Elise Massicard, "Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey" (Stanford UP, 2022)

New Books in Sociology · Oct 4, 2022 · 1h 4m

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. Elise Massicard's Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2022) 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…