Street-Level Governing

Reviews / Votes

"Street-Level Governing is a brilliant and engaging study that overturns dyed-in-the-wool ideas about the nature of the state and modernity. With a sophisticated command of the literature leavened by on-the-ground observation, Elise Massicard makes an excellent contribution to a new global scholarship of informality in politics and politics as performance."-Jenny White, Stockholm University, author of Turkish Kaleidoscope "Street-Level Governing is one of the most interesting and original recent books I have read on contemporary Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and deep knowledge of Turkish politics and society, Elise Massicard gives us a vivid and up-close account of the muhtarlik in the context of state-society relations in Turkey."-Resat Kasaba, University of Washington, author of A Moveable Empire "Street-Level Governing is a commendable study that approaches contemporary Turkey from an original angle with both rigour and scholarship. It certainly deserves to be read and discussed."-Marc Juyient, Manara Magazine "Massicard's outstanding book on the neglected urban agency of muhtarlik crucially challenges major ideas on urban politics, stands as a methodological resource, and contributes to the literature on urban studies by speaking to scholars' broader interest in how local actors and their interrelations with complex urban outcomes have been reproduced."-Guelsah Aykac, Urban Studies "Street-Level Governing, as implied by the title, rejects traditional notions about the Turkish state and its bureaucracy to build on Migdal's state-in-society framework and the rich ethnographic scholarship on Turkey it has recently engendered. However, whereas this new body of work focuses on the marginalized, studying the ever-present muhtar helps Massicard reveal how even mundane interactions shape the contours of the state."-Devrim Yavuz, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association "Moving beyond the clientelism-versus-governance divide and engaging critically with fields of the political sociology and the anthropology of state, Massicard's excellent book on the dynamics of urban politics in Turkey examines state-society interaction in everyday life and successfully demonstrates how they mutually transform, constitute, and produce each other on the ground."-Osman Savaskan, Political Science Quarterly "[T]his book is an important contribution to the sociology of the state, to the literature on domination, and more specifically, to Turkish Studies. It sets out a great example on how to conduct an ethnography of the state, and it should be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists alike working on and interested in Turkey."-Ceren Senguel, Contemporary Sociology "Street-Level Governing provides a detailed snapshot of being a muhtar in Istanbul and the current position of the muhtarlik institution in Istanbul. Massicard... makes a significant contribution to the Turkish public administration/local government literature by examining how the muhtarlik functions as an institution."-Niyazi Karabulut, Public Administration Review "Steet-Level Governing not only contributes to the study of local politics in Turkey but, more importantly, offers a unique analysis of how the practices of muhtarlar, the lowest-level elected officers in Turkey, both underpin and undermine the image of a coherent and centralized state."-Rabia Karakaya Polat, Middle East Journal "[Massicard] sheds light on the complex networks of the state that permeate the society through official and unofficial activities."-Cigdem Goerguen Akguel, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies