The rise and decline of an anti-dam campaign: Yusufeli Dam project and the temporal politics of development

Abstract

This article discusses the temporalities of development and local politics in the context of the Yusufeli Dam project in Artvin, Turkey. Once finished, the project will lead to the submergence of the Yusufeli town center and 19 villages, the relocation of at least 20,000 people and the destruction of all agricultural land. The threat of destruction and eviction has in the past led to the mobilization of the residents of Yusufeli to establish alliances with international NGOs which successfully prevented the start of the project for more than a decade. More recently however, the earlier activist energy in the town gradually fizzled out to give way to the rise of bargaining with the state as the dominant form of political action. To be able to understand this shift from collective opposition to negotiation, I propose to study the spatio-temporal changes and sensibilities that dam planning, finance and construction elicit and become entangled with. If development materializes partly through the desires and emotional attachments of its target populations, I argue, then material and moral engagements of the local residents with past, present and future condition their political responses.