Social development as a governmental strategy in the Southeastern Anatolia project

Abstract

This thesis examines the emergence and transformation of social development as a governmental strategy within the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) in the 1990s. GAP, which emerged as an infrastructure project to build dams, irrigation canals and hydroelectricity stations in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin in the 1970s, was transformed into an integrated development project in the early 1990s in which social development was a significant concern. In the late 1990s, under the impact of the shifting of the global development practice from state-led to market-led models, GAP adopted the discourse of sustainable human development, which entailed a novel notion of social development reconfigured in accordance with the neo-liberal development practices. Since the 1960s, governmental regional development concerns in Turkey were intermingled and became an instrument of managing the Kurdish population which since the early Republican era has had a tense relation with the state. Thus, in the GAP case, dealing with the Kurdish question has become the most significant rationale for the governmental efforts to bring social development to the east. Therefore the notion of social development GAP entailed should be considered as a governmental strategy set forth as a means of the governmental aspiration to manage the population living in the region. Considering this relation between the regional development policies and the Kurdish question this thesis looks at the notion of social development within GAP through an exploration of the governmental rationalities underlying its emergence and transformation, the technologies it deployed and the processes of subject-formation it entailed. In this manner, the study aims to bring a critical approach to studies on GAP in which development is taken as a given entity without being subjected to criticism.