation, to public duty and then security enterprise. He argues that ‘[s]ecurity labor has successively become more and more alienated.’ The contemporary private security guard now often works ‘at the behest of a corporate client unrelated to the guard’s own home and family, working strange hours, conducting patrols that are under constant surveillance so that the guard’s immaterial labor may be representationally transformed into a vendible form.’ When one considers that guards are also represented with a corporate logo to which they have no meaningful affiliation, Rigakos concludes ‘[i]t has to be one of the most alienating forms of labor developed’ (Rigakos, 2016: 112).

The alienating quality of contract private security labour is undeniable given the lived experiences of the Ankara security guards interviewed for this study. Indeed, this alienation spans not only a distancing from, as Marx would put it, the ‘fruits of labour’ but also an alienation from the guard’s own sense of class solidarity and personal dignity.

Security enacts ‘defence of property’ and so cannot be disconnected from class politics. It often invokes a direct encounter of different social classes in an already polarized neoliberal urban space. The places that security guards are positioned to protect and the lives they encounter during their work time reflect daily experience of class relations and their contradictory manifestations of social and political contestations in the country. The alienation bound up with spatial dynamics during this class experience is particularly significant. One respondent, Tarik, provides us with a striking account of this alienation. Living in the lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Kecioren, which is known as a conservative bastion of Islamist politics, he makes a daily journey to an upper-class neighbourhood comprised of gated communities in Yasamkent in Ankara. The work becomes an alienating experience in which the respondent becomes keenly aware of the confines of power and space and his relative class position:

We were controlling visitors, and only after getting confirmation from the host apartment were we letting people in. Indeed, a real problem arises at this point. For instance, a man comes, and you know that he is a fat cat. You are supposed to ask, ‘Sir, for whom have you come?’ And the response is, ‘it is none of your business!’ Like that. You see!? You are assuming a humble attitude. In the first months of my work, these people caused many burdens on me. I have been raised in Kecioren, I am rough and I am young and have newly undertaken my military service. I had never had these types of relations with people before. Am I clear? My father works as a street vendor in poor neighbourhoods. That is, I had never dealt with such kinds of fat cats before. They were rebuffing me, and I felt offended by this. But I could do nothing. Only one month after I started working, I told my mother that I was planning to quit the job. My mother told me that I had to tolerate it. My siblings were going to school, my father had not retired yet. I was the only person that brought in a regular wage. How could I quit? So I tolerated, and tolerated, and then this order has brought me into line. Am I clear? This order has brought me into line. (Tarik, 29, male)

The experience of ‘having been brought into line’ is quite telling about how precarious work conditions the entire life experiences of the urban poor in Turkey. These alienating encounters feed a sense of worthlessness while having a cumulative effect on the erosion of individual dignity grounded in capital’s all-encompassing attack on the lives of laboring masses in the country (Ozugurlu, 2009).

Tarik’s experience is by no means isolated as other respondents reported that they were ‘being treated as second-class citizens or human beings’ (Ali, 31, male) or that they were made to feel like ‘an insect’ (Tarik, 29, male), or ‘like the red-headed stepchild’ (Selim, 36, male). These expressions of worthlessness are rooted in the lived experiences of precarious work as well as frustrating class encounters. As Ali (31, male) says: ‘We are contract workers, working for minimum wages. We are the fifth wheels, let me put in this way!’

