City & Society. 2024;00:1–2. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ciso | 1 © 2024 American Anthropological Association. Received: 21 June 2024 | Accepted: 15 August 2024 DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12495 FORUM State-produced disorder from counterinsurgency to gentrification Stefano Portelli Department of Education, Università Roma Tre, Rome, Italy Correspondence Stefano Portelli, Department of Education, Università Roma Tre, Rome, Italy. Email: stefanoportelli1976@gmail.com “The state is coming! The state is coming!” some children in one of Istanbul's marginal areas screamed back in the 1970s, when they saw the coming of the bulldozers that were going to demolish their homes. The women would then “pour into the streets and start col- lecting stones in their skirts to throw at the bulldozers”; hundreds of people would chant slogans claiming their right to live in the neigh- borhood, one of the countless self-built areas of Istanbul, called gece- kondu (literally “grown overnight”). “Gecekondu is our right!” they would scream. “We will take it against all odds!” Deniz Yonucu recalls this image in a chapter titled “The possibility of politics” (2022, p. 35). After each demolition, the residents would reorganize to rebuild the houses that had been demolished; their work “extended beyond the fight for housing to include collective world building practices that opened up space for individual and social transformation” (p. 36). Twenty years later, the revolutionary youth that defended the neighborhood “began to be perceived by residents as the culprits who were disrupting order” (p. 90). I cannot imagine a clearer instance, although in urban form, of what Graeber and Sahlins called “the constitutive war between king and people” (2017, pp. 398–464). In the three cities where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, I have found various forms of dis- ruption of conviviality and interethnic relationships associated with state-led planning policies. The barrio of Bon Pastor in Barcelona, a hub of anarchist politics until Franco's fascist golpe in the 1940s, remained a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1991) that bridged the bound- aries that elsewhere divided Catalan, Spanish, and gitano (Roma) communities, at least until the bulldozers started tearing it down in the early 2000s. In Rome, the 1970s relocation of slum dwellers to public housing in the outskirts turned self-grown shantytown com- munities, that had developed massive squatting movements and a range of often radical educational experiences, into stigmatized ha- vens for drug dealers and gangs. In Casablanca, waves of evictions from the central city are forcibly inducing drastic changes in cultural and religious practices, such as the Gnawa ritual complex, that have hitherto enabled very different sectors of the population to cohabi- tate (Portelli, 2021, 2023). I see a connection between the divisions generated by the counterinsurgency techniques that Yonucu describes in Istanbul's Alevi neighborhoods and the disruptive effects of neoliberal urban planning. It is not only that public funding for policing often increases as funding for public housing shrinks (Rodriguez, 2024). Urban dis- placement and demolitions reinforce the internal boundaries, as Candan and Kullouğlu claim (2008): all the “small istanbuls” shrank in on themselves as the city expanded, with a resulting loss of spaces of contact. Al-Sabouni (2016) even claimed that in Syrian cities the loss of “contact zones” caused by urban planning and real estate speculation fueled the ethno-sectarian divisions of the civil war. This pattern of spatial “generation of disorder” which Yonucu so sharply identifies, tracing its genealogy and referring it to Rancière's para- digm, bounces from war zones to peace—though with different de- grees of intentionality—and from the frontiers of colonization to the internal frontiers of gentrification. If anthropology, as Herzfeld argues (2010, p. 453), is “the com- parative study of common sense,” Yonucu's work addresses how the state's production of common sense hides its production of disor- der. Her fundamental insight is that the “protection of society” on which the police builds its legitimacy indeed entails the protection of certain social groups, but at the cost of systematically targeting others, especially those who envisage or practice forms of political autonomy or prefigurative politics. The idea that the police actively produce disorder may seem counterintuitive. Yet it is the perspec- tive of countless residents of stigmatized communities worldwide. These people desperately try to communicate to the rest of society that the state does not work as it claims to, and that the police do not act as they should. It is on these grounds that we can see in Yonucu's book a masterpiece of militant ethnography, one that pro- vides evidence for a radically counter-hegemonic interpretation of