Le Ray 443of coexistence and circulation. Checkpoints progressively became privi-
leged sites for exactly this purpose, as the legitimacy of systematic and
repetitive identity controls increasingly came into question. On one occa-
sion, on the bus on the way back from a district center to the provincial
main city center in the summer of 2006, the reluctance of the passengers
(among them a majority of migrants and outsiders) to show their identity
cards—for the seventh time that day, for both military and police check-
points—turned into a more general debate on the rationale of the surveil-
lance and control policies. When asked to justify such repetitive controls,
policemen and soldiers generally offer the same explanation: “We are
doing our duty. This is Tunceli, a zone of terror.” But this time, passengers
expressed their sense of injustice, pointing out that these devices conveyed
a negative image of Tunceli, with devastating effects on visitors and out-
siders. Citing a recent official report on urban terrorism which located the
threat of terror in large cities and metropolitan centers, the bus passengers
challenged the categorization of Tunceli and its inhabitants as “terrorists”;
or at least, as “suspects.” At that moment, the checkpoint, a device imped-
ing circulation in the name of security and contributing to the production
of an overregulated public life, was turned into a contentious public arena.
Indeed a public sphere emerged in the transformation of the “engagement
regime” of the minibus passengers, from the simple identification of the
control device to an active questioning of the device itself.
Collective action over contested spaces
In both cases discussed above, the emerging public sphere did not survive
the dispersion of its public after the event. But these adversarial public
experiences of everyday life, when engraved in memories and sometimes
even bodies, become part of a practical knowledge used to adapt modes
of circulation and interaction. They can also be exposed to and revived
within larger publics in more or less institutionalized arenas of debate
(from conversation with friends to participation in a conference) or
relayed through media channels. What happens now when people engage
in urban space to act collectively in an orchestrated way to challenge the
spatial discipline and transform categories? Does this intentional and con-
tentious regime of engagement produce other types of publicness? Does