This class experience is fundamentally conditioned by socio-spatial segregation, which has increasingly characterized the neoliberal urban transformation of Turkey. Living in Tuzlucayir, a working-class neighbourhood in Ankara, Oguz’s daily journey for security work was drudgery:

I had to spend at least two hours just to go to my workplace, and another two hours to come back home. That is, I was staying at home just to sleep for about four–five hours. It was sometimes even worse. We had to be on extra duty for a couple of hours. Besides, we had many other problems as well. I was earning 774 Turkish liras in a month [which was just above minimum wage at the time, amounting to USD $200]. We were not provided with meal and transportation allowances either. We had problems with receiving our monthly payments … I quit the job after five months. (Oguz, 27, male)

Class resentment, founded upon precarious work experience, is deepened through class encounters at the workplace. It is through precarious service work, like private security, that the labouring masses enter into the living spaces of the middle and upper classes. Work experience, therefore, becomes a contested terrain through which class injuries characterize contradictory daily encounters of security workers. The utterance of such injuries might be symbolically embodied in objects, sentences and behaviours during encounters by security workers. For Oguz, a necktie was experienced as an issue of class resentment:

Those who say otherwise would be lying. You make comparisons. You are saying that this person has two legs, and so do I. This person has a fit body, and so do I. This person is good looking, but I am more handsome than him. Yet, when it comes to style of life, conditions of life, the issue changes. For instance, a young boy comes at you, and says ‘look, I have bought this necktie, it is for 330 liras.’ You see, he buys a necktie for 330 liras. So, you willy-nilly get angry. You get angry and ask why is this so?! Is it because of fate? Is it because of my destiny? Let’s not get angry with God, but I don’t understand why this is so! Why is it that he was born in this way, and I was in another? I can’t make sense of this. (Oguz, 27, male)

This sense of alienation from those whose property and person they are ostensibly there to protect is amplified by a sense of powerlessness reflecting the contested class boundaries and socio-political contradictions of security work itself. This alienation is expressed by other security guards as ‘being [an] employer’s pawn’ (Boran, 28, male) or ‘doing employer’s dirty work’ (Galip, 27, male). These pronouncements are both a denunciation and forced acceptance of security labour.

Working as a private security guard as a supporting unit for municipal police in one of the districts of Ankara, Galip provides a striking illustration of the experiences of policing the poor and the class contradictions determining the everyday violence exercised by security guards:

We have minimized street vending around the municipality but some other people come here. They are neither beggars nor glue-sniffers. How can I call? They are not muggers. These people have a strong body and carry blades with them. You have to be rough against them. When I began working here, I used to say ‘could you please leave this area?’. But they were not going. So, I then began shouting at them: ‘get the f*ck out of here!’. Because you should be rough, otherwise you’re rebuked by your superiors; otherwise they say ‘these men do not do their job, I pay for these 20 men, and they do not work.’ Then, you are naturally getting tougher and tougher. (Galip, 27, male)

This ambiguity in defining the ‘usual suspects’ who tend to be the same ‘suitable enemies’ (Christie, 1986) has indeed been a defining characteristic of modern policing since its inception (McMullan, 1996, 1998; Neocleous, 2000b). What is significant about Galip’s account is that the alleged trespassers of daily order produce a fertile ground for arbitrary violence by security guards that is structurally reinforced by their employer’s expectations. This project of policing the poor by using the poor is a fundamentally conflict-ridden enterprise. Galip continues:

There are tenured street vendors. They always come here to sell something. When I am ordered to drive them out, I go and say ‘brother, leave this place’. [But] he is earning his living there. You are aware of that. You might eat at the same noshery in normal times. When this man tells his story, I then say ‘what can I do? I am an aide’. You come to a point to feel the position of those riot police. The only difference is that we are not scratching anybody’s eyes out [with a tear gas canister].⁹

Violent practices employed by security guards have been reportedly increasing during the recent period of expansion. For instance, the ‘daily terror of security guards’ has received widespread media coverage from the late 2000s onwards, a period when, as mentioned, the sector was being presented as ‘a hope for unemployed youth’ in Turkey (see Hurriyet, 2012; IHA, 2009; Vatan, 2008).

