Extractive rhythms of “energy dependence” in the Soma basin: reshaping the flows of migration, cash, and debt via underground minework

Abstract Over the past few decades, Soma, a once-thriving agricultural town in Turkey’s North-Aegean region, has been transformed into a critical frontier for extractive industries, fuelled by the Turkish state’s ambitious energy independence policies. Soma’s abundant but low-efficiency lignite coal deposits have become central to a nationally designed strategy maximizing domestic energy production, giving rise to new forms of labour, cycles of internal migration, and intensified rhythms of resource extraction. This article examines how Soma’s migrant miner families navigate the interplay between labour, debt, and family obligations in the context of accelerated resource extraction. It focuses on the strategies of migrant miner households who increasingly rely on small, easily accessible bank loans to meet the demands of marriage traditions and emerging gendered expectations. I explore how state-backed financial inclusion policies, along with nationally designed resource extraction models, have created new temporalities and moral economies within mining households. These financial instruments reshape the rhythms of social expenses, family obligations, and regionally specific family expectations that align with the rhythms of extractive industries. Accordingly, this article demonstrates how the extractive economy in Soma operates not only through material resource extraction but also through the production of new forms of moral values at the regional and household levels.