Keywords

Illustration of a construction crane lifting a bundle of money towards the top of a tall orange building. The sky is orange with swirling lines, and the buildings have various window patterns.

“If this is about energy, we have already given our water for energy production. We have given up our rivers, our aorta. This is not about energy. This is about getting rid of the people here”.

“I cannot help but wonder if the actual issue is to depopulate the region as a whole. In order to use the water more freely, to extract the mines more easily (…) There is so much the state can do for people not to migrate, to keep them in their villages. But when you look at what is being done instead, one inevitably thinks they are trying to dislocate the people from the villages”.

Introduction

These words were spoken by locals in Ardanuç, an eastern township of Artvin provincial region, during interviews we were conducting as a part of our fieldwork in the region in 2012.Footnote 1 While the immediate referent of these accounts was the micro-hydro power plants that have mushroomed in the region after the energy market liberalisation of the mid-2000s, the broader dynamic they were pointing to was how the flow of extractive investments into the region was dismantling the conditions that sustained rural communities and pushing them to seek livelihoods in urban centres. This framing of the interlinked processes of environmental destruction and hydropower development as a more comprehensive—and intentional—project of “depopulation” to convert Artin into a region of raw material and energy production was repeated by local residents and environmental activists alike throughout our research.

This dynamic of dislocation-dispossession, however, was by no means limited to Artvin; it is rather one that has marked the last decades of Turkey’s political economy. In an interview on the politics of deforestation in Kurdistan, Rojhat Dilsiz and Agit Özdemir point to a similar process of depopulation as an inherent component of capital accumulation. Describing how depopulation through deforestation paves the way for mining operations to take hold in the region, Dilsiz and Özdemir reveal not only the prevalence of this dynamic but also its historically changing forms:

There has always been a policy of deforestation at work in Kurdistan. The geography of Kurdistan, the mountains, the forested areas are always portrayed as a disadvantage for the state (…) Forest fires were only about burning. [But] now they are not only burning, they are cutting down [the forests] and making profits out of it (…) This all emerges as a continuation of the politics of deforestation. What this politics aims at is depopulation. In the displacements of the 1990s, we’d see the following: ‘drain the water, the fish would die’. Today the same strategy continues in a different guise. It is not only the guerrilla but the entirety of people seen as the enemy.

While in the 90s people could not enter the forcibly depopulated villages even with special permits, mining companies can [now] go into these areas with eminent domain orders. The lands and orchards in villages have been plundered by construction vehicles. A veiled forced displacement policy is in place today. In the 90s people were displaced forcibly by security forces, but today it becomes an exigency with the destruction of the social space in which people can live with tree cutting and forest fires, when there is no living space left. Animal husbandry, for instance, cannot be practiced anymore due to the designation of special security zones and prohibitions on accessing meadows (…) The forced migration is not justified through a directly militarist discourse as it did in the 90s, but through ‘I am building dams, I have to produce energy; I am running a mine, I am making an economic contribution’ (Ormansızlaştırarak insansızlaştırma, 2023).

This chapter takes this entry point to delineate the interlinked processes of continuity and break (within the broader history of the republic) that constitute the political economy of contemporary Turkey. The first thread of continuity-break is that of developmentalism. Developmentalism has served, and continues to serve, as the primary mechanism of acquiring consent by the Turkish state’s claim to rule, and in particular to displace or neutralise grievances based on the socially, economically, and ecologically disruptive impacts of the regime of accumulation operationalised within the last three decades. Yet the form and mechanisms through which developmentalism has been set in motion differ significantly in contemporary Turkey, evidenced not only by the prioritised sectoral “engines” but also by the changing forms of the state’s participation in accumulation processes, as well as its spatial organisation.

The second thread is that of dispossession, as punctuated by the above quotes’ references to a policy of depopulation, which is shown to span different geographical regions and time periods. Dispossession and displacement have indeed been a historically continuous and constitutive element of Turkey’s political economy. While the role of dispossession in reproducing capital accumulation has reached a particular visibility within the last two decades, the processes through which dispossession is realised and its aftermath is organised reveal significant differences.

