ٍSince the late 2000s, Turkey’s countryside began to grab the headlines with reports on protests against resource extraction and infrastructural development projects. The planning and construction of hydroelectric, thermal, geothermal, and coal-burning plants, electricity transmission lines and mining facilities were being met with fierce opposition by rural communities across the country.
Protest actions where men and women, old and young, farmers and pensioners, clashed with the police and gendarmerie for hours were not rare. Occasionally, company meetings were disrupted, and construction vehicles were damaged or set on fire. Soon, they were joined by leftwing activists, journalists, lawyers, artists, and academics from urban centers who were at once intrigued and inspired by the intensity of these struggles.
The long fight against dams
The projects that provoked these protests were part of a new economic model based on the expropriation of rural commons that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) brought to life shortly after coming to power for the first time in 2002. Initially, hydro-energy constituted the backbone of this accumulation regime.
Usage rights of rivers and forest lands were quickly conceded to domestic private companies for several decades to construct hundreds of small-scale hydro-electric power plants (HEPPs).
Faced with countless legal challenges, as well as with different forms of massive campaigning and resistance by rural communities, AKP retorted with a mixture of measures: the introduction of judicial exceptions to expropriation laws, a PR campaign among its support base around the idea of ‘energy independence’, and the more than occasional resort to physical violence.
Whereas some projects were forced to be canceled after long and arduous battles, the damming of rivers and rivulets across the country for energy production was more or less completed within two decades.
Around the same time, AKP embarked on building a series of mega-dam projects on the largest rivers that cross Turkey to be able to convert the motions of water into larger quantities of megawatts. Initially conceived in the offices of the Department of State Planning (DPT) in the 1950s and 60s, large-scale projects such as the Yusufeli Dam on the Çoruh River in the northeast and the Ilısu Dam project on the Tigris in the southeast of the country, respectively, could not be implemented for several decades as state coffers lacked the necessary funds to cover the hefty construction costs.
During the early neoliberalization of Turkey’s energy markets in the 1990s, right-wing governments opted for overcoming this heavy burden by signing bilateral agreements with countries such as Austria, Switzerland and the UK. In this way, they were able to deliver the tenders to international construction companies financially supported by export credit agencies.
Coordinating with European NGOs, local communities pushed against international companies and their domestic subsidiaries to protect their towns against the threats of submergence, displacement and dispossession.
The internationalization of the struggles
Between 2010 and 2018, I followed the case of the Yusufeli Dam project closely. Local activists and their allies compelled three international consortiums to withdraw one after another as they managed to block the release of funds by export credit agencies. They repeatedly made the point that the project fundamentally violates several international guidelines and protections concerning dam planning and building.
The campaign was facilitated in particular by the absence of an environmental assessment report and the companies’ reluctance to abide by the set of norms regulating the flows of dam capital. These norms related to environmental protection and resettlement that they addressed were in return set as a result of earlier transnational anti-dam struggles, such as the campaign against the construction of Sardar Sarovar Dam in Narmada Valley, India and the Bela Monte Dam in the state of Para, in Brazil.
The World Commission on Dams that the Indian and Brazilian struggles ushered in in 1997 eventually made it necessary for international funders from the World Bank to the Suisse Credit to at least pay lip service to the need to protect the environment and livelihoods against the threats posed by mega-dam projects. Activists fighting against the Yusufeli and Ilısu Dam strategically tapped into this global moment of transnational anti-dam activism to defer both projects for more than a decade.
However, this victory did not last for long. Even without any prospect of attracting international dam capital anymore, the Turkish state announced in 2010 that it would finance the Yusufeli project on its own. This new development was in part made possible by the availability of global liquidity.
While no international funder was investing directly in the project itself anymore, the boosting of international flows of capital from the global north allowed countries like Turkey to embark on large-scale construction projects themselves thanks to the appreciation of national currencies, the upsurge of foreign reserves and the declining of borrowing costs.
In this context, in addition to the Yusufeli Dam, the Ilısu, Sardar Sarovar and Bela Monte projects were similarly renationalized in the course of the 2010s. In the case of the Yusufeli project, a new tender was quickly delivered to a national consortium composed of three of the largest domestic construction companies close to the AKP and the Erdoğan family.
