Renewing an ‘Armenian’ neighbourhood: Recursive dispossession and the history of extractive sovereignty in Turkey

Introduction

This article forms an ethnographically and historically informed theoretical enquiry into the relationship between sovereignty and extraction. I pursue this enquiry from within a geography that has figured not so much as a frontier but as part of a broader regional borderland where central Turkish state sovereignty has remained contested, most importantly by historically evolving claims to political autonomy voiced and fought for by the Kurdish political movement affiliated with the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK, Kurdistan Workers’ Party). It is also a region that, way before the current conflict which we might trace back to the onset of military confrontation in 1984, underwent profound changes in the configuration of sovereignty, land and intercommunal relations. Central to this transformation is the Armenian genocide of 1915-X (for it is impossible to give a temporal endpoint to genocidal violence and related processes) which marked the moment of foundational violence in the longer-term shift from a multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish nation-state and its ideological aspiration to strict territorial unity and ethnic homogeneity.

The article begins with the case of an urban regeneration project in a provincial capital in the now predominantly Kurdish region of Turkey, which, though, had a sizeable Armenian population up to the genocide of 1915. The urban regeneration project itself encompasses those parts of the old town that used to include the Armenian quarters of the city. My enquiry into the nexus of sovereignty and extraction is motivated, on the one hand, by the question of how this relation mutates and takes new forms under contemporary conditions of financialised neoliberalism and (populist) authoritarianism and, on the other hand, by the methodological decision to take into account the history of foundational violence which included a comprehensive project of expropriation that constitutes the economic dimension of the Armenian genocide. As cases of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, I understand both episodes of dispossession to constitute moments of (violent) extraction of value from land and property. They thus constitute moments of frontier-making in the sense of being sites where ‘devices, temporalities, scales, and bordering practices’ (Ballestero et al., 2023: 311) enter novel arrangements and create distinct, new possibilities for the generation of wealth.

The article is divided into two parts, the first part proposing a theoretical intervention into debates on sovereignty, complemented in the second part by a historical excursion that is intended as a contribution to the broader historical archive of sovereignty as a globally evolving form. Both engage with related, yet separate strands of anthropological enquiries into the fragmented nature of sovereignty. Beginning with an ethnographic description of the urban regeneration project, I first turn to the growing anthropological literature on the fragmentation and reconfiguration of sovereignty in relation to processes of neoliberalisation and globalisation to argue that the case at hand invites us to think of such transformations not as a matter of erosion or undermining of (central state) sovereignty, nor primarily driven by market forces, but as a project internal to statecraft under the sign of authoritarianism. Sovereignty appears here as a form of executive, constitutive and ordering power wielded by an increasingly authoritarian state also by being fragmented and dispersed across bodies that blur the distinction between public and private. The second part turns to 1915 and recounts the history of the systematic dispossession of Ottoman Armenians that was instrumental in the emergence and consolidation of a ‘Turkish’ national economy. This provides an occasion to put the case of the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey into conversation with recent critical scholarship that seeks to decentre our historical account of sovereignty by foregrounding its emergence in the context of (always racialising and extractivist) Western imperialism and colonialism. Including the Ottoman Eastern periphery into the picture adds distinct (post-)imperial histories and genealogies to what Hansen (2021) has recently called for, namely a truly ‘global account’ of modern sovereignty.

State extraction: A case of urban regeneration

Following a pattern that had accelerated throughout the country over the course of the previous decade, the municipality of the city of Moush, the capital of the province of the same name in far-eastern Turkey, signed an agreement with Turkey's mass housing administration TOKI in early April 2012. The agreement foresaw a so-called kentsel dönüşüm projesi, an urban transformation project, over 17 hectares of the city's historical quarter. Simply put, up until this urban regeneration project remade what is called Kale Mahallesi, the castle's quarter, Moush was architecturally divided between this Ottoman urban legacy nestled along the slopes of the Sassoun mountains and a modern, Republican part that grew and expanded over the course of the last 100 years below the old market district. As government buildings and larger apartment blocks were raised below, the ancient mud-brick houses characteristic of Kale Mahallesi lost their attraction and were left, if means permitted, for a more ‘modern’ life further down below. The quarter was taken over by villagers who moved to the city in the later twentieth century in search of more secure livelihoods. These and other residents of Kale Mahallesi counted, in 2012, among the poorest of the city.

The proposal for an urban regeneration project to remake Kale Mahallesi had been approved by the provincial parliament and the federal Council of Ministers was informed of the agreement in the summer of 2012. Residents remember being invited to the municipality, where TOKI presented their planned project ¹ and spoke of 770 flats that were going to be built in about a dozen TOKI apartment blocks. In January 2013, an Ankara-based subcontractor came to Moush to manage the transfer of title deeds from the residents to TOKI. By June 2013, 197 out of 216 title deeds had been transferred with all outstanding deeds to be handled directly by the municipality. A month earlier, the inhabitants of Kale Mahallesi had received a letter from then-mayor Necmettin Dede, informing them that they had to vacate their homes until mid-June and inform the municipality of their eviction in order to become eligible for rent assistance.

