Emergent Conversation 24

This essay is part of the series Kurdistan(s): Repression, Resistance, and the Fight for Survival,
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 24

By Eray Çaylı

On a summer evening in 2019, Berivan and I are gazing out over the Tigris River from the roof of her family’s house in Fiskaya, a neighborhood in Northern Kurdistan’s unrecognized capital city Amed (known in Turkish as Diyarbakır). She and I have spent the afternoon here planning the workshop we will conduct about urban gardens for Amed’s independent artist-run space Loading. Following a free summer school I coordinated earlier this year for the city’s Chamber of Architects, I remained in Amed at Loading’s invitation as their researcher-in-residence, organizing public workshops on environmental politics. Across the river from us—in the area known as Kıtılbıl—is an industrial fishpond converted from what was once a sand quarry. Berivan, a landscape technician born and raised in Fiskaya, recalls earthmoving (in Turkish: hafriyat) trucks working day and night to transport the sand from here to construction sites all over Amed in the early days of the city’s mid-2000s construction boom.

It was possible to dig sand quarries along this stretch of the Tigris because an amendment made in 1990 to Turkey’s Coast Law exempted the first 100 kilometers downstream of the river’s headwaters from protection afforded to all other major rivers in the country (Çaylı [2020] 2023, 58). When the quarry ran out of extractable sand, its owners drew water from the Tigris to create the industrial fishpond. In 2018, the State Hydraulic Works (Devlet Su İşleri, or DSİ) launched here a project they called “river rehabilitation” (ıslah; stems from sulh, or peace), citing “senseless water use” and “sand extraction” as reasons that prompted them to intervene and “clean the river’s dirty appearance,” “create a pleasurable view,” and “reveal the river’s beauty at a higher resolution” (Ün and Emek 2018). The earthmoving trucks that moved sand in the 2000s would now bring the stones needed for canalizing the river in the name of rehabilitation.

Just a couple of years ago, in 2016 and 2017, the same earthmoving trucks now deployed by DSİ were being used for a different purpose. The authorities were using them for dumping the rubble produced in Amed’s historic city center Suriçi during the state’s violent counterinsurgency campaign in response to Kurdish autonomy declarations. The dumpster created for this purpose was also located in Kıtılbıl—at a spot near the local Dicle University’s campus, which the state established in the 1970s. Kıtılbıl was an Armenian village until the early twentieth century. According to one interpretation, the name Kıtılbıl comes from the Kurdish word xirte, meaning “cut” or “severed body parts”—suffixed with –bil, meaning “place.” It is thought to have acquired this name towards the middle of the twentieth century, following the genocide in 1915 that uprooted its Armenian residents. Kıtılbıl was also a place where the nascent Republic of Turkey, established in genocide’s wake, sought to compensate for the damage suffered by historically Armenian-led industries such as agriculture, sericulture, and copperworks. In the 1920s, the early republican regime established a “model farm” in Kıtılbıl “to revive the 5,000 acres of barren, ‘abandoned’ land” and to salvage whatever agricultural know-how had managed to survive “to be emulated by local farmers and generate agrarian development” (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 156).

Labor and resource extraction has driven the violence that capitalism and colonialism have, since their interlinked origins in the fifteenth century, inflicted on the planet and its inhabitants (Bakewell 2019; Konadu 2022, xxxv). Extractive activity has gradually evolved into a material and spatial ideology that in the Western languages has come to be called extractivism and that I call earthmoving to address its context-specificity. Extractivism involves a racial logic of valuation and domination. It values bodies and the planet only in terms of the quantifiable and marketable energy extractable from them (Li 2013, Frederiksen and Himley 2020). Today this energy includes not only the kind involved in conventional extractive industries like mining, damming. or monocropping, but also a cultural industry necessary for sensitizing publics to the consequences of environmental racism and colonization in ways that obfuscate responsibility and culpability. The concept of earthmoving conveys the central role that earthmoving trucks have had in Turkey’s brand of environmental racism and colonization, as well as the ecological umbilical cord that binds processes involving overt violence to those ostensibly non-violent or temporally and spatially removed from the violent ones. It moreover highlights an aspect underexplored in the burgeoning literature on racial capitalism and colonialism’s environmental workings in the Middle East (e.g., Khayyat 2022, Mameni 2023): that the historical dynamics structuring these workings and the actors responsible for them are that are not only European and North American (Özok-Gündoğan 2024; Yonucu 2024; Çaylı 2025, 11–13).

