State as socionatural effect: Variable and emergent geographies of the state in southeastern Turkey

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 25-39

  Harris, Leila M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY; SOCIAL THEORY; SOCIOECONOMIC SURVEY;

TURKEY;

EID: 84862209115     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: 1548226X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-1545345     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. See Andrew Hurell, "The State", in Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge, ed. Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 165-82;
2. and Hallie Eakin and Maria Carmen Lemos, "Adaptation and the State: Latin America and the Challenge of Capacity-Building under Globalization", Global Environmental Change 16(2006):7-18. (Pubitemid 43181550)
3. See, e.g., Marius de Ceus, "The Ecological Restructuring of the State", in Democracy and Creen Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights, and Citizenship, ed. Brian Doherty and Marius de Ceus (New York: Routledge, 1996), 188-211;
4. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998);
5. and Bruce Willems-Braun, "Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post) colonial British Columbia", Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(1997):3-31.
6. See Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, and Martin Jones, The Nature of the State: Excavating the Political Ecologies of the Modern State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
7. Paul Robbins, "The State in Political Ecology: A Postcard to Political Geography from the Field", in The Sage Handbook of Political Geography, ed. Kevin R. Cox, Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson (London: Sage, 2008), 205-18;
8. and Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds., Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1998).
9. Timothy Mitchell, "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics", American Political Science Review 85(1991):77-96.
10. Cf. Joe Painter, "Prosaic Geographies of Stateness", Political Geography 25(2006):752-74; (Pubitemid 44743101)
11. and Sallie A. Marston, "Space, Culture, State; Uneven Developments in Political Geography", Political Geography 23(2004):1-16. (Pubitemid 38122911)
12. Cf. Mitchell, "Limits of the State."
13. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 174.
14. See, e.g., Joel Migdal, State In Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
15. Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State", American Ethnologist 22(1995):375-402;
16. and Anna J. Secor, "Between Longing and Despair: State, Space, and Subjectivity in Turkey", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(2007):33-52. (Pubitemid 46421527)
17. See also the discussion in Stuart Corbridge, "State and Society", in Cox et al., Sage Handbook of Political Geography, 107-21.
18. Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism1 and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2.
19. See Painter, "Prosaic Geographies of Stateness." Stateness refers to the historical and geographical understandings of and associations with states, including characteristics that might be linked with states at particular times and places, and how these associations might change.
20. See Mitchell, "Limits of the State." Theorists who work on this boundary problem are generally indebted to Antonio Gramsci's work, suggesting that there is no possibility of theorizing states apart from social-economic processes
21. (see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1971; repr., New York: International, 1997]). For discussion
22. see, e.g., Bob Jessop, "Bringing the State Back In (Yet Again): Reviews, Revisions, Rejections, and Redirections", published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, www.comp. lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Jessop-Bringing-the-State-Back-In.pdf;
23. or Kiran Asher and Diana Ojeda, "Producing Nature and Making the State: Ordenamiento Territorial in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia", Ceoforum 40(2009):292-302.
24. George Steinmetz, ed., introduction to State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 9.
25. Mitchell, "Limits of the State", 78.
26. See Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists", American Sociological Review 48(1983):781-95;
27. Reece Jones, "Categories, Borders, and Boundaries", Progress in Human Geography 33(2009):174-89;
28. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993);
29. and Anssi Paasi, "The Changing Discourses on Political Boundaries: Mapping the Backgrounds, Contexts, and Contents", in B/ordering Space, ed. Henk Van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch, and Wolfgang Zierhofer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 17-32.
30. See Robbins, "State in Political Ecology."
31. See Whitehead et al., Nature of the State.
32. See Roderick P. Neumann, "Nature-State-Territory: Toward a Critical Theorization of Conservation Enclosures", in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts (London: Routledge, 2004), 195-217.
33. For more on the role of nature In state formation, see Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaklng and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999);
34. Asher and Ojeda, "Producing Nature and Making the State";
35. and Leila M. Harris and Samer Alatout, "Negotiating Hydro-scales, Forging States: Comparison of the Upper Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan River Basins", Political Geography 29(2010):148-56.
36. See Scott, Seeing like a State. Among critics it has been noted that Scott's "state" is overly simplistically equated with high modernism, standardization, and scientific arrogance. Fernando Coronil also finds fault with Scott's treatment of state and society as neat and distinct categories
37. (Coronil, "Smelling like a Market", American Historical Review 106(2001):114-18).
38. See also Robbins, "State in Political Ecology";
39. Akhil Gupta, "Review of J. Scott: Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed", Journal of Asian Studies 58(1999):1093-95;
40. and Tania Murray Li, "Beyond 'the State' and Failed Schemes", American Anthropologist 107(2005):383-94.
41. For an overview of GAP, see I. H. Okay Onver, "Southeastern Anatolia integrated Development Project (GAP), Turkey: An Overview of Issues of Sustainability", Water Resources Development 13(1997):187-207.
42. For critical analyses, see Leila M. Harris, "Water and Conflict Geographies of the Southeastern Anatolia Project", Society and Natural Resources 15(2002):743-59;
43. Leila M. Harris, "Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies of Waterscape Evolution in Southeastern Turkey", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(2006):187-213;
44. and Leila M. Harris, "Modernizing the Nation: Postcolonial-Ism, (Post) Development, and Ambivalent Spaces of Difference in Southeastern Turkey", Ceoforum 39(2008):1698-708.
45. See also Leila M. Harris, "States at the Limit: Tracing Contemporary State-Society Relations in the Borderlands of Southeastern Turkey", European Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (2009). 24.
