Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir, Turkey to explore the emergence of a contested field of public language around "poverty" and "joblessness" and its wider social and political significance for the people who actually constitute the abstract noun, the economy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is on the politics of poverty in the city of Diyarbakir, informal capital of Turkey's predominantly-Kurdish southeast. Since the political unrest and massive demographic and economic transformations of the early 1990s, there has emerged a contested field of public language around "poverty" and "joblessness", and on how to best bring "improvement" and "development" to the troubled city. Not surprisingly, given the political history of the city and its environs and the dizzying array of actors claiming to speak for the present—central government, local Kurdish opposition party politicians, self-styled civil society organizations (STK'lar) and associations (dernekler)— divergence and disjuncture is shown to pervade this field. Why does the central government hold on to the figure of the entrepreneur and the aid recipient, as well as ideas of service (hizmet) and beneficence? Why do local government actors return to political history and notions of economic and political justice? And how do NGOs fit into this? Dissecting the debates, I ask whether, if at all, they matter for the people who are their presumed objects and would-be benefactors. Building on two years of fieldwork in the city, including interviews and participant observation with dispossessed families, unemployed/underemployed younger men, and a range of shopkeepers, I answer that these debates undoubtedly matter, yet in a less direct sense than we might expect. The paper concludes with some critical reflections on the concept of neoliberalism and its usefulness for analyzing this and similar situations growing increasingly common in a rapidly urbanizing world.