Infrastructures rule in Turkey. They do in double sense. On the one hand, infrastructures rule as the ubiquous agents of the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) political economy. They are key to rent seeking activity, the maintenance of a loyal cadre of businessmen as well as garner consent from a development hungry population. On the other hand, infrastructures rule through a set of legal tools that have been recently devised and/or reinterpreted to accelerate the completion of the projects often slowed down by local resistances, administrative court decisions, natural and geographical challenges as well as financial hardship. In the recent years, hundreds of infrastructure projects have been suspended for long durations by court orders as they were sued by grassroots oppositions and stuck in the country’s notoriously tardy judicial system. In many cases, courts sided with the local plaintiffs and asked for revisions in the environmental impact assessments, annulment of land confiscations or correction of building permits all of which meant further delays. These delays put a significant burden on the private sector, the sensitive loan repayment commitments, and risk the realization of the celebrated projects. Over the past decade, the government put a great deal of resources to ease permits, accelerate land transfers, and minimized administrative oversight for the investors for the seamless progression of infrastructural investments. While I argue these legal tools have contributed to the emergence of a regime of urgency around the infrastructures, in the papers focuses on one aspect of regime called urgent appropriation procedure, an extraordinary imminent domain application. I examine the historical roots of this niche legal procedure and illustrate how it has been utilized to foster infrastructure investments. Based on ethnographic research on small-size hydropower plant developments in Eastern Black Sea Region I discuss how urgent appropriation has shaped the country’s regime of dispossession. Furthermore, I argue that the real prowess of this legal tool stems not from its ability to speedily solve infrastructure-led land-use disputes, but from its usefulness as a technology of government that could be transferred to various other policy areas from urban transformation to counter-insurgency. By looking the increased role of the central government as the ultimate broker of land deals, my paper provides an alternative trajectory for the authoritarianization in Turkey that is shaped not necessary at the level of high politics but through a regime of urgency that takes place in the Turkish countryside.

What is the “before” of the infrastructure? What comes before the concrete materiality of oil pipelines, hardworking pumps, and deep, fertile wells? In 1930s, motivated by the abundance of oil resources in their neighboring countries, Turkish bureaucrats decided to spend their limited money and resources for oil exploration. Yet, geological assessments have shown that Turkey is not an oil-rich country, as only seven percent of the country’s oil consumption is sourced by national oil reserves today (ETKB 2015). Focusing on failed exploration attempts, abandoned oil wells and lost hopes, this paper examines pivotal moments in national oil exploration projects conducted by geologists and geophysicists at the state-owned Turkish Petroleum Company in the past eighty years. Compared with imaginaries of national progress, energy independence and geopolitical power that energy infrastructure projects often generate in Turkey, such failures reveal a darker side of the generative capacity of infrastructures: conspiracy theories. From assassinated journalists and politicians holding key information about international oil secrets, to deliberately abandoned oil wells that were in fact quite productive, conspiracy theories about the evildoings of malevolent Western powers and their collaborators inside keep occupying the public imaginary in Turkey. Today, the unyielding faith in the “resource potentiality” (Weszkalnys 2015) of Turkish lands goes hand in hand with an even stronger conviction in the obstruction of such ideals by internal traitors and external enemies. In fact, conspiracy talk has been the trademark of the populist and authoritarian AKP government, if not its massive infrastructure and construction projects. However, rather than conceptualizing conspiracy theories within a dichotomy of the rational and the irrational, this paper takes them seriously in order to think about the political-economic “truths” that infrastructure imaginaries work to mask in the first place. Tracing ethnographic encounters in the capital Ankara and Kurdish-populated oil cities Batman and Adiyaman, interviews with politicians, scientists and engineers, bestseller books, corruption scandals, news leaks and rumor, this paper explores the kinds and ways of evidence that different actors use in order to make certain political or scientific claims about how power operates in Turkey and the world today. In doing so, it examines the kinds of knowledge, politics, and future horizons that are enabled by conspiracy theories and by their debunking.

