ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how emergency has featured in Turkey as a mode of governmentality, with a focus on the 2010s. This decade is significant for two reasons. First, Turkey saw successive periods of emergency rule in 2015–16 when war flared up in its south-east and a failed military coup was attempted. Secondly, the decade was marked by the effects of a piece of legislation passed in 2012 and geared purportedly towards disaster preparedness, which wove an architectural emergency by designating parts of the land and the existing building stock as vulnerable. Considering these two contextual features together, the chapter converses with recent literature on Turkey that explores emergency rule as entangled rather than antithetical to democracy and as a mode of governmentality whose effects are distributed differentially across society and geography. The chapter contributes to the literature by foregrounding, thanks to its focus on architecture and urbanism, how emergency as such is implemented and contested in embodied and material ways—a focus that remains underexplored in relevant scholarship. Its empirical analysis features two specific sites: the Istanbul neighbourhood of Küçükarmutlu (a revolutionary left stronghold, most of whose residents are Alevi) and Suriçi (the historic centre of Turkey’s largest predominantly Kurdish inhabited city, Amed, otherwise known by its official name Diyarbakır). The chapter contends that understanding emergency’s differential effects in Turkey requires situating them within a history much more expansive than just the mid-2010s and stretching back to the dispossession and violence suffered by non-Muslim populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter moreover argues that these differential effects are best conceptualized as deriving from intracolonial dynamics. In arguing this point, however, it diverges from Foucauldian formulations of colonialist methods’ moving from the periphery to the centre or, more broadly, with a Global North and a Global South distinction that imagines each of these geopolitical entities as socially and politically monolithic.