Following the pattern elsewhere, resident owners of the neighbourhood were presented with two options: they could either sell their property to TOKI at a price designated by a commission set up to define the value of the respective property. Owners had the right to go to court to challenge this designated value, but they could not challenge the expropriation as such. Alternatively, they could lay claim to a flat in the to-be-built apartment blocks. But for that, they would have to pay an additional sum based on a calculated difference in value between the current and future real estate based on land rent. Given that none of the residents had much liquidity to speak of, this meant entering long-term credit arrangements, in short, a process of indebting. After a temporary resettlement for which they were promised 300TL rent assistance, residents were thus promised the opportunity to return to Kale Mahallesi, if no longer at ground level. They would have to pay a deposit of about 10% to 15% of the apartment cost and then commit to a government-administered mortgage plan for periods of 15 to 20 years. If residents failed to honour their payments, ownership of the property would go back to TOKI.

As I will discuss in more detail below, it is the municipalities that are entitled to identify certain areas and declare them urban regeneration sites, backed by a government programme encouraging such schemes in designated earthquake regions. But it is TOKI that holds executive powers to expropriate land. For local residents though, their ire focused on the commissions responsible for evaluating the value of properties. As has been noted by others (Demirtas-Milz, 2013; Kuyucu, 2014), these commissions tend to follow non-standard procedures and come up with widely differing valuations for different properties. In Moush, anger and frustration then mixed with broader critiques as to the apparent absence of logic: why were some promised more TOKI flats for smaller properties? Why were some indebted with larger sums even though their plots were larger and the houses bigger? Why were some buildings that had only recently been constructed in line with earthquake safety regulations included in the urban regeneration scheme at all?

By pairing expropriation with compensation and the option to contest the commission's valuation in court, such urban regeneration schemes maintain a veneer of procedural legality. Yet, they are sites for the profound remodelling of state and capital including the re-assembly of structures of executive autonomy and the parallel dismantling of legislative and judicial checks and balances. The calculation of property values by commission members whose working methods and valuation criteria are far from transparent or democratically accountable, together with dispossession's central mechanism of forceful indebting and the fact that the principle of expropriation as such cannot be contested in court clearly identify urban regeneration schemes as extractive ventures in Turkey. As one local resident put it:

TOKI has become a profiteering centre that overturns frightening amounts of money. It doesn’t do it itself, but through its contractors. If the house is worth 10 lira, it costs the citizen 30. In the place of two people's houses, they build a block with 20 flats. Just make the calculation, they indebt people by say, 100 000 TL, they sell each flat at about 110 000 TL. Can something like that be? For about 100 000 TL they become the owners of 20 flats!

TOKI does not operate autonomously, but in close cooperation and at the initiative of municipalities. In what follows, I want to take a closer look at this configuration of actors and analyse what it tells us about the changing nexus of sovereignty and extraction within a broader transformation of authoritarian statecraft under the AK Party (AKP), which has been in power for over two decades now. Building on earlier developments, particularly a process of economic liberalisation that set in following the 1980 military coup, the AKP government further neoliberalised the economy, placed land and the construction industry at its centre and complemented this macro-economic policy with a transformation of the state and of municipal governments in particular.

Madra and Yilmaz (2019) consider the establishment of metropolitan municipalities in 1984 a milestone in the neoliberal restructuring of local governments, which was further flanked by the granting of increasing budgetary and executive autonomy. AKP's career began at the level of these local governments, whose control was central to the development of what Madra and Yilmaz call ‘corporate sovereignty’, a form of governance later extended to the national level. Cloaked in populist claims to embody the will of the people, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken on the role of Chief Executive Officer expanding his control over the economy by wielding the power of exception. His party hereby functions as ‘the key institutional interface between the redistributive function of the state and the reciprocity links of the social’ (Madra and Yilmaz, 2019: 50). While Erdoğan embodies the ruling patriarch, citizens figure as recipients of welfare provisions and consumers within an expanding market of credits and mortgages. In parallel fashion, public–private partnerships have been expanded to strengthen specific networks of reciprocity with loyal capitalist factions (Buğra and Savaşkan, 2014).

The appearance of urban renewal projects and the general targeting of urban land as a central motor of privatisation and commodification went hand in hand with the transformation of local governments into market facilitators, now tasked to organise space in line with financial and commercial interests. This had much to do with Turkey's integration into global financial markets and the inflow of foreign direct investment, but as noted by Eraydin and Taşan-Kok (2014) and Madra (2018), market dynamics alone do not account for this transformation. The state took an active role, turning into a corporate meta-market actor and direct provider of housing. It underwrote large infrastructure projects by Treasury guarantees, established financial wealth funds to direct financial flows, publicly directed investment into housing construction by means of TOKI and generally mobilised urban space as a tool to redistribute wealth and generate financial resources for all levels of government.

