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

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.