ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a study designed in light of critical, anti-racist and anti-subordination lens of intersectionality and explores the production of centre and periphery in the making of Istanbul Airport. The airport was meant to become the biggest in the world and transform Istanbul into a ‘global centre’. In examining intersecting dominations of state and capital under an authoritarian neoliberal regime of governance, the study argues that the creation of this ‘global centre’ rested on multiple processes of peripheralization. The containment of the workers’ resistance against working conditions which occured at the building site weeks before the inaugration was a crystallization of intersecting oppressions. The airport workers’ detention, arrest and trial is analysed by primary and secondary resources. The analysis shows that the Kurdish workers’ ethnicity was rendered more salient by stripping them of their class identity in an attempt to de-legitimize the resistance.