A series of legal changes in the mid-2000s equipped municipalities with exclusive decision-making powers to designate, plan and implement urban regeneration projects, transforming inner cities in particular into sources of capital accumulation for these now reconfigured entrepreneurial municipalities (Candan and Kulloğlu, 2008; Demirtas-Milz, 2013; Dinçer, 2011). A devastating earthquake in 1999 has served as an important pretext for legislating this policy of urban renewal (Adaman et al., 2014). Ever since, a discourse of security and a spectre of emergency in the form of natural disaster, frequently complemented by or blurring into stigmatising discourses of crime, dilapidation and neglect, are conjured to rationalise what are essentially municipal profit-making schemes. Moush itself suffered a massive earthquake in 1966 and thus conveniently holds the status of a primary earthquake region ever since. This framing of urban renewal as an urgent security measure overriding the need for democratic, participatory procedures finds legal expression in the Law on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk (Afet Riski Altındaki Alanların Dönüştürülmesi Hakkında Kanun; law number 6306) which permits TOKI to intervene in and transform areas designated as being under risk of disaster without consent from local residents (Demiralp et al., 2016).

Risk prevention also appeared as a primary rationale for the urban regeneration project in Kale Mahallesi. Unsurprisingly, this is a far cry from TOKI's original purpose, which was to solve the housing problems of middle and lower-middle-income groups through the provision of public housing and credits to cooperatives and individuals. Yet, over time, TOKI became itself a developer in the housing market, invested with vast powers to obtain public land at no cost or ‘urgently’ expropriate land for urban renewal projects. This land is then provided to private developers and construction companies at sub-market values in return for a share in the final revenue from the sale of housing units. TOKI can thus form revenue-sharing partnerships with private developers and sell houses for a profit (Candan and Kulloğlu, 2008; Karaman, 2013). But TOKI's exceptional status includes more:

After legal changes in 2004, TOKI took over the public land and sites formerly owned by a variety of other state institutions. Moreover, TOKI can buy land at the price it wishes without having to consult the privatization administration. It has the authority to make plans and evaluate projects. Mass housing or urban transformation TOKI projects are exempted from taxes, this is in contrast to all the other building constructors. It is not controlled by the investment programs of the state planning agency, by the court of auditors or any other financial control system. It has the right and authority to credit just as financial institutions (Geray 2010; Perouse 2013). Being exempted from financial control, TOKI also completes projects without inspections of the building or the materials used. This lack of regulation and control allowed TOKI to reach its goal of constructing half a million buildings in a short period. (Çavuşuğlu and Strutz, 2014: 142)

Not only is TOKI thus overturning ‘frightening amounts of money’ as one resident put it, but it also takes the form of a sovereign agent, unencumbered by regulatory oversight or constraints. This sovereignty builds on and deepens the reach of financialisation. As Madra (2018) reports, the last two decades have witnessed a massive increase in household indebtedness, half of it now taken up by mortgages.

Reconfiguring sovereignty as a project of statecraft

I take this re-assembly of executive autonomy across agents that blur any straightforward distinctions between public and private but coalesce around projects of value extraction from land as an invitation to think about the changing relation of sovereignty and extraction under conditions of neoliberal financialisation and (populist) authoritarianism. Emerging from a crisis of liberalism, what we observe here goes beyond what has been described as the ‘outsourcing’ of governmental or state functions to private actors in response to neoliberal critiques of public inefficiencies, forms that have functioned as incentives of extraction by capital fractions. It is, to follow Madra and Yilmaz’s notion of ‘corporate sovereignty’, a reformatting of statecraft in the wake of this neoliberal critique, one that entails a remodelling of statecraft in the image of the corporation, one which also alters the control of the economy. Formerly ‘an independent legal form that defined itself in opposition to the incursions of the state’, the corporation first became ‘the platform through which the neoliberal critique and audit of the state is launched’ to then, finally, ‘become the model for the state to re-position itself as a corporate actor with sovereign powers’ (Madra and Özselçuk, 2019: 126). What we observe is thus also different from what Foucault describes as the advent of a liberal form of governmentality accompanying the rise of capitalism and taking the ideational form of political economy, that is, a mode of governing the economy that operates by way of the principles of freedom and interest. This liberal governmental reason was, according to Foucault, concerned with not governing too much, with arranging people and things on the basis of natural rules internal to the logics of political economy. What we observe is closer to what Butler (2004) described in the wake of the US-led war on terror whereby sovereignty re-emerged within the field of governmentality, taking the shape of a tactical suspension of the law for the exercise of a form of rogue power. But whereas Butler shed light on this re-arrangement of sovereignty in relation to the management of populations, I am considering this re-arrangement in terms of extractivist relations to land and property.

What I have described above can well be described as a process of disassembly, fragmentation, dispersal and re-arrangement of sovereignty, a trope that has re-appeared in much of the literature on sovereignty over the last two decades. Aihwa Ong somewhat initiated this debate when she drew on the idea of the exception to understand how neoliberalism works on and through sovereignty in a way that both fragments, flexibilises and extends the space of the nation-state:

Market-driven strategies of spatial fragmentation respond to the demands of global capital for diverse categories of human capital, thus engendering a pattern of non-contiguous, differently administered spaces of ‘graduated’ or ‘variegated sovereignty.’ Furthermore as corporations and NGOs exert indirect power over various populations at different political scales, we have an emergent situation of overlapping sovereignties. (Ong, 2006: 7)

