Electrifying Sovereignty

In Turkey, the state has made a concerted effort to upgrade the country’s infrastructure over the last 20 years, including everything from electricity and water to roads and housing. But it has done so unevenly and punitively, especially in the predominately Kurdish southeastern region, where a protracted militarized conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish minority has resulted in a complex web of infrastructure and social control. There, the new infrastructural investments not only address long-standing infrastructural inadequacies but also reinforce the counterinsurgency measures that the Turkish state implements against residents, especially since the (re)escalation of its armed campaign in 2015. This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a southeastern province of Turkey, where many new electricity projects have been completed but where residents nevertheless continue to experience electricity inadequacies and disruptions. Through participant observation and interviews, I examine the region’s infrastructural regimes with a focus on the provisioning and governance of access to electricity to understand how infrastructural improvements utilizing technology combine with existing securitization strategies in the region to create new infrastructures of securitization that transform people’s livelihoods, identities, temporalities, and socialities.