Murat Öztürk*

The ownership of private land in Turkey has numerous legal, political, economic, and ethnic dimensions, both individually and collectively necessitating discussion. Legally, the transition of the right of land use from state ownership (demesne) to private ownership began with the Ottoman Land Regulation Law of 1858 and was further fortified and safeguarded by the republican-era constitutions and other legal measures during the twentieth century. Legal regulations alone do not determine the nature of the distribution of land to individuals and groups, but they are a strong indicator. Other political and social aspects, such as population exchange, forced migration and displacement, and subsequent land allocation, as well as the influence of the Kurdish agha system in southeast Anatolia, indicate the political aspects of the determination of land ownership in the country. Considering all these factors, the Turkish experience reveals that the distribution of land ownership and usage rights cannot be explained by a single factor and that political considerations need to be taken into account.

Necmettin Türk*

Control and access to land and related natural resources have been systematically used against Kurds by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state as key disciplinary tools to consolidate state presence and to advance its colonial exploitation and assimilation processes. The Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM, Tevgera Azadiyê ya Kurd) has developed an ecological struggle against these policies as an essential element of its politics to decolonize the state’s control mechanisms over land and resources through commitment to ecological and democratic principles with the objective of creating a new ethic and aesthetic of national liberation.

Kamuran Akin*

My research   “In/visible Colonization: On infrastructure, surveillance and destruction in northern Kurdistan”[i], aims to understand the implications of infrastructural projects on the Kurdish issue, specifically under the AKP government since the early 2000s. I show how specific examples of coloniality in northern Kurdistan harness in intricate ways institutional racism, population control and ecological destruction.

Adnan Mirhanoğlu* and Eray Çaylı**

In Mesopotamia, a region central to mainstream historiographies of agriculture’s role in civilization as state building, hydrology has figured prominently in understandings of whether and/or how long states survive. “Civilizational collapse” has been attributed to irrigation practices that distribute water unevenly, such that some lands are overirrigated while others are desertified and salinized (Hillel 2000; Jacobsen and Adams 1958; Postel 1999). Turkey’s so-called Southeastern Anatolia Project or GAP is often treated as the latest case in point (Bilgili et al. 2018; Özerol and Bressers 2017). Initiated in 1977 amidst incipient armed conflict in the region, GAP’s founding premise was that “the Eastern Question” (as the problems plaguing this region were then called in Turkey) was the result of underdevelopment. GAP’s solution has mainly involved the construction of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, along with large-scale irrigation canals serving 1.8 million hectares of land (Bilgen 2020). Several decades on, GAP remains an ongoing project (46% of the areas where the masterplan proposed to build irrigation canals have yet to receive coverage) as does the question it has aimed to solve.

Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou*

The Lavrio camp was established in 1947 in the coastal town of Lavrio in Greece, as the country’s first state structure dedicated to the reception of asylum seekers. After 1980, due to the political instability in neighboring Turkey, the majority of the camp’s population consisted of left-wing Turkish asylum seekers and subsequently, almost exclusively of persecuted Kurdish asylum seekers predominantly from Turkey, who were associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Lavrio camp gradually acquired a central position within the trajectories of Kurdish migrants passing through (but also settling in) Greece and became a political showcase in exile for the struggle led by the PKK, as well as a part of the PKK’s transnational migrant network.

For the last 30 years, the Lavrio state-run camp was operated by the Red Cross in an informal cooperation with the PKK network. It was the PKK, for example, that decided in most cases who would, and who would not, be accommodated in the camp. However, in the midst of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, and the multiple changes it brought in the governance of migration at the national and European level, the status of the camp changed dramatically. Specifically, in 2017, the Greek government demanded from camp residents to ‘de-politicise’ the camp by taking down all symbols, posters and images defining it as a political space of the PKK, and planned for camp residents to be moved to other recently established state-run camp facilities. When camp residents refused, the government withdrew from the site and the camp became self-organised. Since then, the camp was run with the support of the PKK network, as well as local, national, and transnational solidarity initiatives.