Presentation short abstract

Grassroots ecological resistance in Türkiye challenges authoritarian extractivism and the dominant growth paradigm. Based on fieldwork, the paper shows how local communities build counter-hegemonic practices and alternatives amid intensifying political-ecological crises.

Presentation long abstract

In recent decades, authoritarian neoliberalism has increasingly operated through ecological exploitation, whereby extractivist projects become sites of dispossession, accumulation, and political control. This pattern is particularly visible in developing countries such as Türkiye, where large-scale mining, hydroelectric, and energy initiatives have reshaped not only local landscapes but also the modalities of ruling. In response, local communities have both recognized the multi-layered exploitation inherent in these projects and created counter-spaces through their own alternative organizational models. To contextualize this grassroots resistance, the paper situates these struggles within a Gramscian framework, examining how the hegemonic order seeks to secure consent and coercion over local communities, and how these communities respond with their own repertoires of action. State actors and corporate allies promise prosperity and employment while simultaneously cultivating fear through threats and the discourse that ‘the state cannot be resisted’. Pro-government civil society organizations and corporate-sponsored associations reinforce this hegemonic project by normalizing extractivist development. Against this backdrop, local communities have built village committees, neighborhood initiatives, and regional ecological platforms that enable knowledge exchange, the circulation of protest repertoires, and solidarity across different sites of struggle. These forms of organizing not only articulate opposition to ecological authoritarianism but also generate new political subjectivities and practices of participatory democracy under conditions of shrinking civic space. Drawing on original fieldwork and interviews, the paper argues that these grassroots formations not only resist ecological authoritarianism but also cultivate counter-hegemonic imaginaries that implicitly challenge the dominant economic-growth paradigm and the long-standing ‘catching-up development’ myth.