Ezgican Özdemir Kelly, "Hegemony-building and water politics in northern Cyprus" Voices from the Field: 2025 Spring Anthropology Talks

Voices from the Field: 2025 Spring Anthropology Talks #7

Ezgican Özdemir Kelly

"Contesting privatization, looking for 'normalcy": A case of hegemony-building and water politics in northern Cyprus"

21 May 2025, Wednesday, 10:00
AB2.121

This talk focuses on domination-through-infrastructure of the Turkish state in the occupied territories of northern Cyprus. Through a historically informed ethnography of water infrastructure and its privatization, I argue that the Turkish-sponsored Water Supply Project in northern Cyprus poses an example of how water resources, both in their materiality and multiplicity of meanings, drive politics and inform human reflection about space, place, agency, autonomy, and what constitutes a community.

Through the case study of this megaproject, I problematize the assumed connection between Turkey as motherland (anavatan) and northern Cyprus as babyland (yavru vatan) and its consolidation through a pipeline by engaging with communities on the island grappling with political patronage, economic dependency, and Turkey’s neoliberal experimentations in governance in their unrecognized state. I will give an ethnographic account of the grassroots movement called the “Water Platform”, their main political and moral concerns regarding the privatization of water, and the innerworkings of their activism as well as core ideas about power and politics vis-à-vis their de-facto state. For people of northern Cyprus, water infrastructure became a site to look for answers for who they are, where they belong, and who they look up to. Northern Cyprus for them, is a “half- island” where exceptionality is the rule; inferiority over “motherland” Turkey, or as I call it their “internalized dispossession” is the condition through which they maneuver between the powers hovering over them and powers to act upon their own world.

Through this account, I will also provide some conceptual and methodological considerations as to how infrastructure megaprojects involving both natural and built environments reveal the co-constitution of the material and ideological dimensions of social life.

The talk will be delivered in English.