The chapter takes up these two threads in turn. The next section describes the particularly extractive form that developmentalism takes in contemporary Turkey, emphasising its articulation with neoliberalism and authoritarianism. The section operationalises the Gramscian notion of state hegemony and national-popular outlook to reveal and explicate the persistence of developmentalism in Turkey’s political-economic history. Section three, in turn, takes up dispossession, conceptualising Turkey’s contemporary economic regime as one of accumulation by dispossession. After illustrating the continuity of dispossession throughout the history of the country, the section delineates how contemporary dynamics represent a break. The concluding section addresses how the threads of developmentalism and dispossession are linked within the contemporary era, and locates the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s project of Democratic Economy as a paradigm-shifting alternative.

Extractive Developmentalism: New Wine in Old Bottles

While the political economy of contemporary Turkey can be explicated from different entry points, it can hardly be disputed that the hallmark of this era has been the ascent of extractive sectors such as construction, energy, and mining. Underlying this unprecedented ascent was the explicit and visible role that the state assumed, particularly through realising a series of critical changes in the legal infrastructure. The restructuring and liberalisation of energy markets, which were consolidated under AKP rule, opened fields of energy investments previously inaccessible to the private sector, most notably coal and hydropower. This was coupled with the consistent relaxation of environmental legislation that could halt the development of the sector as well as the provision of a variety of incentives such as market assurance and credit subsidies. In the case of construction, legal revisions were made to allow state expropriation of land for purposes of redevelopment and to unleash lands previously under protection into development, buttressed with direct state involvement and support through public–private partnerships.

Concomitant with this liberal turn was an authoritarian one of centralisation, top-down decision-making, and heightened use of coercion.Footnote 2 Most visibly through a heavy reliance on executive measures, such as governmental decrees and eminent domain, existing legislation on land governance, zoning, and environmental protection was modified, eliminated, and/or sidetracked (Tansel, 2019). Governmental decrees have been used systematically to amend land zoning provisions and designated protection statuses to allow energy, construction, and mining investments and/or to provide exemptions for particular projects. Eminent domain has become a commonplace practice under the AKP regime, with an overwhelming majority of land expropriations carried out for construction, infrastructure, or energy projects (Kaya, 2016; Toker, 2014). Such streamlining and centralisation of decision-making also served to quell social opposition by blocking existing venues of social contestation, coupled with the heightened use of force against urban and environmental movements.

If the visibility of the state’s role is the first common thread that ties the rise of these extractive sectors, the appropriation of space—land, resources, living spaces—inherent to their functioning is the second. A particularly striking manifestation of this is the proportion of land cover licensed for mining exploration and operations. According to data compiled by the Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion, for Reforestation and the Protection of Natural Habitats (TEMA), 92% of all provincial lands in Kütahya, 74% of those in Ordu, 71% of those in Arvin, and 59% of those in Muğla were under mining licences for exploration or operation as of early 2024. Concomitant to such unprecedented appropriation of space and resources has been the proliferation of urban and environmental resistances, unprecedented in scope and public visibility (Adaman et al., 2017; Aksu et al., 2016; Arsel et al., 2015) Seen in this light, the overlap of extractivism and authoritarianism is no coincidence: the rise of energy, construction, and mining relied fundamentally on the state’s ability to claim and redirect land to these sectors through direct expropriations, revision of zoning designations, and privatisation of public resources, while effectively shielding itself from social opposition. In this sense, authoritarianism has been inherent to, and a prerequisite of, the contemporary political-economic regime in Turkey (see Tekin’s chapter in this book).