The line of enquiry that emerged from this recognition of spatial fragmentation and the proliferation of sovereign actors has broadly been concerned with how processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and neoliberalisation were disembedding sovereignty from central(ised) states (Bonilla, 2017; Hansen and Stepputat, 2005, 2006; see Comaroff and Comaroff, 2016; Mountz, 2013; Nordstrom, 2000). Pointing to changing institutional structures including supra- and transnationally operating agents and organisations, this body of literature has sought to trace and make sense of changing spatial relations of sovereignty and its increasing disjuncture from national territories. Adjectives have abounded to characterise these sovereignties and their legal and territorial geographies. Besides Ong's notions of graduated, variegated and overlapping sovereignties, we find fragmented and distributed sovereignty, mobile and hybrid sovereignty, contested, undermined, evaded, relative, contingent, partial and precarious sovereignty. Lastly, as Billé (2019, 2020, 2021) has argued, this fragmentation is not two-dimensional, but extends to aerial volumes and the underground in a way that further unhinges sovereignty from territorial control. Global transformations in the operations of capital persistently feature as driving forces of transformation, particularly processes and dynamics of liberalisation and deregulation in the field of trade and finance, as evidenced in Ong's emphasis on the ‘market-driven’ nature of strategies of spatial fragmentation.

Bonilla (2017) has problematised approaches that understand the mutations of sovereignty in the contemporary moment in relation to processes of neoliberalisation, arguing that this dehistoricises the emergence of sovereignty within the colonial encounter. For her and others (Benton, 2010; Hansen, 2021), forms of partial, attenuated or fragmented sovereignty are common to political life and particularly to the routine operations of empire. Bringing empire into the picture also draws attention (back?) to the issue of (resource) extraction beside or beyond the dimension of populations, mobility and citizenship. To do so in my case, and somewhat ironically, actually resurrects the (post-imperial) nation-state as an analytically relevant category. While the point of fragmentation has been made, both in relation to neoliberal globalisation and in relation to imperial histories, in order to figure out the spatial dimension of sovereignty beyond, above, or below the nation-state, my ethnography showcases this fragmentation as a domestic project internal to the practices of national statecraft.

The case of urban regeneration projects as an extractivist venture for local governments invites us, then, to re-think the particular form that the relation between sovereignty and extraction takes in a contemporary context of financialisation and post-liberal authoritarian statecraft. That sovereignty is itself invested in extraction is not new. But this relationship has primarily been thought of in terms of the state's critical role in providing property regimes, contractual legal authority and necessary infrastructures to enable extraction by mineral capital. Once more, this is in line with a liberal tradition that would locate economic rationality squarely within the market and its price mechanism. Which, however, does not prevent the state from gearing processes of territorialisation towards extractive capital (Emel et al., 2011). In the context of a neoliberal differentiation of domestic and international jurisdictions and related financial, regulatory and material infrastructures and networks, this has led many, as pointed out above, to speak of the undermining of state sovereignty.

But as Easterling (2016) has shown, this process of legal and spatial differentiation can undermine central state sovereignty, but it can also work to strengthen the state. Her crucial insight is that the suspension of particular laws, the exemption from regulations and the complex re-arrangement of state and non-state jurisdictions that are characteristic of spatial formations such as free zones can be understood as strategies that serve the state's interests and political-economic strategies. When we look at urban regeneration schemes in Turkey, TOKI's evolution from public housing provider to privatisation agent and real estate developer, the restructuring of different levels of the state, but particularly the transformation of municipal governments into entrepreneurial market actors, and importantly the devolution and redistribution of sovereign prerogatives towards and across these public-turned-(semi)-private actors, we find that the dispersion, fragmentation and complex re-arrangement of sovereignty occurs less as a result of processes of transnationalisation or due to effective legacies of imperial formations, but as a project internal to statecraft under the sign of authoritarianism. These transformations are not primarily driven by market mechanisms, even though the context of their unfolding is not limited to the nation-state but includes transnationally effective economic incentives such as a generalised pressure of extraction arising from the ways in which financialisation has tied national economies to debt servicing (Bear, 2015; see also Streinzer, 2024). But importantly, they mark the emergence of the state apparatus as a meta-market actor and a de-privileging of market mechanisms in favour of direct interventions through the force of exceptional powers. All with a view to gaining wealth through the extraction of value by means of dispossession and predatory lending. As I have shown, unlike cases of neoliberalisation elsewhere, the Turkish state did not withdraw from the provision of housing over the course of the previous decades. It instead took on the role of a direct provider, but in a way that was dependent on simultaneous dispossession and that entailed a remodelling of local governments and the state's public housing authority as entrepreneurial actors. These hybrid creatures both appear as market actors yet also remain endowed with certain sovereign powers, both in terms of their ability to dispose of land and their rights to intervene in property relations, but also by largely acting independently from regulatory oversight or systems of democratic legitimation. This is what marks their authoritarian character. Further, this complex re-arrangement of rights and powers is important in enabling extraction. But it also ties the logic of extraction to the operation of sovereignty in unprecedented ways, precisely by centring the state, endowed with exceptional powers, as a meta-market actor.

