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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 clearcut 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