46. For more details on the Kurdish question, see Kemal Kiriscl and Gareth M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of Trans-state Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1997).
47. On nationalism with respect to dam building, see Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (London: Zed Books, 1996);
48. and Daniel Klingensmith, One Valley and a Thousand: Dams, Nationalism, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
49. On Atatiirk and CAP in particular, see Harris, "Modernizing the Nation";
50. and Leila M. Harris and Samer Alatout, "Negotiating Hydro-scales, Forging States: Comparison of the upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River Basins", Political Geography 29(2010):148-56.
51. See Harris, "States at the Limit."
52. For an explication of differentiated experiences of these changes, see Leila M. Harris, "Water Rich, Resource Poor: Intersections of Gender, Poverty, and Vulnerability in Newly Irrigated Areas of Southeastern Turkey", World Development 36(2008):2643-62.
53. See Harris, "States at the Limit."
54. See Leila M. Harris, "Modernizing Gender: Social Geographies of Waterscape Evolution in Southeastern Turkey" (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004).
55. See Harris, "States at the Limit";
56. cf. Andrew Finkel and Niikhet Sirman, eds., Turkish State, Turkish Society (London: Routledge, 1990).
57. see Harris, "States at the Limit."
58. For discussion of varied responses by different sociodemographic groups, see Harris, "Water Rich, Resource Poor."
59. Bahattin Aksit and Adnan Akcay, "Sociocultural Aspects of Irrigation Practices in Southeastern Turkey", Water Resources Development 13(1997):523-40.
60. See Maarten Martinus van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992).
61. Kurdish migrant worker, interview by the author, October 2001; see also Harris, "Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies."
62. Cf Harris, "Modernizing the Nation";
63. and Harris, "Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies."
64. See Leila M. Harris, "Contested Sustainabilities: Assessing Narratives of Environmental Change in Southeastern Turkey", Local Environment 14(2009):699-720.
65. See Scott, Seeing like a State.
66. Cf. Trevor Birkenholtz, "Contesting Expertise: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Indian Groundwater Practices", Geoforum 39(2008):466-82. (Pubitemid 350286821)
67. See Scott, Seeing like a State.
68. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests, 35.
69. See also Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries";
70. and Painter, "Prosaic Geographies of Stateness."
71. See Marston, "Space, Culture, State."
72. For more social natural and ecological inflected approaches, see Castree and Braun, Remaking Reality;
73. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
74. and Erik Swyngedouw, "Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracioismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape", Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89(1999):443-65. (Pubitemid 29509023)
75. Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries", 392.
76. See Secor, "Between Longing and Despair." Discussions of spatiotemporalities have been increasingly visible in state theory, particularly through the work of geographers.
77. See, e.g., Painter, "Prosaic Geographies of Stateness";
78. Merje Kuus and John Agnew, "Theorizing the State Geographically: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Territoriality", in Cox et al., Sage Handbook of Political Geography, 95-106;
79. Corbridge, "State and Society";
80. and Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Reseating of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
81. See Secor, "Between Longing and Despair."
82. Cf. Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
83. See Castree and Braun, Remaking Reality;
84. and Robbins, "State in Political Ecology."
85. See Harris, "States at the Limit."
86. and Harris, "Irrigation, Gender, and Social Geographies."
87. For scale and political ecology, see Haripriya Rangan and Christian A. Kull, "What Makes Ecology 'Political'? Rethinking 'Scale' in Political Ecology", Progress in Human Geography 33(2009):28-45;
88. and Roderick P. Neumann, "Political Ecology: Theorizing Scale", Progress in Human Geography 33(2009):398-406.
89. For political ecology and state theory, see Robbins, "State in Political Ecology."
90. See, e.g., Klingensmith, One Valley and a Thousand;
91. and Scott, Seeing like a State.
92. For a discussion of the mobilizations of science and technology as crucial for the legitimization of the postcolonial state in India, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
93. Homayun Sidky, "Irrigation and the Rise of the State in Hunza: A Case for the Hydraulic Hypothesis", Modern Asian Studies 31(1997):995-1017. (Pubitemid 127644159)
94. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).
95. see Samer Alatout, "Imagining Hydrological Boundaries, Constructing the Nation-State: A Fluid History of Israel, 1936-1959" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2000).
96. Cf. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). The focus on microphysics of power is due, in part, to the widespread influence of Foucauldian governmentality, yet the theoretical opening provided by Michel Foucault is not limited to focus on distributed and capillary power
97. (see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York, Vintage, 1979)). Tania Murray Li, for example, connects governmentality to grand schemes of socioenvironmental engineering
98. (see Li, "Beyond the State").
99. See James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, "Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality", American Ethnologist 29(2002):981-1002. (Pubitemid 36086302)
100. See also the discussion of state consolidation and hydro-scalar politics in Harris and Alatout, "Negotiating Hydro-scales, Forging States."
101. See Karen Bakker and Gavin Bridge, "Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the 'Matter of Nature'", Progress In Human Geography 30(2006):5-27. (Pubitemid 43329207)
102. See Karen Bakker, "A Political Ecology of Water Privatization", Studies In Political Economy 70(2003):35-58; (Pubitemid 36684209)
103. Sidky, "Irrigation";
104. and Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism.
105. See Harris, "States at the Limit."
106. Mitchell, "Limits of the State", 94-95.
107. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist States in Their Place (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990), 7.
108. See Robbins, "State in Political Ecology";
109. and Whitehead et al., Nature of the State.
110. Neumann, "Political Ecology";
111. Robbins, "State in Political Ecology";
112. Harris and Alatout, "Negotiating Hydro-scales, Forging States";
113. Scott, Seeing like a State.
114. See Jessop, State Theory, 279.
115. Cf. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
116. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44.
117. See Neumann, "Political Ecology."
118. See also Brenner, New State Spaces;
119. and Harris and Alatout, "Negotiating Hydro-scales, Forging States."