Since the mid-2000s, the use-of-force continuum—a global standard for providing law enforcement with guidelines on the proportionate use of force—has been central in Turkish police training and reporting practices. Liberal police accountability tools, like the use-of-force continuum, rely on standardization to prevent police violence. Yet these techniques still result in maimed bodies and psyches and police impunity. Rather than taking the standardization of police force simply as a failed project, a sham, or a mere techno-fix, I examine how powerful actors like police align with such standards and how they start thinking and acting through them while repurposing them. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 among the Turkish National Police, I show how the transnational standardization of police force has in fact enabled police in Turkey to redefine and ultimately reclaim the violence they are professionalized in as what I call “force experts.” Force defies standardization in both theory and practice; however, what sanctions police violence now is not just technical standardization but the expert framing of the democratically reformed police force. This is the violence of standardization, especially in contexts where governments retool reforms to criminalize suspect Others whom they perceive as a “threat” to their rule.

This essay examines the birth of French medieval studies in America as a product of the racial anxiety and cultural-linguistic precarity experienced by Creoles. It argues that the idea of the French Middle Ages in North America, the conceptual matrix through which it became thinkable and desirable as a coherent subject of study, was made possible through engagements with minoritized Francophones who were assumed to embody the deep past. Part 1 examines how scholars in France’s Second Empire became invested in patois as a marker of “primitive” French cultural expression thought to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation. Part 2 turns to a specific instantiation of French scholars’ pursuit of dialect: collectors of creole stories and grammars in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and south Louisiana who analogized creole utterances to the first French vernaculars as they emerged from Latin. Part 3 focuses on the pursuit of creolité as evidence of medievality in south Louisiana, and considers the racial anxiety evident in local deployments of the term creole. It concludes by discussing historical methods informed by creolization and mixed temporalities, and by imagining how these methods might transform medieval studies.