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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how forest securitization in Turkey produces slow violence in forests, and how women and multispecies communities in Akbelen and among Sarıkeçililer transform securitization through everyday practices of care, coexistence, and repair.

Paper long abstract

In the context of the climate–security nexus, forests are increasingly governed as sites of security—spaces to be defended, stabilized, and rendered resilient through exceptional measures. While framed as protection, such securitization often produces forms of slow violence: cumulative dispossession, environmental degradation, and the redistribution of vulnerability across human and more-than-human lives. This paper examines how these dynamics unfold ethnographically in two forest struggles in Turkey: the resistance against lignite mining in Akbelen Forest and the ongoing securitization of Sarıkeçililer nomadic pastoralists under forestry and conservation regimes.

Drawing on feminist political ecology, I trace how forest securitization materializes not only through infrastructure, surveillance, and legal exclusion, but also through mundane disruptions of everyday forest relations—restricted mobility, criminalized livelihoods, and damaged interspecies ties. At the same time, the paper foregrounds how women in these contexts enact alternative forms of ecological security through slow, care-based practices such as herding, fire prevention, forest guardianship, and collective resistance. These practices do not deny conflict or harm; rather, they work within damaged landscapes to sustain livability, interdependence, and repair.

By juxtaposing slow violence with slow care, the paper argues for a feminist reconceptualization of ecological security as a relational, multispecies process shaped from below. It contributes to debates on forest securitization by showing how ecological security is not only imposed through militarized governance, but also reworked through embodied, gendered, and more-than-human practices of coexistence that challenge dominant logics of protection and control.