Dam money and displacement: Laws and intimate rupture in the Muş Alpaslan-1 Dam Project, eastern Turkey

Dams are often framed as emblems of national progress and modernisation, yet their construction produces slow, reverberating forms of violence that disrupt everyday life. This article examines the social, legal, and gendered repercussions of the Alpaslan-1 Dam, built on the Murat River in Muş province, Eastern Turkey, drawing on 10 months of fieldwork. The dam submerged villages, displaced thousands, and transformed livelihoods, land ownership, and social relations. Villagers’ encounters with resettlement policies, expropriation laws, and the baraj parası (compensation payments) reveal bureaucratic disjunctures, persistent inequalities, and inheritance conflicts. Patriarchal norms frequently override women’s legal rights, compelling them to relinquish their inheritance to preserve household cohesion, reflecting their ‘triple marginalisation’ across ethnicity, gender, and rural class. Compensation processes largely benefit those with bureaucratic knowledge, exacerbating existing disparities, while delays in infrastructure and resettlement prolong instability. This article shows how infrastructural projects penetrate intimate domains of life, reshaping landscapes, kinship, and lived experience.