Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey by Elif M. Babül (review)

Building upon her seven years (2007 to 2014) of ethnographic fieldwork in human rights training programs, in her book Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey, Elif M. Babül examines the globally acclaimed concept "human rights" and its daily configurations manifested by government officials such as judges, prosecutors, police officers, prison guards, teachers, religious officials, and health care professionals. Turkey's candidacy to the European Union (EU) membership started in 1999, and from then on the country pursued the integration process to enforce the EU standards of human rights.¹ The human rights training programs that Babül's book focuses on are part of this integration process. For Babül, these programs functioned as spaces of encounter between government workers and transnational human rights regimes. She convincingly argues that training programs enable the "translation"² of the human rights standards in order to address local issues. Yet these programs also depoliticize these standards in order to navigate the "foreignness" attached to these standards

in the nationalist imagery of the government workers, by redefining them as necessary requirements to achieve expertise, professional development, and good governance. According to Babül, in doing so, these training programs have failed to contest the existing authoritarian bureaucratic structures that pave the way for major human rights violations, such as ethnic violence, forced migration, and disappearances.

While analyzing the training programs, Babül moves beyond the clear-cut separations of the conventional understanding of pedagogy that builds a hierarchy between the educated and non-educated, and teacher and learner. Instead, she emphasizes "dialectical encounters that generate contradiction and resistance."³ According to her, these training practices operate as "dialogical processes"⁴ that are full of negotiations, contestations, and uncertainties, where the government workers actively take part in challenging and reframing these supposedly "standard" universal standards in line with their local conditions, social and political interests, and "sensitivities, moralities and rationalities that shape the governmental field in Turkey."⁵ In this sense, her ethnographic method enables the scholar to pay special attention to the interactions and exchanges of different actors, rather than rely on a top-down analysis of human rights standards and their implementations. This choice is particularly useful for the Turkish context, considering the prevalent nationalist reactions against the discourse of human rights and its European/Western "experts" that claim them to be foreign impositions.

Although recently the state has undertaken the responsibility of the institutionalization of human rights discourse—through "a liberal reclamation"⁶—the prevalent nationalist reactionary discourse in Turkey has defined human rights as "a cover for treacherous activity against the indivisibility of the nation and the state."⁷ Babül contextualizes this understanding within the country's political and economic history (particularly after the 1980s coup d'etat). As a recipient of foreign aid and structural adjustment policies, Turkey has been required to follow the standards of human rights and women's rights in order to gain the necessary funds.⁸ As in other contexts from the Global South,⁹ this has created the feeling of human rights standards as being a foreign influence on the sovereignty of the state. Babül alludes to this neocolonial aspect of human rights training programs while tracing the history of the training programs in the third chapter, where she emphasizes the role played by the Western military-industrial complex in designing these training programs. However, while doing so, the scholar does not exempt the government workers in Turkey from responsibility as she successfully implements a balanced analysis that holds the government officials accountable for their human rights violations, while also emphasizing global asymmetries of power. Throughout the book, Babül underlines the ways in which these national sensitivities around human rights discourse play a role in building "bureaucratic intimacies"¹⁰

where government workers, in different levels and formats, collectively take part in conducting, sharing, and withholding "public secrets," meaning major violations of human rights, for the "continuation/perpetuity of the state."^11...