Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Hayal Akarsu
2025-2026
Home institution
Utrecht University
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology
Political Sciences
Sociology
Theme(s)
Contemporary violence & Justice
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Globalization
Human Rights
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Hayal Akarsu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Previously, she was a Junior Research Fellow in the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Lecturer in Anthropology at Brandeis University. She obtained her PhD in 2018 from the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and her MA in 2012 from Near Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU). From her current book project on police reforms to her ongoing research on digital policing and environmental crimes, Akarsu explores how various imaginations of risk and threat securitize and police different realms of social and natural life.
Research Project
Force experts: afterlives of police reforms in Turkey
Research question: What do police do with reform, and what does reform do to police and the public.
In Force Experts, Hayal Akarsu examines the persistence of police violence despite global efforts at reform, including investments in community policing, democratic training, and non-lethal technologies. Based on 18 months of fieldwork funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2015–2017), Akarsu explores why such reforms have failed to curb abuse and instead argues that they provide regimes with new toolkits to extend power, manufacture legal impunity, and garner support.
Focusing on the Turkish police, Akarsu shows how officers adopt transnational reform standards to redefine violence as professional expertise—becoming what she terms “force experts.” Rather than functioning outside security systems, reform itself operates as a security technology, producing new forms of governmental power that reshape everyday experiences of policing and control.
Her ethnographic research follows police academy trainees, tracks reform networks across Ankara, London, and Belfast, and accompanies police officers in community settings. Force Experts brings together the anthropology of expertise and techno-political governance with scholarship on power and violence, offering critical insight into the workings of populist authoritarianism and contributing to broader debates in security studies.
Research Interests:
Police violence and reform; anthropology of expertise; security technologies; transnational policing networks; populist authoritarianism; police/policing; security; human-rights; international flows and global governance; law and society; environment; eco-justice; digital cultures and surveillance; science and technology studies; ethnography; Anthropology of the Middle East and Turkey