Yet authoritarianism was not alone in this latter function of neutralising social contestation. The developmentalist appeal of extractive sectors has been integral to reproducing popular consent in the face of the extensive dynamics of dispossession and dislocation brought on by this regime. Within a context shaped historically by the power of developmentalism, the material and symbolic significance of these sectors have garnered broad-based support and legitimacy. Construction, energy, and mining projects initiated in this period have unexceptionally been cast as key contributors to economic growth and defended in terms of their employment creation, which helped pacify social contestation through the promise of an equal sharing of the benefits of growth (Akbulut et al., 2018). While the distribution of rents especially from the construction boom (i.e. material concessions in the form of direct transfers, expansion of urban consumption possibilities, as well as opportunities to appropriate urban rent) reproduced the consent of large sections of the society, monumental projects such as the third bridge and the third airport resonated closely with modernisation in the social imaginary and reinforced the image of the state as the deliverer of growth and prosperity, receiving admiration from different sections of the society (Adaman & Akbulut, 2021).

The strength of developmentalism is the first axis of continuity-rupture that constitutes Turkey’s contemporary political economy. While the forms and mechanisms through which it was put to work differ historically, developmentalism has been a motif that shaped the social and political imaginary in Turkey like no other (Akbulut et al., 2020; Arsel, 2005). Seen in a Gramscian light, the strength and persistence of developmentalism can be located within the making of state hegemony in Turkey (Akbulut, 2011, 2019; Akbulut et al., 2018). Gramsci famously theorised hegemony as “consent backed by force” to emphasise the amalgam of practices and discourses through which states seek to elicit the active consent of the ruled. The constitution and reproduction of a national-popular outlook play a crucial role within this context (Gramsci, 1971). Through such a construct, it becomes possible for the state to appear as a neutral institution that represents the collective interest of the society and thus justify its claim to rule. The illusion of a collective interest also cements unity (albeit always temporary and incomplete) among different social forces and masks fragmentations within the social sphere, reinforcing the image of the state as an impartial actor.

From this perspective, Turkey’s political-economic history can be read as an ongoing rearticulation of a hegemonic project within which economic development has been operationalised as the collective interest. The history of the republic is indeed marked with narratives that portray economic development (qua modernisation) as the collective interest of the Turkish society, whose achievement is an arduous task that requires a unified nation and whose benefits are going to elevate all Turkish citizens (Akbulut, 2019). By the promise of fulfilling this collective interest, the Turkish state could represent itself as a neutral actor and elicit the consent of the society to its claim to rule. The constitution of this general/collective interest also involved the portrayal of society as a homogeneous entity with no internal divisions, unified behind the goal of development, which allowed the Turkish state to pre-empt opposition that mobilised around issues such as social justice and distribution.

While state-society relationships in Turkey have undergone significant changes within the last two decades, not least with the neoliberal restructuring consolidated under AKP rule, the appeal and strength of developmentalism remains intact. While previous forms of state involvement in the economic sphere have largely been eroded, the Turkish state has not given up on its claim on developmentalism or its active engagement with the economic sphere. On the contrary, it participates in and mediates accumulation processes, in particular through constructing markets, providing incentives, and structuring participant actors, and indirectly mobilises labour, resources, and capital towards industrial centres. Inherent to this is the remaking of rural space as a resource and people as labourers to be directed to where they will be most efficiently used. This corresponds to a particular form of developmentalism shaped under authoritarian neoliberalism that is distinct from earlier eras (Akbulut et al., 2020). Rather than a developmental state following a Rostowian logic (i.e. explicit state action to direct resources to particular ends through sectoral reorganisation and economic planning), the Turkish state emerges as a choreographer that arranges markets and incentives in a particular way to reach its developmentalist aim.

An Economy of “Grabbing”

Writing on the recently codified amendment to the Law on the Transformation of Areas under the Risk of Disaster (6306 Sayılı Afet Riski Altındaki Alanların Dönüştürülmesi Hakkındaki Kanun’unda Değişiklik), known colloquially as the Reserve Area Law, which effectively expands the state’s ability to reclaim and redevelop the urban housing stock, Tanil Bora (2023) uses the term “the economy of grabbing (mülke çökme)”. Identifying the Law as the most recent link in a broader set of practices that transform land into a resource to be included in circuits of capital, he delineates how the rise of “an economy of construction and energy” depends fundamentally on the expropriation of space and land. This, for Bora, exemplifies the persistence of primitive accumulation, accelerated particularly through the destructive dynamic of capitalism that has become discernible within the neoliberal era.