This sovereign investment in extraction is very different from the long tradition of ‘statism’ (devletçilik) in Turkey, a political principle of state-driven regulation of the market that dominated economic policy until the onset of liberalisation in the 1980s. State intervention in the economy under statism followed a strategy of developmentalism that included commitments to welfare, redistribution and national security. While security continues to linger discursively in the form of disaster and emergency prevention serving as legitimation for urban renewal, its injunction remains vacuous as evidenced in the disastrous and deadly February 2023 earthquake which had left reputedly ‘earthquake-proof’ buildings and neighbourhoods in ruins. Welfare and redistribution as economic concerns have largely been abandoned or replaced by strategies of (financial) self-responsibilisation. What remains in the wake of neoliberalism is hence a state apparatus invested in and positioned as a key player in extractivist forms of accumulation and endowed with the sovereign capacities not only to extract, but also to distribute and allocate profits along clientelist networks.

The Armenian genocide of 1915 as a moment of primitive accumulation

My argument builds on the work of Yahya Madra, who, as mentioned above, characterises contemporary Turkey as a case of ‘corporate sovereignty’. In a series of (partially co-authored) articles (Madra, 2018; Madra and Özselçuk, 2019; Madra and Yılmaz, 2019), he expands on how the AKP regime under Erdoğan has engaged in the project of constructing a corporate nationalist regime of accumulation around the construction, energy and armament sectors, all of which rely heavily on the powers, capacities and resources of the state. Madra and Ceren Özselçuk provide a genealogy of this corporate form, tracing how it first came into being as a sovereign gift through special charters granted by absolutist states, particularly to facilitate indirect rule in the colonies. As quoted above, the corporation then gained an independent legal form and took on a central (figurative) role in the articulation of neoliberal attacks on the state only to eventually become the model for the state to emulate.

The reconstitution of sovereign rule in contemporary Turkey thus bears genealogical traces of a recursive exchange with the corporate form, traces that are deeply entangled with European imperialism and colonialism. This opens the (post)neoliberal present to histories of empire and raises the question of the governance of difference as well as of Turkey's own historical entanglement with the history of (European) colonialism. At the same time, extraction and the related concept of primitive accumulation always raise the question of the role of (sovereign) violence as it is what characterises this mode of accumulation as opposed to the operation of subtle coercion in processes of extended capitalist reproduction. What comes to light if we look anew at this nexus of sovereignty and extraction from the perspective of imperial formations and the historicity of sovereign violence?

This question emerges from the ethnographic case under discussion because Kale Mahallesi included, until the early twentieth century, several Armenian quarters. In the summer of 1915, the residents of these quarters, together with other Armenians in Moush and elsewhere in the empire, were forcefully evicted from their houses. Armenians living in the plain below the city were mostly shot or rounded up in barns and burned alive. The remaining Armenians were deported and sent on death marches towards the Syrian desert. In mid-July 1915, the Armenian quarters of the town were bombarded and raided by regular and irregular forces and its inhabitants killed. Soldiers and commanders, deputies and governors, as well as Muslim locals pillaged and pilfered what remained of the Armenian quarters (Gust, 2005; Kévorkian, 2006; Svazlian, 2004). Armenian properties were confiscated and to a large extent liquidated in what Harootunian (2019: ch. 4) describes as an act of primitive accumulation.

It remains impossible to recount the concrete history of dispossession that accompanied and followed the murder and deportation of Ottoman Armenians, in Moush or elsewhere (for the case of Adana, see Kurt, 2021). The most important archives, those of the cadastre office and the liquidation commissions, remain classified. Yet, building on the earlier work of Armenian scholars, Onaran (2010), Kaiser (2006), Üngör and Polatel (2011) and Akçam and Kurt (2015) have compiled a relatively clear and detailed account of the institutional and regulatory apparatus and procedures that were implemented throughout the empire to secure the comprehensive dispossession of the empire's Armenian and Assyrian populations. The central element was the so-called commissions for ‘abandoned property’ (emval i-metruke), several dozens of which were set up throughout Anatolia in the summer of 1915 to identify and record the kind, quantity and estimated value of the assets that Armenians had been forced to leave behind. These included both movable and immovable properties, such as land, buildings, animals, jewellery and cash. According to official regulations, these goods and assets were taken ‘under protection’ by the state, which claimed to simply administer the properties’ values in the name of the original owners, even after the commissions had liquidated them starting in September 1915. The laws and regulations thus officially accepted the deportees as legal owners and granted them the right to the value of their properties, yet when and how such restitutions would occur was never specified and payments thus postponed indefinitely. The late Ottoman state thus upheld a right to private property while simultaneously accomplishing a process of dispossession and appropriation. Importantly, by regulating and institutionalising the process, the state could directly shape and subject this process to a broader economic strategy, namely that of the formation and consolidation of an emerging Muslim capitalist class (Kaiser, 2006).

Discussing the case of the Armenian genocide, Harootunian (2019: 94) writes of the ‘intimate and interactive relation between the nation-state and capital accumulation’. While the murder of Ottoman Armenians made little sense from the perspective of capitalist modernisation, also given the important role they played as merchants and artisans often embedded within transnational commercial networks, it was instrumental in Turkifying, that is, ethnically homogenising the land and forming the newly emerging Turkish nation-state. Already towards the late nineteenth century, economic policy had become increasingly protectionist and nationalist consolidating into a programme of ‘milli iktisat’ (national economy) following the Young Turk (CUP) revolution of 1908. Subsumed under the fight against Western imperialism, non-Muslim subjects of the empire were increasingly targeted as ‘foreigners’ also in the economic domain (Çetinkaya, 2014; Kılınçoğlu, 2015; Pamuk, 2018). The Armenian genocide then enabled both a process of unification and accumulation that further continued into the Republican period through the population exchange with Greece, the so-called wealth tax of 1942 and other means of accumulation by dispossession.

