Renewing an ‘Armenian’ neighbourhood: Recursive dispossession and the history of extractive sovereignty in Turkey
Philosophische Fakultät
Based on ethnographic research on an urban regeneration project targeting the historically Armenian quarter of a provincial capital in the Kurdish parts of Turkey, the article engages with two related, but separate strands of anthropological scholarship on the ‘fragmented’ nature of sovereignty to think through the relation of sovereignty and extraction. It does so, firstly, in relation to contemporary transformations of statecraft under conditions of financialised neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and secondly, in relation to the historically contingent constellation of property relations, racialisation and violence in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state. The first leads me to argue that ‘fragmentation’ emerges here as a project internal to the practices of statecraft, that is, not primarily driven by market mechanisms, nor as something that extends beyond the nation-state. The historical account is offered as a case that further extends our scholarly archive of modern sovereignty as a global form intimately entangled with extraction and dispossession.
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