PI: Ronay Bakan. Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Second Century Fund
Project Abstract: My project explores bureaucratic strategies employed by states to target ostensibly “threatening” populations. Specifically, I look at the relation between urban planning, tourism, heritage-making, and violence. This project draws on multi-sited fieldwork within the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, which in 2015 emerged as a prominent and particularly violent site of urban warfare between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerrillas. Following the conflict, the government declared urgent expropriation decrees and aggressively built up the district’s touristic potential as a key part of its ongoing security agenda instead of providing a path to return for the residents. My research seeks to understand the spectrum of such legal and developmentalist strategies employed by states such as Turkey and the consequences of their deployment. I do so by exploring the politics surrounding land reclamation, heritage conservation, touristification, and their intersection with ethnic politics. I argue that the socio-legal reconstruction of urban landscapes including urban planning and heritage preservation becomes tools of pacification and profit-making in the aftermath of military conflict, and term these strategies as “counterinsurgent urbanism”. My ethnographic research will be supplemented by archival research at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France.