Recursive dispossession: Other archives of property

Kale Mahallesi has thus been the site and scene of recursive acts of dispossession. A century prior to the urban regeneration project, dispossession was part of the broader transition from empire to nation-state and a concrete feature of related processes of homogenisation and territorialisation. What results from including this history of sovereign foundational violence into the picture? What conditions of possibility operating in the present moment might become apprehensible? With what implications for our understanding and account of the relation between sovereignty and extraction?

As noted above, Bonilla has argued that to understand contemporary mutations of sovereignty in relation to the neoliberalisation of economy and governance alone risks dehistoricising our understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty, she argues, emerged as a legal technology in the colonial encounter through treaties that incorporated native communities into ontological orders of civilisational difference, and which precisely provided the means to dispossess them. Elaborating on the constitutive relation between sovereignty, racialisation and property, Nisancioglu (2020) speaks of ‘racial sovereignty’. Race, he argues, permeates and structures modern sovereignty as it works through the classification of, the relationships between and the technologies of control over lands and people. Not only is the notion of territorial exclusivity genealogically rooted in the doctrine of discovery, which emerged in response to the exigency to negotiate competing claims between different imperial powers over the same stretch of (colonised) land. A central question also concerned how to share space with native populations. Their dispossession was legitimated on the grounds that natives were deemed wasteful and incapable of ownership. Bhandar (2018: 2) speaks of a ‘racial regime of ownership’ emerging from this convergence of the histories of sovereignty and modern property law. Both modern property law and more general justifications of private property ownership were articulated through the attribution of value to the lives of those defined as having the capacity and ability to appropriate. And this in turn was tied to prevailing concepts of race and racial difference.

Sovereignty is thus constitutively enmeshed in imperial histories of racialisation and dispossession, both of which were indispensable to projects of colonial extraction. As Nisancioglu argues, this violence becomes disavowed in the abstraction of external recognition that became the hallmark of sovereignty as a matter of international relations. Yet it also lingered in imperial jurisprudence, which created a typology of polities with different degrees of sovereignty, defining subordinate but semi-independent colonial polities as partially sovereign. Imperial sovereignty, Benton (2010) argues, was historically characterised by unevenness, operating through disaggregated political geographies, the portability of subjecthood and the delegation of legal authority.

The disaggregation and differentiation of sovereignty is thus not a new phenomenon, but lies at the heart of (histories of) empire, the governance of difference and the will to dispossess and extract. Joining this debate, Hansen (2021: 41) has recently called for a ‘truly global account of modern sovereignty’ that begins ‘not from the heart of Western Europe but from Asia, the Indian Ocean, and other colonized territories’. In such an account of minor sovereignty, what would come to light would be forms of dependency, subordination and tutelage, as well as affective registers of melancholy over the loss of power and autonomy. Central to such accounts would be an analysis of property arrangements and their long and effective afterlives, particularly racialized distinctions between alienable property emerging through and held by settlers and colonisers, local notables and new kinds of land-holding peasants, on the one hand, and inalienable (communal) property guaranteed by customary law or treaty obligations, on the other.

But what about the Ottoman Empire, which engaged in close dynamic exchange with forms of European imperialism and colonialism particularly in the nineteenth century, but which also features a distinct history of imperial formation? Which came under immense pressure from Western imperial powers both on particular territorial fringes as well as through intervention in domestic, including fiscal, affairs? Which reformed its mode of governance in the image of and in competition with ‘Western’, modern forms of rule? But which was also never territorially incongruous such as European imperial formations, which did not negotiate treaties with indigenous communities or formulate legal regimes of native title? But which nonetheless engaged in comparable forms of indigenous dispossession and eliminationist murder as is characteristic of settler colonialism? In the remainder of this article, I want to push Hansen's call for a ‘truly global account’ of sovereignty further by considering alternative imperial genealogies and arrangements that decentre our account of sovereignty and its relation to property, dispossession and extraction even more.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire developed its own forms of graduated sovereignty, as in the case of the autonomous provinces of Egypt and Hijaz (Can and Genell, 2020; Kostopoulou, 2013). But under the pressure of imperial forces and the effective influence of European colonial ideologies, Ottoman rule in the Eastern provinces was also remade in the image of the West. As Makdisi (2002) and Deringil (2003) have argued, the late Ottoman elite mixed ideas of modernisation with colonialism. It translated and adopted the modern binary of Western progress versus Eastern backwardness for the empire itself, conceiving of the Eastern peripheries increasingly as a colonial setting, to be civilised, modernised, absorbed and integrated (Kühn, 2007). While it propagated shared and equal citizenship, also through a discourse of Ottoman patriotism, this was always complemented by temporal segregation and increasingly racialised differentiation (Campos, 2017). While autonomy was granted to more peripheral regions, the opposite was the case for Kurdistan.