Indeed, many have invoked the concept of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession in explicating Turkey’s contemporary political economy (Akbulut, 2017b; Özgür, 2023, 2024). In Marx’s original formulation, the term primitive accumulation is used to describe how enclosures of common property formed the origins of and conditions for subsequent capitalist accumulation. Through the separation of direct producers from their means of production on the one hand, and the transformation of commons into private property on the other, enclosures produced the two prerequisites of capitalist accumulation: a population forced to sell their labour power and a surplus wealth that can be put to production as capital. The concept has been reworked by David Harvey (2003) as “accumulation by dispossession” to underline that this process is not limited to a specific temporality but is rather continuously employed to restore accumulation by opening outlets of investment (new venues of capital accumulation) and providing cheap input supplies. The series of practices Harvey mentions as means of accumulation by dispossession include commodification and privatisation of land, conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, public) into exclusive private property rights, privatisation of public assets, and commodification of nature and culture (Harvey, 2003).

This conceptualisation reveals the dynamics of the accumulation regime that marks Turkey’s contemporary political economy. As discussed earlier, the rise of this era’s hallmark extractive sectors has depended on an extensive process of dispossession through enclosures of urban and rural commons and the commercialisation of public lands and resources, which were consequently incorporated into circuits of accumulation (see also Erensü & Madra, 2022). While this process crystallised most visibly in the appropriation and privatisation of rural commons such as forests, pastures, and rivers for mining and energy investments, it was paralleled by enclosures of urban commons such as streets, neighbourhoods, architectural structures, and cultural symbols, which are constituted by collective use and social relations (Fırat, 2011). In both contexts, common rights to space and resources were eradicated, through which the latter are made into capital and their users are dispossessed. Inherent to this process of dispossession has been the undermining of non-commodified forms of provisioning and (re)production of livelihoods that provided a degree of independence from the market. The appropriation of land, space, and resources that formed a fundamental basis for reproducing social life, whether in the form of material subsistence or immaterial relations and practices of reproducing everyday life, meant heightened reliance on wage labour, commodified means of subsistence and, more broadly, the mediation of market. In that sense, dispossession has implied not only a change in control and use of resources but, more importantly, the decimation of spaces of social (re)production which had previously been relatively autonomous from the mediation of the market (Akbulut, 2017b).

Yet, to the extent that the analytic of dispossession is invoked as an exceptional means of accumulation particular to the neoliberal order consolidated under the AKP rule, it risks overshadowing both the historical forms of dispossession that lay at the foundation of the republic and the contemporary dynamics of accumulation that go beyond those normally invoked by the term dispossession. Dispossession should instead be located as an axis of continuity/break—the second one that this chapter delineates—that constitutes Turkey’s contemporary political economy.

Karataşlı and Kumral (2019), in their work on the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey, mobilise an understanding of accumulation by dispossession as a continual process punctuated particularly by waves of violence, wars, and geopolitical conflict since the late nineteenth century. In doing so, they delineate waves of dispossession through which the properties, land, capital, and networks of non-Muslim and Kurdish communities have been appropriated, emphasising the “multiple and diverse paths of primitive accumulation”. Violence against Armenians, which culminated most egregiously in the Armenian Genocide, led to a massive plunder and transfer of wealth which paved the way for the emergence of a new and specifically Muslim capitalist class. In the words of Harootunian (2019, p. 128), “[w]hile the genocide’s program of dispossession – theft – and expropriation began earlier”, notably through local acts of plunder at periods of anti-Armenian violence (Kurt, 2021), “it became policy by 1915 and continued in different forms after the massacres and deportations and well into modern Turkey’s history”.Footnote 3 This economy of plunder, as Kurt (2021) dubs it, through which Armenian property was seized and reassigned to Turks, served the double objective of Turkifying the empire and the construction of a purely Turkish national economy, the ideological evolution of which is traced by Üngör and Polatel (2011). Similar processes of dispossession and confiscation were realised by the displacement of the Greek population throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as the wealth tax instigated by the People’s Republic Party in 1942 (Karataşlı & Kumral, 2019).

