The Geography of Cattle and Sheep: Security, Dispossession and Industrial Food Production in Turkey
His research disentangles the ways in which markets, states and supra-national institutions intervene in ecological networks and production regimes in order to increase and accelerate capital accumulation, particularly in conflict zones. For this purpose, he focuses on changing human-animal relations in the Kurdish region of Turkey as a means of exploring and comparing social transformations starting from 1990s up to present. In this period, human-animal relations have been drastically altered towards industrial production in a very short span of time, which took place in the nexus of A) a new set of financial tools introduced by IMF & the World Bank and B) the security concerns of the Turkish State. Through the exercise of selective military violence and financial tools, such transformation endorsed the replacement of “inefficient” species of cattle for more productive animal breeds, and by means of that, villagers for entrepreneurs. The main conceptual framework of the research draws on an emerging conversation between science & technology studies, biopolitics and animal studies, while extending this body of work to a conflict-ridden region in Turkey.
