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State as Socionatural Effect: Variable and Emergent Geographies of the State in Southeastern Turkey

Duke University Press

This article draws on recent interventions related to everyday states, state-natures and political ecologies of the state, as well as the “state as effect” idea of Timothy Mitchell, to detail and analyze ongoing changes in southeastern Turkey associated with the large scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). Using interviews and survey data, I detail changing narrations and understandings of the Turkish state among villagers of Turkey’s southeast, revealing the importance of social and historical processes, as well as differentiated biophysical conditions and changing access to water resources for these imaginaries. The case study details both ways that state-society relations evolve, as well as ways that the state is expressed as distinct from society, in part in relation to the varied and important changes associated with the ongoing damming and diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Apart from contributions to understandings of the state and state-society dynamics in the long-contested southeastern Anatolia border region, the work also advances state theory. Specifically, I build on arguments related to the importance of political ecology and socio-natural approaches, detailing key analytics related to these approaches the provide important insights for state theory –spatio – temporalities, inequality and differentiated access to resources, scalar dynamics, and materialities of nature. I argue that these analytics have considerable potential to advance state theory and state-nature approaches, particularly to draw out ways that the state emerges as seemingly distinct from society—the ‘state effect.’ Scale, I argue, may be particularly useful towards this end, and to expose other key processes of importance for states and stateness as they relate to development and nature.

Article

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0132708

Science, Faculty of; Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for

Reviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/