Achieving modernization and economic progress has been a long-standing objective of Turkish policymakers, one that has received remarkably little contestation from the side of a wide range of ideologies within Turkish politics. Consequently, growth policies have been given priority, based on the assumption that their achievement would automatically resolve social and political issues, and debates on how to best promote economic growth have always dominated the political landscape. Indeed, the roots of this undisputed appeal and dominance of growth-oriented modernization can be located within the configuration of state-society relationships; in particular, the way that the state established and legitimized itself. Fulfilling the promise of the ideal of modernization enabled the Turkish state to represent itself as a neutral institution that embodied the collective will of the people, and thus acquire the consent of the society to its claim rule, i.e. constituted its hegemonic project. While the undisputed appeal of growth and modernization has changed little, its operationalization has undergone radical shifts within the last decade. In particular within the case of hydro-power, the dominance of state-led/owned large infrastructures is replaced with small-scale hydro-power plants undertaken by the private sector within the contemporary era. This shift was also marked with the emergence of numerous local resistances in response, unprecedented in their prevalence and the public attention they received. Yet the numerous conflicts sparked by these projects stand in contrast with the relatively little contestation that the large-scale dams have produced in the past. This presentation explains this contrast by the ineffectiveness of small-scale hydropower plants in (re)producing consent to the state’s claim to rule. In doing so, it builds on Gramscian political ecoloy and employs the findings of a case study conducted in Northeastern Anatolia. More specifically, it is argued that the dams have invoked an image of the nation as a unified collective, where all has to (somewhat reciprocally) sacrifice and is compensated by the fruits of modernization, and that of the state as a deliverer of modernization who arbitrates neutrally. Small-scale hydropower plants, on the other hand, are marked by the absence of such consent-building to state power.

Following the discovery of oil fields in Raman mountain, Batman oil refinery was established in 1955, near Kurdish-populated ?luh village of Siirt Province. A complex network of oil pipelines was also built to connect the refinery to the oil fields but also to the air fields. With the establishment of oil industry, ?luh continued to attract a stream of population, ranging from petroleum engineers to refinery and pipeline technicians and workers. In 1990, Batman province was established. During the 1990s, Batman’s population dramatically increased, from a few hundred thousands to over a million, due to the village evacuations and forced displacement of Kurdish population in the wake of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. The forcibly displaced population created shanty-town neighborhoods in the outskirts of the Batman city center, these neighborhoods covered the surface of the complex network of oil pipelines connecting oil refinery to oil fields as well as air fields. With worsening socio-economic conditions, an increasing number of Batman residents engaged in oil theft from the oil pipelines and justified the oil bunkering by denying and countering the Turkish state’s ownership claim of natural resources, prominently oil and natural gas, in Turkey’s Kurdistan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011, I examine the socio-technical as well as political-moral dimensions of oil bunkering in Batman. A recent set of studies have examined the unexpected political and economic opportunities that the state-led infrastructures created for disenfranchised groups. As these studies have mostly centered on urban infrastructures, that range from water pipes to power lines, a little attention has been paid to rural infrastructures. This paper counterbalances this lack of attention by unpacking the socio-technical, economic, and political-moral agencies that the oil refinery and oil pipeline networks, which were designed and constructed as rural infrastructures, enabled in the context of rapid, unexpected, and unplanned urbanization. Through its focus on the local sets of political and moral justifications of oil theft among Kurdish oil traders, smugglers, and thieves, the paper also goes beyond the institution and elite-based analyses that prevail in the studies of the Kurdish politics in Turkey.

The history of electrification in Turkey is connected to the transformation of social life, state formation, and the emergence of citizens who became consumers of energy derived from natural resources. Electrification took place within the context of the Republic’s modernization project, which brought profound political-economic and social changes that continue to shape Turkish society. Through archival ethnography, my project analyzes the processes that brought modern citizens and state into being through the creation of an electrical infrastructure in Turkey’s early Republican era, 1923-1950. I argue that electrification played a key part in Turkey’s modernization, because it made possible two things crucial to the development of capitalism and the consolidation of the modern state: industrialization and the creation of a citizen who consumes technological commodities. Analyzing the processes of electrification and the subjects it generated in Turkey thus provides insight into how state power is consolidated through the reproduction of citizen-subjects and through the state’s relationship to capital and resources, as well as its hold over the provision and regulation of utilities like electricity. My paper explores this consolidation, asking: how is modernization and the Gramscian notion of popular consent connected to the state's role as the main provider of infrastructure for its citizens? How did electrification help to produce modern citizen-subjects in Turkey? How was the image of a state acting for the common interest of the nation created? This paper aims to integrate the history of infrastructure and political economy in Turkey with the project of state-building, modernization and subject formation by investigating the relationships between state, capital, electricity and society. It seeks to bridge the divide between two approaches to the concept of the state in Turkey: those which focus on class, capital and state power as their object of analysis, and those that hone in on subject formation and the experience of state power in the everyday. Thus, I aim to provide an understanding of Turkish modernization that goes beyond explanations of modernization as a solely cultural phenomenon by introducing a political economic approach that also takes into account changes in the everyday lives of citizens.