The Southeast Anatolia Project, known by its Turkish acronym of GAP (Güneydo?u Anadolu Projesi), is one of the largest regional development projects in the world. The development program’s most prominent work is a series of massive hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects on the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. However, the project extends far beyond water infrastructure in its remaking of the economic life and environment of nine Turkish provinces. Hospitals, airports, community centers, and schools are also part of the GAP. Indeed, scholars and activists have noted how the GAP became the “economic solution” to the problems of Kurdish resistance in Anatolia. Yet, to call the GAP a Turkish project would be a misnomer: international agencies financed many projects, which in turn employed international experts and multinational corporations. To obtain this support and funding, the GAP administration, organized in the late 1980s, sought to frame the project and the technology of the dam within broader, globalized discourses of security and sustainability. Security discourses produced and activated a range of boundaries, often depending on binary constructions, such as water security/insecurity, border security/insecurity, economic security/insecurity. Meanwhile, as awareness of climate change and other environmental degradation grew in the 1990s, the GAP became “sustainable.” Indeed, the project’s Wikipedia page now announces that the GAP is “based on the concept of sustainable development,” despite its reliance on massive dams known to produce myriad negative environmental effects. Notions of sustainability produced other binaries (sustainable/unsustainable), but also rendered the project within the language of a globalized, and increasingly corporate, environmentalism. Such framings were critical as funding agencies’ priorities shifted, though, ultimately, the GAP itself hardly changed; a huge dam, the Il?su, now rises on the Tigris River. The two discourses seemed, then, to enfold and support one another. “To secure” and “to sustain” meant much the same thing to the GAP administration: economic “development” imposed from above. This paper will examine memoirs, parliamentary reports, and official publications from the 1990s to trace how the GAP administration adapted to changing discourses on security and sustainability. It will also critically analyze the GAP administration’s efforts in relation to an increasingly prevalent body of literature: studies connecting environmental change to international security. A genealogy of these connected discourses in the case of the GAP is critical to understanding how and why their entanglement may in fact hinder conflict resolution and environmental resilience.

This paper investigates the construction of the discourse of water scarcity in Jordan. First, it identifies the actors constructing the discourse, their interests, and the elements comprising the discourse. Second, it examines the effects of the deployment of the discourse of water scarcity on policy-options, analysing the solutions opened and closed by the discourse in the national water strategy. Third, it explores the effects of the deployment of the discourse on transboundary water governance, as well as what other factors shape Jordanian-Syrian, Jordanian-Israeli, and Jordanian-Saudi hydropolitical relations. The study is important and makes an original empirical contribution because the discourse of water scarcity has been taken for granted, and studies on an in depth discursive analysis in Jordan are still missing. Research undertaken in other contexts on this topic shows that discourses are being deployed to sanction and open certain solutions rather than others. It also shows that policies are designed and implemented in line with dominant discourses. The main methods of data collection are documentation as well as semi-structured interviews with relevant individuals involved in the construction and reproduction of the discourse. The data are analysed through Fairclough’s theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, which applied to this case study represents a methodological contribution to knowledge. The study finds that there is a single dominant discourse of water scarcity, which is composed of two narratives: water insufficiency and water mismanagement. The water insufficiency narrative is emphasises factors external to the responsibility of the Jordanian government as reasons for water scarcity, like nature, refugees, and neighbouring countries. It is mainly constructed by governmental oriented actors and deployed to open solutions on the supply and conservation sides and ultimately to maintain the status quo of the current water uses. The water mismanagement narrative emphasises as reasons for water scarcity factors of mismanagement of water resources, and deployed to increase economic efficiency in the water sector. The actors behind this narrative are mainly donors and international organisations. The water mismanagement narrative opens mainly demand oriented policies and solutions on the conservation side, ultimately challenging the status quo of the current water uses. However, the water mismanagement narrative is not dominant, and therefore does not have a major impact on the policies. The results suggest that the dominant and mainstream narrative is water insufficiency and the most prominent solutions that this narrative opens are on the supply side and particularly of transboundary nature.

Built in the Landscape: Large Dam Construction and Expertise in Turkey This paper examines the role of the landscape in shaping the construction and maintenance of large-scale infrastructures in Turkey. Over the last two decades, megaprojects have been central to the politics of Justice and Development Party, mobilizing the claim of making a “New Turkey.” This novel emphasis on megaprojects as political tools of building hegemony (Paker, 2017) draws upon the long-lasting legacy of practices of conquering nature and transforming space. By shifting attention from the spatio-political implications of megaprojects to the equally important politics of expertise integral to the construction of these projects, I will approach large dams as political, technical, and ecological assemblages whose embeddedness in a landscape is not a given, but a highly negotiated and dynamic process. My ethnographic analysis will focus on two specific sites: (i) the construction of the dam body and (ii) the maintenance of the dam reservoir on the Çoruh River located in northeastern Turkey. First, I will analyze how experts and engineers survey, decide on, and monitor the very site where the dam body is located. Second, I will look at foresters’ efforts of protecting dams from erosion and sedimentation through practices of soil conservation in the uplands. By looking at the ways in which the relationship between large dams and the landscape they inhabit is managed, this paper will shed light on the co-existence of different forms of expertise and temporalities in the making of large-scale infrastructures. Drawing upon scholarly works that approach biophysical environment as an integral part of infrastructure building and maintenance (Carse, 2014; Barry, 2016), I will show that the juxtaposition of immediacy of construction and the long-term temporality of maintenance render visible what I call “uneasy collaborations” within a diverse expert and engineering community. Works Cited Barry, A 2016, “Infrastructure and the earth,” in P. Harvey, C. B. Jensen, and A. Morita (eds.), Infrastructures and social complexity: a companion, Routledge, London, pp.187-198. Carse, A 2014, Beyond the big ditch: politics, ecology, and infrastructure at the Panama Canal, The MIT Press, Cambridge. Paker, H 2017, “The ‘Politics of Serving’ and Neoliberal Developmentalism: The Megaprojects of the AKP as Tools of Hegemony Building,” in F. Adaman, B. Akbulut, and M. Arsel (eds.), Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment under Erdo?an, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, pp.103-119.

Throughout the 20th century, many Palestinian peasant households chose to grow tobacco commercially. This was especially true for the early 1920s, the years of the “tobacco rush.” However, the skill of these Arab Palestinian growers was a debated matter. Within newly established capitalist relations in a settler-colonial context, skill and expertise were a reflection of the power structure in which they were embedded. Europeans (e.g. British officials, Jewish settlers, and cigarette manufacturers) perceived peasants to be unskilled and unproductive. They believed peasants used “primitive” methods, were inexperienced with tobacco cultivation, and were unable to improve, and therefore diminished the quality of tobacco, and set the whole industry back. Tobacco companies used grading scales to decide the prices paid for tobacco according to quality, more often than not deeming local Arab crops as inferior to imported tobacco. Peasants countered their negative characterization using a multiplicity of not only discursive, but also material means which boosted their pride in their craft and lifestyle, while creating new ways to provide for their families. Peasants believed that as natives, they were most familiar with the landscape and climate, and that peasant households were the production units best-equipped for the job. Peasants additionally invested in alternative markets and customers; they decided between the long-existing informal markets of “smuggled” tobacco (present since the Ottoman period) on one hand, and state-sponsored monopolized production on the other. Based on archival and oral history research, I argue that the real or perceived ability of peasants to adequately grow quality tobacco drove them to carve out an alternative economic sphere, which deeply affected the revenues of both the state and tobacco companies, and troubled the formal market.