Meltem Journal of the Izmir Mediterranean Academy No. 2, Winter 2017, 102-104 104 The Politics of Crime in Turkey: Neoliberalism, Police and the Urban Poor Zhandarka Kurti* Neoliberalism as a political proMect from above has not so much withdrawn the state from the sphere of social life, but instead entailed its deep entrenchment in the lives of the urban poor. Crime and criminalization have become important ways in which the neoliberal state has positioned itself in the lives of the urban racialized poor, entailing the strengthening of punitive social control technolo- gies from the increasing use of imprisonment to conﾀne those populations ren- dered superﾁuous by capitalist restructuring and the spatial regulation of ra- cialized bodies through urban policing strategies. Focusing on the restructuring of the Izmir Public Order police in the third largest urban city of Turkey during the mid-2000s and its eͿects on mostly sec- ond-generation Kurdish migrant youth, Zeynep Gönen’s book contributes to our understanding of the relationship between urban poverty, crime, criminali- zation, and policing. Gönen’s book makes two important theoretical and conceptual interven- tions about crime, criminalization and policing in the neoliberal era. The ﾀrst is that she challenges the often-simple narrative of the shift from welfare to penal state that we ﾀnd promoted by scholars like /owc Wacquant. DiͿerent from oth- er advanced core capitalist countries, neoliberal state restructuring in Turkey was ushered also by a series of military coups that consolidated the power of the state, squashing not only leftist movements grounded in working class pow- er, which we have also seen elsewhere but most importantly the growing Kurd- ish struggles for autonomy, declaring the latter internal enemies of the state. Fo- cusing on criminalization as an ｴideological and a material processｵ (50) in the second chapter of the book, Gönen locates its roots in the neoliberal restructur- ing of urban cities, which made land expensive and criminalized the strategies that Kurdish migrant struggles employed to secure housing and most impor- tantly the political upheavals of the 1990s that followed, all of which together helped to shape the construction of a new subMect, the Yaroü, or slums, as a stig- matized identity in the Turkish public imagination. It was the children of these Kurdish migrants along with other ｴtarget populationsｵ that would become the new subMect of criminalization by the police in the mid-2000s. Criminalization, as she demonstrates is a ｴhistorical and structural problem in continuity with state violenceｵ (154). Gönen’s second theoretical contribution is her conceptualization of the ｴneoliberal politics of crimeｵ, which she devotes the ﾀrst half of the book to. Her theoretical framework marries together both Marxist and Foucauldian concepts on policing, crime and punishment, a combination of perspectives that is often lacking in the most recent scholarship on penal state formation.  Binghamton 8niversity, Department of Sociology