At a time when environmental sensibilities have become a part of mainstream consciousness due especially to climate change awareness, extractivism operates not despite these sensibilities but through them. DSİ presented itself in 2018 only as a rehabilitating actor that beautifies the landscape and repairs the environment—without mentioning the destruction that it caused for decades as the state organization responsible for building and running large-scale dams as part of the so-called “Southeastern Anatolia Project.” This is an extractivism that is not only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also about leaving the witnesses of this violent displacement sentimentally moved. Hence the twofold meaning of this context-specific brand of extractivism that I conceptualize as earthmoving. This conceptualization, which encompasses both physically exploitative practices and how they are made sense of, highlights the crucial role that the production of knowledge and meaning plays in racialization and coloniality as material phenomena. In turn, it requires scholarship to approach extractivism not just as a research topic but also as a methodological and epistemological question. The workshop and summer school initiatives mentioned in the introductory vignette, though undoubtedly inadequate, are among the ways I have responded to the imperative to approach extractivism-afflicted geographies and communities not as a “field” to be mined or monocropped for data but as equal partners to be engaged with reciprocally (Tilley 2017, 27; Mair 2023).

My forthcoming book, Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan, focuses on visuality to detail the dual machinations of extractivism in Northern Kurdistan. Here, extractivism involves both exploiting      the colonized and the racialized and making sense of this exploitation in ways that obfuscate—and simultaneously perpetuate—colonization and racialization (Çaylı 2025). Here, I will confine myself to a couple of observations that are visually charged, although they do not specifically come from the visual cultural sector the book prioritizes.

Consider an incident on the evening of 13 December 2018, where a floodgate collapsed at a major dam just upstream of Amed, one of the two dams completed on the Tigris River in the late 1990s as part of the Turkish state’s mega-infrastructural and hydro-extractivist Southeastern Anatolia Project. As water accumulated in the dam reservoir discharged downstream, it inundated the river’s historical floodplains that the dams have now caused to dry up for a quarter century, including those down the hill from Fiskaya. The incident rekindled the debate on dams and their environmental impact especially in media outlets not directly aligned with the government. A case in point was coverage that celebrated the Tigris River for “flowing magnificently,” “regaining its true identity,” and “taking revenge” (Erbay 2018).

While such coverage did problematize the dams’ damaging environmental and social impact, the way it appraised the damage and its restitution in the same metricized terms that characterize extractivism risked perpetuating the problem. Before and after images portrayed environmental welfare as measurable in continuously voluminous waters whereas the upper Tigris has been historically known for dramatic seasonal changes in its flow and clarity (owing to its location at the intersection of the warm climates of the Mediterranean, cold semiarid ones of the Northern Mesopotamian highlands and hot semiarid ones of Southern Mesopotamia). Earthmoving often operates by permeating the imaginaries of contrarian actors as well as through the obvious affiliates of racial capitalism and colonialism.

What ought to replace this context-independent problematization of extractivism that remains trapped in metrics-based extractivist logics of valuation is context-specific, politically demystifying, and historically grounded attention to systemically violent dynamics that underpin such incidents as the bursting of the floodgate in December 2018. Just such attention characterized Kurdish environmental activists’ responses to the same incident as they inquired into the processes that had led to it. These processes turned out to include not only usual ones associated with large-scale dams such as the shifts they cause in precipitation regimes (unseasonable downpours had befallen Amed in the lead-up to the floodgate collapse, swelling water levels in the dam’s reservoirs). Alongside this well-known problem, the activists found out about another one: that the spare floodgate these dams are required to have on site had been sent away for use in the construction of a new dam in nearby Silvan province. The activists revealed that the Silvan Dam was being constructed primarily to aid shale gas fracking in the region—a technique that cracks rocks and bursts them open using high volumes of pressurized water mixed with rock-weakening chemicals. Indeed, it was in Silvan that Turkey piloted fracking in the mid-2010s (Milliyet 2015). The specific part of the province chosen for piloting fracking encompassed the villages of Pîreman and Başnîq, which hosted a sizeable Armenian population alongside an Assyrian-Syriac one prior to the genocide of 1915–16.

