Studying states of emergency relationally

In State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben (Reference Agamben2005) shows that the regularization of emergency governance began during World War I, when exceptional legislation by executive decree became standard in European democracies. Crucially relevant to this paper is that this mode of governance merges economic imperatives with security concerns. Agamben (Reference Agamben2005, 12) highlights the “implicit assimilation between war and economics,” noting that during the World War I, a dictatorship of the military high command was instituted across much of Europe, blending military authority with economic control. The economic aspect, according to Agamben, took the form of a general mobilization of men and resources.

Further, he notes that this practice was not limited to authoritarian regimes. In Germany, for example, the Social Democratic Party inherited and institutionalized the state of exception through Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. This illustrates how emergency powers, though initially introduced by right-wing or military regimes, were quickly adopted by leftist governments when they assumed power. For Agamben, this bipartisan adoption signals that the state of exception functions as a foundational paradigm of modern governance, a dynamic I will illustrate through the emergency declarations issued by both the AKP and CHP.

Building on these insights, this paper explores how economic imperatives are embedded within emergency governance and how the capacity to declare a state of exception transcends party ideology. In doing so, I aim to move beyond some of the limitations in the existing literature on states of exception by advancing a historical and relational approach.

Scholarship on states of exception has grown significantly (e.g. Ralph Reference Ralph2009; Scheppele Reference Scheppele2004), particularly in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the ensuing US responses, including the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. Often inspired by the works of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these studies have illuminated how executive power expands while legislative and judicial functions are suspended. They have focused on the effects of such expansions – surveillance, suspension of rights, and constitutional authoritarianism – especially in contexts of war, crisis, and civil unrest. These works have been instrumental in showing how the state of exception serves as a reaffirmation of sovereign power.

However, recent critiques – of which this paper is a part – have pushed against the dominant frameworks of this literature. First, as Adey et al. (Reference Adey, Anderson and Graham2015, 3) emphasize, the state of exception is only one among multiple techniques of governing emergencies. Emergency governance does not rely solely on exceptionalist legal frameworks but emerges through shifting practices and problematizations of life, security, and response. This calls for a closer examination of the diversity and nuances of emergency practices and the sociopolitical rationalities they mobilize.

Second, while most analyses center on sovereign actors, other forces – including humanitarian agencies, non-governmental organizations, and international bodies – have played pivotal roles in shaping states of emergency. Fassin and Pandolfi’s (2010) work redirects attention toward these actors, emphasizing how interventions in the name of morality and ethics often depoliticize violence and override state sovereignty (Ophir Reference Ophir, Fassin and Pandolfi2010). Their notion of “humanitarian government” sheds light on how emergencies can be governed in non-sovereign yet deeply consequential ways.

Third, this paper argues that existing studies often isolate types of emergency governance – war, terrorism, economic crisis, disaster – as if they exist in separate policy silos. This obscures the entanglements between different domains of emergency. For example, while Fassin and Pandolfi (Reference Fassin and Pandolfi2010) focus on humanitarian intervention, Zizek (Reference Zizek2010) identifies a permanent economic emergency characterized by austerity and precarity. Others have examined emergency regimes in relation to terrorism (Dillon Reference Dillon2007), natural and technological disasters (Murray Reference Murray2009), epidemics (Nguyen Reference Nguyen2009), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Halstead Reference Halstead2020). Rather than treating emergency declarations as discrete or siloed events, this paper traces their interconnectedness through a genealogy from Turkey, highlighting how economic, political, and security rationalities are deeply intertwined in the production and operation of emergency governance.

It is crucial to emphasize that relationality does not refer merely to the co-occurrence or resemblance of different states of emergency, but to the way they are co-constituted through shared infrastructures of rule and accumulation. A relational approach foregrounds how different modalities of emergency governance – whether spectacular or mundane – operate through legal mechanisms, administrative categories, and political logics that circulate across cases and institutional settings. In this sense, the post-conflict expropriations and violent curfews in Diyarbakır, and the bureaucratic designation of “risk areas” in Eskişehir, are not isolated episodes. They are linked by a common logic: the use of emergency powers to dispossess populations and reorganize urban space for capital accumulation and political control. Rather than treating security, disaster, and urban policy as separate domains, a relational approach asks how these domains are governed through overlapping legal rationalities and state techniques that reinforce each other across space and time. This perspective builds on my critique of exceptionalist literature, especially those that extend Agamben’s insights without attending to the ways that emergency governance mutates across policy sectors and actors.

Importantly, the decision to analyze one spectacular case and one non-spectacular case is not incidental but intentional. While it would be possible to compare two spectacular instances, placing a highly visible, violent emergency next to a bureaucratic and largely unnoticed one better illuminates the shared logic and tools of emergency governance despite their overt differences. This juxtaposition exposes how seemingly different modalities are united by a common rationality of rule and dispossession.

