Localization of Neoliberalism. State Rescaling, War and Culture in Southeast Turkey - PhD defense of Ayse Seda Yuksel

PhD defense of Ayse Seda Yuksel

Dissertation Examination Committee:

Chair:  Tamara Steger, Assistant Professor at the Department of History, CEU

Supervisor: Ayse Caglar, Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

Internal examiner: Prem Kumar Rajaram, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU

External examiner: Ayse Bugra, Professor at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Bogaziçi University

Abstract:

This dissertation examines the processes of neoliberal restructuring in southeast Turkey through the lens of a two-year ethnographic research conducted in two cities, namely Gaziantep and Diyarbakır.  Building upon the ethnographic material collected in these two cities, I explore the ways local economic elites attempt to reposition themselves and their cities through urban entrepreneurial regimes. The various and multifaceted phases of capitalist scalar restructuring in Turkey since the introduction of neoliberal reforms in 1980 have not only rescaled localities and imposed a new conception of a fragmented national geography but it also radically reshaped the modes of locality formation and the forms of belonging. This study seeks to extend the theories of state rescaling and neoliberal restructuring to southeast Anatolia, a geography moulded by the low-intensity war between PKK and Turkish army and the exceptional policies of the Turkish state. It aims to contribute to the under-researched area of the impacts of global neoliberalism on southeast Anatolian cities in Turkey, and more importantly provide a critical analysis of the relations between capitalist restructuring, wars, identifications and urban culture. 

This dissertation aims to advance discussions in three areas. First it sheds light on the processes of state rescaling in localities, manifested in the form of various entrepreneurialisms (cultural or industrial) that are embedded in the local activisms of local elites (political and economic) in support of a specific trajectory under neoliberalism. It discusses various assets/dynamics that serve the local actors to mobilize multi-scalar networks for “jumping scales” and defining particular trajectories under neoliberalism (such as ethnicity, local history, local politics). Second, by detailing the moral and legal universe within which the capitalist restructuring in Turkey evolved in tandem with the symbolic universe of religion and ethnicity, this dissertation discusses how wars, exceptional rule regimes and authoritarian techniques of government articulate to rescaling processes. It claims that rather than being ruptures to the neoliberal capitalist restructuring, wars and conflicts create alternative systems of profit, wealth and power, thus inevitably alter the identifications and modes of belonging in a particular site. Last but not the least, this dissertation illustrates how interventions to urban environment, local histories and local cultures are strictly related to the “localization” of rescaling processes. It argues local histories and interventions to urban spaces become part of significant strategies by the local actors for repositioning their localities in the geo-economic hierarchies of neoliberal order.