Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always associate them with the central government. Street-Level Governing is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role—not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate—to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming ‘margin’ of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions.
As Elise Massicard shows, muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning.
Table of Content
1. An Incompletely Formed Institution
2. How the Muhtarlık Fuels the Production of Notables
3. The Muhtars’ Changing Role
4. The Residents’ Champion
5. Ambivalent Interface with the Official Order
6. Enacting Context-Dependent Roles
7. Working within and Modulating Institutional Constraints
8. The Muhtarlıks’ Waning Autonomy
Conclusion
About the author
Elise Massicard is Research Professor at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique / Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po. She is the author of
The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: Identity and Managing Territorial Diversity (2012).
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