Apart from this daily, arbitrary violence by guards, private security has been strategically incorporated into repressive practices against social and political dissent in the country. For instance, in November 2014, peasants of Yırca village in Manisa, a city located on the west coast of Turkey, protested against the felling of thousands of trees to make way for a thermal power plant. Hundreds of peasants were violently attacked by private security guards employed by the company awarded the building contract. The construction of the power plant and the violence of the security guards received extensive coverage. Eventually, public reaction led to the cancellation of the plan by the Council of the State. Having lost a profitable investment opportunity, the company fired about 100 workers, half of whom were private security guards who had been responsible for the violent attack against the peasants. It was an action reminiscent of the mentality of the 19th-century American railroad baron Jay Gould, who purportedly said ‘I can always hire half the working class to kill the other half’.

One of the dismissed security guards who felt that they had been duped put it in the following way:

They had promised us a job guarantee, and even retirement guarantee. I quit my previous job, and came here to work as security guard. They fooled us and made us attack the peasants. They made us confront the peasants. They used us, and then fired us. It’s not gonna work! We will be here [resisting] until we get our rights. (Bianet, 2014)

After ‘being [their] employer’s pawn’, not only did the security guards have a sense of being used but they also experienced a sense of alienation from their fellow workers. This type of alienation is not confined to Yırca village. Private security guards across Turkey have been increasingly positioned against the urban poor and social and political dissidents in recent years. Widespread peasant struggles against the construction of hydro-electric power plants and other mega-projects have drawn violent responses by not only the gendarmerie and police forces of the state, but also by private security functioning as a de facto army of large corporations (see Bianet, 2011; Eroglu, 2016; Yavuz, 2013).

It is clear that contested neoliberal urban transformation has been mobilized through neoliberal policing in Turkey, within which private security has played a major role. The deployment of ‘thieftakers’ (McMullan, 1995), private police (Spitzer and Scull, 1977), coal and iron police (Couch, 1981) or ‘Pinkerton men’ (Weiss, 1978) has a long history in the pacification of labour during the development of industrial capitalism (Rigakos, 2011) but the conflation of this form of policing with the development of a new partisan party authoritarianism is particular to Turkey. It is wedded to both domestic pacification and geopolitical concerns. Its effects, therefore, on class conflict and worker alienation are familiar and unique to Turkey.

Conclusion

This article was intended to better understand the class-related contradictions of the Ankara private security worker who has become part of a de facto urban army, managing the daily affairs of an already polarized urban space. Turkey’s increasingly suppressive regime has been offered as a case study for examining the formation and consolidation of a neoliberal authoritarian system and the role and function of private security in the fabrication and enforcement of that order.

Given the contradictory operation of the neoliberal security-industrial complex in Turkey, violence has been the defining characteristic of policing. This is, of course, a common phenomenon that has resonance with many parts of the contemporary Global South and the historical development of the Global North. The story of capitalist accumulation is therefore rife with the practices of pacification (Neocleous, 2011) that brought it to fruition (Rigakos, 2016), and the continuous reassertion of exploitation and the intensification of wage labour that maintain it. In this sense, there is clear evidence in the lived experiences of security workers interviewed in Ankara and the fabrication of social order they are charged with enforcing, that Turkey is no exception to this longue durée (Braudel, 1973) of capitalism.

Yet, there are particularities about the Turkish experience that conditions the nature of pacification and the experiences of security guards who enforce it that bears further examination. The precarity, militarism and alienation we have described is also conditioned by a geopolitical (in)security with respect to the construction of the Kurdish threat and the mobilization of this security threat by the emergence of a highly partisan, single-party regime that has extended its tentacles in every aspect of social life in Turkey. Defending the country has also been deliberately conflated with securing the AKP party and its leader, especially after the failed coup of 2016. The fabrication of this particular authoritarian order, therefore, carries with it significant situational and political considerations that are important determinants of the shape and function of policing in Turkey.

The AKP, therefore, has undertaken a politically contested and contradictory policy of fabricating an entire security sector that is loyal to the party, and that can be utilized against dissident voices in the country. This has major implications given the politics of polarization engineered by the party through the direct exercise of state violence in the last number of years. It also has important analytic implications for helping us to understand the nature of private security provision and its various uses as a mechanism of pacification.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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