For centuries, the region had been governed through autonomous Kurdish emirates with sovereignty over internal affairs. Emirs held hereditary rights of property over provincial land, agricultural produce and revenues and enjoyed great fiscal autonomy. Yet, in 1875, the empire defaulted on its foreign loans, leading to the establishment of a Public Debt Administration that granted Western imperial powers a degree of control over the empire's finances. Under great pressure to generate and extract more revenues from the provinces, the Ottoman ruling elite abolished the emirates, established a rationalised tax system, pushed the commodification of land and integrated tribal and nomadic populations through settlement and related policies. The state confiscated and divided up land, recognised private property, thus making land available for commercial transactions, and engaged in efforts to tax more systematically and comprehensively. Yet, it fundamentally lacked the necessary financial and human resources, which meant it had to negotiate with and grant concessions to religious leaders, tribal chiefs and local notables on the ground. Its sovereign territorial and extractive grip was thus precarious. Under the pressure to settle tribes as well as migrants from the Caucasus, conflicts over land and resources intensified. Particularly with the establishment of Kurdish light cavalry regiments, violence and insecurity became endemic, exacerbating existing inequalities and injustices. Armenian peasants in particular were massively exploited through land occupation and usurpation, over- or double-taxation as well as loan enforcement under conditions that regularly led to defaults and dispossession. The region was taken over by an almost unchecked economy of plunder, leading to the destitution and impoverishment of the Armenian population in particular (Altuğ, 2021; Astourian, 2011; Astourian and Kévorkian, 2021; Aytekin, 2009; Gutman, 2014; Klein, 2011; Özbek, 2012; Özok-Gündoğan, 2014).

Extraction of land revenues and the dispossession of a largely Armenian peasantry were thus at the heart of transformations in sovereign rule in the region from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Moving from a system of autonomous native emirates towards a strategy of territorial consolidation and biopolitical governmentality, the Ottoman state adopted and incorporated discourses and techniques of European colonial modernity in its own domestic affairs. However, it was unable to fully establish corresponding institutions and infrastructures and could thus not control the flow of what turned into an extractive economy of plunder. The Armenian genocide of 1915-X changed this in that the state, through a regularised programme of dispossession, could give birth to a Muslim bourgeoisie henceforth tied by complicity and the force of sovereign foundational violence to the state as apparatus and project (Kurt, 2021).

This mass transfer of wealth over the transition from empire to republic not only gave rise to a Muslim Turkish bourgeoisie, but also entailed the emergence of a racialised property regime built on the fundamental exclusion of non-Muslims (Altuğ, 2021). This evokes the intimate relation between sovereignty, imperial formations and indigenous dispossession articulated in the literature cited above. The racialisation of property regimes under imperial formations has so far been understood as working by way of constructing civilisational differences, mobilised to facilitate and legitimate extraction. It has operated by figuring some as incapable of appropriation, as lacking concepts of property and as engaging with land in non-productive, wasteful ways. The late Ottoman Empire and its genocidal chapter of indigenous dispossession differ from this pattern. If anything, it was Kurds who were problematised as non-sedentary and transhumanist, and later, in Republican times, also as cross-border smugglers. It was Kurds and other nomadic groups who were figured as the object of a new civilising mission following discourses of European colonialism. But it was Armenians and other non-Muslims who were murdered, dispossessed and chased from the lands, Armenians who had, over the course of the nineteenth century benefitted from how the Ottoman Empire had opened up to global markets, who had worked as land-tilling peasants, as manufacturers, merchants and traders. As noted above, Armenians even continued to be officially recognised as private property-holding rights-bearers after their dispossession. They were not so much dehumanised as barbaric, primitive others than targeted as enemy-foreigners also through discursive association with Western imperialism. They were targeted for elimination and their looted properties and capital were used to prop up the state budget, kick-start a new generation of Muslim capital and power holders, but also to settle nomads and migrants and bind Kurds to the land through the force of complicity. An alleged association with Western imperial powers informed the eliminationist drive against an indigenous group whose assets were henceforth used to ‘civilise’ and integrate those subject to a colonising gaze.

Likewise, when it comes to the particular arrangement between sovereignty, territory and property, the Ottoman/Turkish case is entangled with, yet distinct from the context of European imperialism and settler colonialism. Even though policies vis-à-vis the Eastern provinces took on settler colonial traits over the transition from empire to republic, particularly through strategies of forced displacement, the Ottoman Empire was not a settler colonial state project. The Ottoman state abolished, as noted above, Kurdish autonomous emirates in the nineteenth century. It did not negotiate treaties with populations that had already been imperial subjects for centuries. The ensuing property arrangements thus also did not include the formation of a distinct form of ‘native’ or ‘customary’ title. In the mid-nineteenth century, a new land code had made the alienation of land through sale, mortgaging and other commercial transactions easier, effectively transforming land into private property even if it was not officially declared as such (Aytekin, 2009). Even over the course of their comprehensive dispossession, Armenians continued to be legally recognised as owners of their properties. The Armenian genocide as an act of primitive accumulation constituted a distinct laboratory for the institutional articulation of property regimes.

