Paper short abstract:

This paper is on the material, affective, and contested politics of resource extraction in one of the richest natural reserves in the Middle East. It shows how “nature” in militarized territories might serve as spatial and affective maps of race and territorial ambitions via resource extraction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is on the junction of military occupation and resource extraction. Historically known to be the "lungs of Diyarbakır," located in the informal capital of Kurdistan and recently declared to be a UNESCO site, Hevsel is one of the richest natural reserves in the Middle East. The gardens provide minimal livelihood for the Kurdish urban poor. This paper shows how Hevsel shifted from a synonym of "gardens" to a metonymical eco-political border, worthy of its own affective force as a memorial site reminiscent of the Turkish military blockades and the corresponding Kurdish uprisings. I am interested in this paper in how this ecological border was differentially remade by the Turkish state, the Kurdish freedom movement and environmental activists both symbolically and materially, in their complex efforts to describe the quality of resources in the area after the fact of their destruction, and by so doing to provide a practical means for both essentialising that "nature" and orienting its rehabilitation. I argue that Hevsel, as the material and metaphorical lungs of the city, constitutes an unruly and fractured process of breathing continually given new momentum by violent processes like military blockade, infrastructural gridding, gentrification, and gradual ecological destruction. The geographically, materially, and affectively regimented movements of Kurdish families through those bits of urban fields enables me to show how this violent matrix of disruption is reconfigured on the ground to ask whether the most abject instances of militarized life could deliver spaces of breath to survive.