Presentation short abstract

When a coal exit happens unplanned, as in Ermenek, Turkey, the town is left in limbo. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, this study shows how people keep turning back to mining for security and identity, offering new insight into why some communities stuggle to move on.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the decade-long aftermath of an unplanned exit from coal in Ermenek, a mining town Turkey where nine underground pits were permanently closed after the 2014 disaster that killed 18 miners. Drawing on extensive multi-sited qualitative fieldwork (interviews with miners, families, local officials, and industry actors) the study approaches Ermenek as a revealing instance of how coal worlds endure even after extraction ends.

In a political context marked by authoritarian governance, selective environmentalism, and resurgent resource nationalism, the abrupt closure produces not transition but a prolonged limbo. Although most mines are gone, many residents continue to look back to extraction as the most familiar and dependable source of dignity and security, keeping alive the expectation that mining might one day return. Meanwhile, proposed alternatives (eg. ecotourism, agriculture, service work) circulate as ideas but are rarely pursued or prove ill-suited to local realities. The absence of robust labor–environment alliances, coupled with deep uncertainty about life after mining, reinforces the symbolic pull of coal, while everyday narratives of national sovereignty and suspicion toward externally driven climate agendas help sustain the plausibility of reopening the pits.

By foregrounding unplanned exit as an analytical category, the paper shows how “just transition” in peripheral settings often remains more a slogan than a lived process, reduced to short-term, centrally managed gestures with little restorative capacity. Ermenek demonstrates how transitions that exist in name but not in practice can deepen mistrust, leaving communities both unprepared for and resentful toward broader climate and transition agendas.