The Three Pillars of De-development: Forced Displacement, Cultural Annihilation, and Economic Expropriation

The central argument and the vantage point of this article is that there is an indivisible and organic link between the economic and noneconomic aspects of dispossession or disarticulation in the state policies in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia (ESA), without the analysis of which the political economy of de-development in ESA cannot be veraciously understood. Nor could the region be analyzed from a decolonial lens because overlooking or negating this link hinders the pivotal aims and achievements of the decolonization scholarship: (1) excavating the significant historical power inequalities and (2) unearthing and impugning the sanitization or negation of plunder and the civilizing mission. An indispensable element of de-development in ESA is the nationalist population policies, which, among other things, include forced displacement of the autochthonic populaces in ESA. This article analyzes the fluxes in the socioeconomic and political features and structures of ESA and describes the demographic engineering-centered de-development policies implemented in the ESA, which have been thus far either eluded or analyzed devoid of their ramifications for socioeconomic features and structures in ESA by scholarly studies. In doing so, the article will employ a political economy approach as well as a longue durée mode of analysis.