That is to say, the dispossession of non-Muslim populations and the appropriation of their capital, land, property, and economic networks lie at the foundation of the republic, through which a new domestic capitalist class was forged. Added to this is the massive displacement of nearly 1.5 million Kurdish people in the early 1990s through village and forced migration (see Dinç’s chapter in this book), the majority of whom became urban proletariat in Western cities. While there is no systematic account of if and how the lands and assets that Kurdish communities were forced to abandon were incorporated into circuits of capital accumulation, the displacement and dispossession of the Kurdish population have served, and continue to serve, the domestic capitalist class as they have been integrated into circuits of capital as a racialised and largely precarious segment of wage labourers (Karataşlı & Kumral, 2019).

While this reveals the historical continuity of dispossession as a constitutive element of Turkey’s political economy, the dynamics of dispossession and its role in capital accumulation within the contemporary era go beyond those captured by the analytic of accumulation by dispossession. That is to say, the processes of dispossession at work within Turkey’s neoliberal extractive capitalism have been realised through distinct forms and mechanisms that represent a break with earlier, historical forms of dispossession. Here I take up two aspects of this break: the variegated forms of alienation that fall outside of direct dispossession of producers from means of (re)production, and the dynamics that not only comprise dispossession but also the dislocation and mobilisation of labour, energy, and materials to urban industrial centres.

As elaborated throughout this chapter, the most evident mechanism of dispossession in Turkey’s contemporary era has been the expropriation of land, resources, and space associated with extractive investments. Yet a less visible, but equally prevalent, dynamic has been the dismantling of the conditions of production and subsistence, through which an indirect process of dispossession was set off (Akbulut et al., 2020). This additional dynamic is an inherent consequence of extractive activities and their transformation of space, as put succinctly by a villager in Artvin regarding the construction of a hydropower plant:

Water is everything here [...] If they build [the hydropower plant], there won’t be any produce in the garden, there won’t be any water in the pastures. If the pastures dry out, there won’t be any hay to give to the livestock; if the grass dries out, that will put an end to livestock. If livestock ends, I’m asking you, how are we going to make money?

Reduced availability of water with the construction of hydropower plants, pollution, and environmental degradation associated with energy and mining, and disruption of social networks and relations by expropriation and transformation of space severely undermine the (spatial) conditions of the social (re)production of life (see Aydın and Turhan’s chapter in this book). As the material and immaterial foundations of existing livelihood practices are eroded, communities are forced out of their traditional networks and bases of livelihoods and subsistence, making them more dependent on—although not automatically integrated within—wage labour. As such, this process functions as a form of separation or dislocation from the spatial conditions of production and subsistence, which ultimately, if indirectly, dispossessed urban and rural communities.

This distinct form of dispossession is echoed also in the quotes cited at the beginning of this chapter, with phrases such as “a veiled forced displacement policy”, “an exigency with the destruction of social space”, “when there is no living space left”, “this is about getting rid of the people here” and “depopulate the region as a whole [i]n order to use the water more freely, to extract the mines more easily”. These accounts attest first to how the dismantling of the conditions of the reproduction of life functions as dispossession. However, they also shed light on how the subsequent dislocation of dispossessed communities perpetuates capital accumulation. Through displacing populations and severing their social relations to land and space based on access, use, belonging, and history, this process empties space, by which social opposition is hindered, and paves the way for its incorporation into circuits of capital. This aspect of dislocation is obviously not novel: as Dilsiz and Özdemir elaborate in their interview quoted earlier, the strategy to “depopulate” in order to fragment communities and rupture the social infrastructures they rely on has always been integral to the Turkish state’s policy towards oppositional forces, particularly the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Yet the contemporary dynamics of dislocation differ significantly, Dilsiz and Özdemir state, in that such counter-insurgency strategies are now being used to pave the way—almost literally—for capital accumulation.

