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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines issues of internal colonialism rooted in cotton production in southeast Turkey—an ‘unruly habitat’ with a history of conflict, environmentally unsuitable for this crop. It is a reflection on the way the state intervenes in production and social reproduction for geopolitical aims.

Paper long abstract:

Social reproduction approaches have provided valuable understandings of capitalist dynamics across the world. Nevertheless, the state in its multiple configurations has been relatively neglected in this literature, which has mainly focused on governance and the neoliberal welfare state in Europe and North America. This paper aims at contributing to a deeper understanding of the state—including the security and developmental state—in securing, and at times jeopardizing, social reproduction by bringing feminist political economy literature in conversation with dependency and postcolonial scholarship. It draws on several months of participant observation and interviews between 2020 and 2023, to unpack the internal colonial roots of cotton production in southeast Turkey and its implications for the daily lives of its residents, particularly Kurdish and Arabic speaking. Despite being an ‘unruly habitat’ in light of its history of conflict between the Turkish nation-state and the PKK, and unsuitable environmental conditions for this crop, developmental state-led interventions through the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP from the Turkish acronym), such as the damming of the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, deeply transformed the productive landscape of the region, which contributes the largest share of cotton production in the country for the domestic textile industry. In so doing, they have deeply transformed relations and activities of social reproduction as well, reordering people’s daily lives along intersecting gender, race and class status markers. The main argument is that the state is implicated in social reproduction through multiple arrangements that cross overlapping production and reproduction boundaries rooted in internal colonial objectives of nation-state building.