Reconstruction as enclosure: The making of a propertied place in post-conflict Diyarbakır

Despite the technical and humanitarian rhetoric surrounding post-conflict reconstruction, such processes frequently produce more commodified, securitized, and fragmented urban formations, generating novel configurations of power. Recent scholarship on post-conflict cities has increasingly emphasized transformations in everyday practices and lived experience in order to understand these dynamics. This article engages these debates through the case of Diyarbakır, the principal urban center of Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeast, focusing on the reconstruction of its historic core, Suriçi, following the urban clashes of 2015–2016. While existing scholarship has primarily examined how the Turkish state deployed coercion to demobilize Kurdish contentious politics, less attention has been paid to how reconstruction generated new sociabilities through more diffuse spatial practices and imaginaries. Addressing this gap, I conceptualize Suriçi’s reconstruction as a process of enclosure that operated not only through authoritarian imposition from above but also through the quieter neutralization of collective praxis from within. Based on fieldwork conducted between December 2022 and February 2025, the article examines how reconstruction instituted a novel regime that transformed Suriçi into a propertied place while dismantling the infrastructures of commoning and the contingent forms of place-making through which Kurdish urban poor had sustained social and political capacities. In doing so, the article argues that reconstruction extended violence beyond destruction and displacement by reorganizing the material, social, and affective conditions of urban life. Conceptualizing reconstruction as enclosure thus offers a framework for analyzing the everyday modalities of power shaping post-conflict urbanities.