In the Kingdom of Dams: Water, Governance, and the Keban Project in Eastern Anatolia, 1961-1974

摘要

The Keban Project (1965--1974) was of enormous importance for the Republic of Turkey during the Cold War. As the country's first large dam of significance, the Keban Project would provide upwards of ¼ of Turkey's existing electrical capacity, as well as remediate the burdens associated with socio-economic underdevelopment in the impoverished Eastern provinces. Built along a pass in the province of Elaz?? along the Euphrates River, the Keban Dam was meant to not only tap into the energy potentials of such natural largesse, but also resolve the Republic's checkered political legacy in its Eastern provinces known as Eastern Anatolia. In spite of Turkey's twin ambitions, little has been said in contemporary scholarship on the Keban Project and its legacy, either in Turkish or in English.;This study has two broad analytical focuses. The first uncovers the ways in which American practices of land reclamation and regional development become globalized at a particular moment during the Cold War, when the United States had to present alternatives to Soviet models of development to the countries of the Global South. Turkish engineers who visited the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, fascinated by American narratives of industrial progress and state-making, began to "translate" and ultimately adapt these models such as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) into a similar geographic setting in Eastern Anatolia, albeit with slightly different political, social, and cultural differences.;The second aspect shifts to the question: what becomes of those communities as a result of the construction of the dam? In environmental humanities, Rob Nixon uses the term "unimagined communities" to describe how discursively as well as materially, the very existence of a certain group of people in the path of large dams are rendered undesirable in the making of the narrative of national progress. By turning Nixon's concept into a question, this research seeks to explain this uninaminging as a process which continues to have contemporary relevance in Eastern Anatolia, particularly with the ongoing conflict with the Kurds and the state.