The central Ottoman government enlisted local tribal leaders in the genocide’s implementation, convincing them with rewards in the form of lands and property confiscated from non-Muslims. This historical fact is reflected in land ownership patterns as well as the post-1980s phenomenon of guardian (korucu) villages which the state has deployed in its military campaign against the Kurdish liberation movement (Çelik 2020). Therefore, the burst floodgate was not simply a case of environmentally harmful dam building sucking up the earth’s resources as a universal and planetary problem. Rather, it was the consequence of a context-specific, long and ongoing history of genocidal violence underpinning Kurdistan’s dispensability for the Turkish state. Kurdistan is treated as a place where indigenous peoples can be pitted against one another, the most harmful extractivist technologies can be piloted, and precautionary measures such as spare floodgates are not necessary.

Understood as a place-based and community-differentiated question of dispensability, extractivism today characterizes even those interventions that are carried out in the name of sustainability and climate friendliness—interventions that are categorizable as “green extractivism” (e.g., Mejia-Muñoz and Babidge 2023). Take solar and wind energy. In early 2023 it was announced that Istanbul’s Kuyumcukent (literally: jewelers’ city), which prides itself on being the world’s largest jewelry production and sales complex, would source its energy from two new solar farms set up in Northern Kurdistan—the village of Şêxkî in Riha’s Sîwereg province (Enerji Günlüğü 2023)—across a total area of 500,000 square meters. Such land grabbing in the name of green transitions, which Kurdish activists now call “occupation through wind and solar energy,” has continued to expand across the region including in areas formerly inhabited by sizeable Armenian communities such as those in Pasûr (Çil 2025). Turkish companies that seek to benefit both from the government’s stimulus packages for green energy transitions and from new import-export systems with the European Union based on emissions trading and carbon taxes now burden Northern Kurdistan with the environmental consequences of what purport to be climate-friendly resources (Gürsucu 2024). Many a celebratory press report on the region’s rising profile as a provider of green energy features photographs of photovoltaic panels’ shiny reflective surfaces against the backdrop of dry barren fields (Maltaş 2016). However, most solar and wind farms in fact take away farmlands integral to local livelihoods (Gürsucu 2024).

In summer 2022, as I finished writing Earthmoving, Kıtılbıl was renamed as Fetih (conquest) neighborhood by the centrally appointed mayor that replaced the democratically elected Kurdish ones (Budancır 2022). Appointment of unelected bureaucrats to mayoral seats across Northern Kurdistan is a colonial governance method that the central government has wielded since its violent counterinsurgency campaign in the mid-2010s. The official term used for a centrally appointed mayor is kayyım, or watchperson. Kıtılbıl’s new official name “conquest” is a word often used in Turkey for referring to Ottoman or Islamic capture of Byzantine lands. This renaming episode therefore crystallizes the two fundamental points that this article has sought to make. The figure of the colonial watchperson evidences  visuality’s centrality to racial and colonial environmental interventions in Northern Kurdistan. References to Ottoman conquest demonstrate that the extractivism at work here is grounded in longstanding and ongoing histories of imperial nationalism irreducible to those featuring Euro-American powers.

Eray Çaylı is Professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene at the University of Hamburg and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include the monographs Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (University of Texas Press, 2025) and Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey (Syracuse University Press, 2022), and the edited volume Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe (I.B.Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021). He is a member of the Journal of Visual Culture‘s editorial collective.

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