The shift from a transnational to a national regime of finance and construction that we observe in the case of mega-dam projects as a result of decades-long struggles invokes an idea advanced by theorists coming from the Italian workerist/post-workerist tradition: conflict is an internal mechanism of capitalist development and therefore capital accumulation is contingent on struggles. Put differently, the history of capitalism has been and continues to be written by the antagonisms animated by working class struggles against exploitation that capital tries to control and contain as a reaction. Antonio Negri formulated this slightly differently by postulating that resistance precedes domination by capital, but is parasitically contained by the latter for its survival.
After the nationalization
After the Turkish state once again nationalized the project, the local opposition to the Yusufeli Dam gradually began to fizzle out. A number of promises made about compensation payments and the new settlement area by the town’s mayor and the figures from local party networks in coordination with national politicians helped to replace resistance to the project with negotiation as the dominant mode of political action.
These figures also began to garner the support of local residents by actively creating the conditions for a real estate boom and land speculation in the years preceding the town’s submergence; for example, by lifting bans on new constructions or artificially increasing the value of plots.
The increasing capacity for these politicians from the party-state to generate economic incentives, at least for a short period of time, was no doubt tied with residents’ affective investments in the real and imagined connections between the local and the national. Politicians and administrators recognized as co-locals, such as the former mayor of Istanbul, were crucial in cultivating hopes for negotiating the terms and conditions of their displacement and dispossession.
Whereas a handful of activists continued to oppose and legally challenge the project until the end, the rest, including many residents who had previously filled in the streets to protest and mobilize against their displacement, actively took part in speculative investments on property and their livelihoods enabled by the party-state and its local/national representatives.
Governing in the interests of capital accumulation by appealing to the sensibilities of the community and co-locality attests to the significance of those material and immaterial bonds, imaginaries, and activities that sustain these relations. I believe we can call them “conservative commons”, taking our cue from political theorists who warn against the dangers of recognizing commons invariably as the locus of resistance against the state and capital. For example, David Harvey reminds us that gated communities too are an example of commons or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who speak of the family, the corporation, and the nation as corrupt forms of the commons.
Actions taken (or not taken) by various representatives of the AKP in the name of kinship, co-locality or the shared conservative-nationalist ideology in Yusufeli served to legitimize the party-state’s visions of development and absorb the collective energies that once electrified the resistance against dam buildings.
In line with Negri’s and other post-workerist arguments then, resistance to mega-dams, together with the broader political and financial transformations, compelled a fundamental change in the conditions of capital accumulation. The blocking of the international regime of dam planning and construction could not have been possible without the truly transnational anti-dam activism into which the Yusufeli campaign was articulated.
What came to replace it however, was a national regime of development, which is not only antithetical in many ways to the new smooth and flat space of global capital imagined by Negri but also particularly conducive to the harnessing of material and immaterial connections forged around identity for the containment of resistance.
While violence remains the main tool for crushing dissent against extractive capitalism in Turkey and elsewhere, the case of Yusufeli shows us that commons, in their corrupt form, can become another medium through which resistance is blocked. It suggests too that domination takes new guises or finds new momentum by tapping into the realities on the ground that the energies of discontent create.
And yet, the struggles continue and they continue to mutate further as capital and the state penetrate into new frontiers. In the current moment, fights against mining activities across Turkey constitute the most intense form of environmental struggles. It is fair to say that these rural confrontations and campaigns will not extinguish anytime soon. They may also have an important political role to play as the AKP regime and the Erdoğan rule are possibly nearing their end.
References
Arsel, Murat, Bengi Akbulut and Fikret Adaman (2015) “Environmentalism of the Malcontent: Anatomy of an Anti-Coal Power Plant Struggle in Turkey.” Journal of Peasant Studies 42(2): 371-395.
Erensü, Sinan (2018) “The Contradictions of Turkey’s Rush to Energy.” Middle East Report 288: 32-35.
Evren, Erdem (2022) Bulldozer Capitalism: Accumulation, Ruination and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey. New York: Berghahn.
Negri, Antonio (2005) Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. London: Verso.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009) Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David (2011) “The Future of the Commons.” Radical History Review 109: 101–7.
Khagram, Sanjeev (2018) Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Tronti, Mario (2019) Workers and Capital. London: Verso.
Yaka, Özge (2023) Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles. California: University of California Press.
