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

Bureaucratic Intimacies is an ethnography of human rights training given to government workers in Turkey as part of EU harmonization. The book is a critical take on the framing of human rights as a technical matter as part of the good governance agenda. It is a fascinating read giving flesh and blood to the encounter between various actors involved in human rights training: bureaucrats who are uncomfortable being “educated,” foreign and local trainers cautiously presenting the information in “acceptable” terms at the expense of “depoliticizing the radical agenda” of human rights, and translators who translate with care for national sensibilities, among others. Babül shows that in this training, figured as dialogic spaces, translation, jokes, whispers, off the record anecdotes, and parodies all become part of the performances of the state, the encounters between the state and the EU, and the negotiations of local and universal as well as the actual and the ideal.

Babül argues that as mediums of encounter between Turkish government agencies and their European interlocutors, the training shows that human rights need to go through translation in order to be integrated into the governmental domain and that this translation was done by dissociating human rights from their radical political connotations and reframing them to be compatible with everyday practices of national governance (p. 3). The trainees were uneasy about “being trained” given their perception of themselves as educators of the public; they felt discomfort related to class or other differences, i.e., lack of language skills, and were not happy with the unconventional atmosphere of the training that evaded bureaucratic hierarchies. To regain power, they referred to their hegemony over knowledge of actual conditions in juxtaposition to the ideal they believe the training presented. Hence Babül argues, the trainees who are already socialized to be suspicious and reactionary towards the politics of human rights reverted to reactionary nationalism, and the training ended up forming a community of knowers of bureaucratic secrets, instead of a community of believers in the values of human rights (p. 34).

Babül’s ethnographic study, conducted over the course of seven years (2007–14) is set at a time when Turkey-EU relations started deteriorating while various harmonization tools such as training and projects were continued for capacity building. As Babül describes, human rights training was significantly different from the grassroots human rights advocacy carried out by human rights organizations in Turkey, whose agents often face persecution. I believe the book will be valuable to those interested in harmonization, good governance, and capacity development processes around the world. While existing scholarship critically assesses such in terms of the junctures created between professionalized civil society and grassroots activism, Babül’s book brings a fresh perspective by focusing on the micro-politics of the training programs. The book also makes one think about the relationship between human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in a new light. Babül shows that with the lack of a political agenda, and when human rights are taught as a mere technical matter, such that abiding by human rights norms is presented as a quality of a professional bureaucrat, training does little in terms of contributing to the internalization of the ethical dimension of human rights, or the promotion of accountability and responsibility.

Babül argues that while the training aims at bureaucratic professionalization through impersonalization, paradoxically, it ends up promoting empathy, conscientiousness, and creative problem solving when trainees bring to light issues such as the lack of resources, conflictual relations between bureaucrats due to occupational and other hierarchies, and other power differentials (ch. 2). Therein lies a major strength of the book which points to a new way of thinking about the deep-seated problem of the functioning of the state in Turkey where on one hand, agency, responsibility, and accountability are subsumed under a mystified notion of the state, while on the other hand, structural...