The distinct afterlife of this property regime took shape when, following the foundation of the republic in 1923 and well into the 1930s, the central government continued to be challenged in its claims to exclusive sovereign rule through a series of Kurdish rebellions. The elementary structure of the central government's response to these uprisings would characterise governance in the region for the time to come: militarised and violent repression and exclusion on the one hand, and a type of non-violent inclusion and integration that authorities themselves labelled ‘colonial’ in early Republican (secret) documents (Yarkin, 2019). Under shifting forms of governing by exception, the institutional arrangements and particular technologies that had taken shape in the context of the dispossession of Armenians (and Greeks, see Morack, 2017) were now applied to Kurds targeted as part of the rule by martial law. Kurds targeted for deportation because of their association with uprisings were allocated land in Western Turkey. They were forced to pay a difference in value between the plots of land, while the land that had been left behind was declared ‘abandoned’ to be assessed and redistributed through local commissions under the authority of the central treasury.

Procedures for expropriation that included mechanisms for compensation payments and figured the state as legal steward over ‘abandoned properties’ were thus flexibly extended in ways that targeted now racialised Muslim parts of the population. And yet, while Armenians turned into abstract owners, reduced to ghostly existences within the account books of the abandoned property and liquidation commissions, Kurds stood a chance and indeed did sometimes return to their village and region of origin.

Conclusion

When I asked people in Moush what they thought were the reasons and motivations behind the urban regeneration project in Kale Mahallesi, many made an allusion to ‘that’ history of the quarter. But my attempts to probe deeper tended to yield mostly silence. At some level, the intentions of the state remained inscrutable. Might it have something to do with gold? That was one question hushed across the silence. But following the demolition and evacuation of the quarter, it was not state officials, but residents and others who flocked to Kale Mahallesi to dig up the ground between former buildings in search of what is locally known as ‘Armenian’ treasures and gold. There is a widespread belief in the region (and beyond) that Armenians buried their valuables prior to or facing the threat of deportation, riches that continue to await their finders underground today (see also von Bieberstein, 2017, 2021).

My point in bringing the two historically separate but geographically coincidental episodes of extraction by (racialised) dispossession together has not been in order to affirm some direct lines of causality or determination. Yes, the institutions and mechanisms of expropriation in 1915 continued to be applied and developed in relation to other population groups and cases after the foundation of the republic. Yes, the Armenian genocide constituted a frontier for the elaboration of techniques and procedures, some of which we can make out in the context of the urban regeneration scheme today. They include the principle of state stewardship and mechanisms for the payment of compensation together with the continued official upholding of rights to private property. And yet, these techniques and procedures operate under very different conditions of capitalist statecraft, which radically changes their nature and meaning as well. The general inaccessibility of relevant archives also does not allow for the writing of a clear materialist study of the history of Armenian properties and assets.

But what I am suggesting is that the genocidal moment of primitive accumulation has informed people's historical consciousness and works to imagine the land as a source of booty. In that sense, it is the history of sovereign violence that contributes to rendering the landscape amenable for extraction in the present, across an Armenian-Kurdish divide. As I showed above, this imagination originates in the late nineteenth century, preceding the Armenian genocide. But the latter was, also by force of its sheer violence, a constitutive moment for the institutionalisation of a racialised property regime built on the fundamental (and extractive) dispossession and exclusion of non-Muslims.

This regime survived the transition from empire to republic, which makes this case very different from the post-colonial states and spaces in the focus of such scholars as Bonilla or Hansen. Turkey might be post-imperial, but it is not post-colonial. Its victorious ‘war of independence’ ensured continuities in political personnel and policy. Bonilla and Hansen are concerned with how sovereignty emerged in the context of European imperialism and colonialism as a global concept, norm, and performative category, which, precisely by the way it allowed for forms of fragmentation, gradation, and hierarchisation between imperial centres and colonial peripheries, ensured extractive relations between the two. By expanding the anthropological archive as I have done, I want to bring attention to imperial and colonial formations which are not necessarily unrelated to ‘the West’, but which are certainly not reducible to it, but follow their own logic and program (for a similar point in relation to China, see Byler, 2021). In Western Armenia/Northern Kurdistan, the political formation that was the central driver of colonising discourses, genocidal murder and projects of dispossession and extraction was not defeated, it won out. While all post-colonial settings grapple with the legacies of colonial logics and formations, in the case of Northern Kurdistan, the ‘colonisers’, so to speak, remained in power and now claimed to embody popular sovereignty.

As I have shown, this does not mean that processes of racial differentiation, hierarchisation, and fragmentation are any less present, but, similar to my argument concerning a neo-mercantilist present that turns this fragmentation into a strategy of post-liberal, authoritarian statecraft, these processes are once again internal to the imperial/nation-state project, a hundred years prior and across the transition from empire to republic. In short, the break-up and re-assembly of sovereign prerogatives and powers are crucial for enabling extraction, but this does not necessarily occur at the scale of the geopolitical, as a matter of international, post-colonial relations between former colonial centres and peripheries, as emphasised by Bonilla and Hansen. It therefore does also not necessarily manifest as a division between alienable private property and inalienable customary title, to return to Hansen's example.

Expanding the anthropological archive of empire and colonialism towards non-European cases thus also leads me to hold onto an idea of sovereignty as more than a norm or performative category. Even beyond or at the margins of Euro-America, it is not only an aspiration, the site of a struggle or a matter of negotiation within international relations. Sovereignty is thus the name I give to the force that can powerfully fragment and redistribute authority and that can determine differentiations and fragmentations that are central to enabling extraction.