Bureaucratic Rotation as Strategy: Governor Turnover and State Violence in Turkey’s Counterinsurgency

Abstract

This study examines how governments deploy conflict assignments as high-stakes loyalty and competence tests for political agents, focusing on provincial governors in Turkey. Drawing on Principal–Agent Theory, I argue that internal conflict enables the state to assess a governor’s willingness to prioritize coercive policies over other administrative considerations and their capability to manage complex security operations, serving as a costly signal of political loyalty and operational competence. Governors are deliberately rotated into conflict-affected provinces, where their performance reveals cues that inform subsequent promotion or removal decisions. To test these claims, I construct an original dataset that extends the Governors of the Ottomans and Turkey (GOT) dataset with new information on post-tenure career trajectories, covering all governors from 1984 to 2025. The analysis shows that gubernatorial shuffling occurs significantly more often in Kurdish-majority regions during periods of intensified counterinsurgency, and that service by compliant agents in these regions increases the likelihood of advancement to higher bureaucratic posts. These findings demonstrate how the state strategically manages its provincial bureaucracy, using conflict-zone experience as a monitoring mechanism for loyalty and competence. The study contributes to broader debates on authoritarian governance, elite circulation, and the institutional strategies through which states manage dissent.