Presentation short abstract

The study explores why some Aegean communities stay silent despite geothermal harms. It argues that silence reflects constrained agency within uneven power relations, revealing the grey zone between discontent and open resistance under extractive development.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past decade, Turkey’s Aegean region has witnessed expansion of geothermal energy projects, promoted by the state as part of its ‘green’ energy transition. By creating pollution, soil degradation, water depletion, and disruptions to agriculture-based livelihoods, these projects have generated widespread local discontent. Despite facing comparable harms, communities have responded in markedly different ways: while some villages have resisted, others have remained largely silent. This silence, however, does not necessarily signal acceptance. Instead, many of these communities occupy a grey zone: a position marked by dissatisfaction and concern, yet unable or unwilling to translate discontent into open resistance.

Drawing on scholarship on hegemony, silence, and compliance, this study examines the grey zone through the ambiguous, uneven, and contradictory power relations that constitute it. The analysis shows how discontented yet silent residents operate within asymmetric dependencies on local powerholders, companies, and state actors, as well as intersecting hierarchies of class, gender, and age that shape who can speak, when, and at what cost. These dynamics produce a terrain in which silence emerges as a contingent and situational response. It embodies a complex assemblage of compliance, fear, desperation, indifference, and uncertainty, reflecting constrained agency shaped by asymmetric power relations and by the tensions of occupying multiple, sometimes incompatible, subject positions within extractive governance regimes. By bringing these dynamics to the fore, the study conceptualizes silence as an active and meaningful mode of response - one that reveals the layered power structures and socio-political logics that organize community life under extractive development.