Paper short abstract:

Looking at the conjuncture between the search for 'Armenian' treasures and the war of the Turkish state against the Kurdish movement, this paper engages with the longue durée of 'war' as a means of governance and dispossession.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation enquires into the temporal and material entanglements of different chapters in the history of war economy in the region of Eastern Turkey. Emerging from ethnographic fieldwork, it will pick up different stories attesting to the significance of the war between the Turkish state's army and the armed wing of the Kurdish movement (PKK) for the practice of hunting for what are mostly referred to as 'Armenian' treasures or gold. These entanglements point not only to a structural feature of war as a regressive institution that makes possible new intimacies with death and opens up new spaces of accumulation and dispossession. They also reveal an economic afterlife of World War I and the particular role that the Armenian genocide has played for the constitution of Turkey's national economy through the dispossession of Armenian property. The presentation will focus in particular on the history of emergency governance through such legal frameworks as 'state of siege' and (later) 'state of exception', which have been crucial in institutionalising 'war' as a primary mode of relating to and governing differently constituted 'minorities'. The legal framework, however, has not only enabled a necropolitical targeting of the lives of these 'minorities', but has also made way to the expropriation of property. My contribution thus wishes to highlight the question of historicity, temporal entanglements and periodisation as central to the overall concerns of the panel.