Second, as alluded to earlier, the contemporary regime of accumulation in Turkey relies not only on the expropriation of resources and dispossession of communities but also on their dislocation and transformation. That is to say, it comprises not only dispossession but also the dislocation and mobilisation of the dispossessed (labour), as well as the extracted materials and energy, away from their immediate surroundings to urban industrial centres—a regime that we have dubbed “accumulation by dislocation” elsewhere (Akbulut et al., 2020). This regime has been driven by broader processes produced and mediated by the Turkish state, including the comprehensive wave of agricultural liberalisation with the rollout of the Agricultural Reform Implementation Program (ARIP), the ongoing eradication of rural infrastructure and extensive commodification of rural commons, and labour market policies that incentivise various forms of precarious employment. This was coupled with the state-led commodification of land and housing in urban centres, to which energy and labour power were mobilised, and which “energised” and enabled the construction boom. As such, both the spatial organisation of dispossession and that of its aftermath are closely tied to the role played by the state, especially under its authoritarian form.

Conclusion

This chapter has explicated Turkey’s political economy by delineating two axes, developmentalism, and dispossession, that embody a continuity and a break throughout the history of the republic. I have argued that both developmentalism and dispossession have persisted as foundational motifs of the country’s political economy, yet the forms they have taken and the mechanisms through which they have been articulated have been significantly different in the contemporary era. While the notion of development continues to carry as much force as before, particularly as an illusory collective interest of the society, the role that the Turkish state assumes towards fulfilling its developmentalist ambitions has been more of a choreographer which mobilises markets and incentive mechanisms. Dispossession, on the other hand, has taken distinct forms and mechanisms in contemporary Turkey, which represents a break with its historical forms, notably in the indirect processes of alienation through the dismantling of the conditions of production and subsistence.

While the chapter addressed these two motifs largely separately, developmentalism and dispossession have been hinged closely together within the contemporary political economy of Turkey. On the one hand, contemporary processes of dispossession are framed within a developmentalist rhetoric and justified through the promise of bringing development, employment, or rural infrastructure. While this is not necessarily novel (Akbulut et al., 2018; Evren, 2016), that it is replacing, at least on the surface, an overtly militarist discourse in Kurdistan is worth consideration (Ormansızlaştırarak insansızlaştırma, 2023). On the other hand, the particular ways in which the Turkish state has been participating in and mediating the contemporary processes of dispossession points to motivations beyond those of a passive instrument of capital and rather to the reproduction of its own existence and legitimacy; that is, the promise of delivering economic development constituted as the collective interest of society.

The Kurdish Freedom Movement’s project of Democratic Economy emerges as a paradigm-shifting alternative within this political-economic context. Concomitant to the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s political vision of democratic autonomy is the construction of a communal economy along the principles of women’s liberation, ecology, and democracy (Aslan, 2016; Aslan & Akbulut, 2019). Democratic Economy is envisioned explicitly as non-accumulationist, where economic relations are oriented towards the fulfilment of needs and collective and equitable access to the means of social reproduction is prioritised over profit-making. This is buttressed by the positing of nature as the non-commodifiable common heritage of all living creatures. Some of the more concrete proposals put forth include the minimisation of fossil fuel consumption; de-commodification of land, water, and energy; equity and ecological limits to be established as the basis of governance of natural resources; and material extraction to be limited by needs and use value rather than exchange value and profit (Akbulut, 2017a).

Although a broad-based debate towards a clearer and more concrete articulation and operationalisation of this project was initiated in 2013, it was abruptly (and violently) undercut by the Turkish state’s offensive starting in 2015. The project of Democratic Economy is noteworthy nonetheless, as an imaginary if not as an institutionalised set of practices. Against the backdrop of a political economy imprinted with the continuity of dispossession and dislocation justified by the idea of development, this vision deconstructs the imperative of development, which is otherwise seen unquestionable, and puts the historical and contemporary dynamics of dispossession into sharp relief, both historically and contemporarily. The project of Democratic Economy thus denotes an alternative political economy not only for Kurdistan, but also more broadly for Turkey.