Importantly, relational thinking in this paper does not only rest on a comparison between two settings. It also examines how, within each case, multiple logics of rule – security, urban planning, and population control – intersect and become operationalized through overlapping policy mechanisms. This approach foregrounds the internal complexity of emergency governance, showing how different domains and rationalities of accumulation and ruling purposes co-produce emergency governance.

Finally, much of the literature focuses on the overreach of executive power, rarely addressing how emergency declarations may falter, be resisted, or generate unintended consequences. This paper centers not only on the rationalities and institutional mechanisms through which emergencies are declared and administered but also the practices of resistance playing a role in their scope. It is in these moments – where declarations are contested, defied, or redirected – that we see the relational and historically contingent nature of emergency governance most clearly.

Historical genealogy of states of emergency in Turkey

Studies of states of emergency have generally been event-based research fixed in a certain time frame. The discussion below, divided into three sections, will trace the historical foundations and legal bases of emergencies that have long existed in the Turkish state while emphasizing the interplay between various forms of emergency governance through a relational analysis.

The AKP’s rule, law, and dispossession

The year 2002 was a milestone in Turkey’s urbanization, marking the AKP’s rise to power under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Bayırbağ Reference Bayırbağ2013; Civelek Reference Civelek2019; Kuyucu Reference Kuyucu2018; Türkün Reference Türkün2011). Construction became central to the AKP’s accumulation strategy, and urgent expropriations sharply increased, enabling a drastic expansion of urban renewal projects. Hundreds of legal amendments and policy interventions paved the way for the large-scale reproduction of the built environment across residential and non-residential zones, often through urgent expropriations. The Mass Housing Authority (Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı; TOKİ), founded in 1984, emerged as the key actor, empowered by extraordinary privileges under the AKP government to implement renewal projects.

In earlier research on a TOKİ-led gecekondu renewal program, I asked a planner in Eskişehir’s Odunpazarı district municipality how the project was implemented so quickly. She said they used the Expropriation and Municipality Laws to initiate urgent expropriation “in the name of the public interest,” swiftly demolishing the houses – “it was a fait accompli,” she pointed out (Interview on August 12, 2012). As this example illustrates, discourses of urgency and the public interest have justified renewal efforts while generating significant rents for public and private actors. As observed, “the threat and pressure of urgent expropriation have made citizens feel powerless in negotiations with authorities” (Türkün Reference Türkün2011, 67), especially in gecekondu areas, leading to displacement and dispossession through emergency-like interventions (Civelek Reference Civelek2019).

After the 2011 Van earthquakes, which killed approximately 650 people, the AKP government began invoking the “risk of natural disasters” in urban policy. Speculation about future catastrophes helped frame renewal as a moral and urgent duty. The government promoted the need for “safe and secure” towns and granted new powers to public institutions to carry out renewals under the pretext of disaster prevention. This aligns with theories of disaster capitalism (Klein Reference Klein2008; Schuller and Maldonado Reference Schuller and Maldonado2016), where fear and moral panic serve as justification for aggressive urban interventions. During a 2012 meeting in İstanbul, the Minister of Environment and Urbanism claimed that 40 percent of Turkey’s nineteen million dwellings needed to be renewed. Such rhetoric concealed structural inequalities and the neoliberal logic underpinning renewal efforts.

Just six months after the Van earthquakes, in May 2012, the government passed Law No. 6306 – The Law on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk. Despite criticisms from opposition parties, including the CHP, the law was enacted swiftly. It contained vague and ambiguous clauses and was drafted without consulting urban planners, professional chambers, or academics. After its enactment, even forest areas, cemeteries, coasts, and military lands were eligible to be declared “risk zones” subject to renewal. Urban experts, activists, and chambers argued the law’s true aim was to stimulate the construction sector (Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects [Türk Mühendis ve Mimar Odaları Birliği; TMMOB] 2012).

Due to its ambiguous language, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization frequently issued bylaws to implement the law. When I interviewed a bureaucrat from the Ministry in 2016, he admitted that “four years after the law had come into force, we still don’t know how to interpret those articles – not even the Minister knows” (Interview on March 19, 2016).

Notably, Law No. 6306 authorized the Ministry, TOKİ, and other public bodies to carry out urgent expropriations to foster urban renewals. Table 1, adapted from Karaman (Reference Karaman2015), shows a sharp rise in urgent expropriations following the law’s enactment.

Table 1.

Number of urgent expropriations following the enactment of Law No. 6306

Source: Karaman (Reference Karaman2015).

When Law No. 6306 is implemented, the designated area is declared a “risk zone” requiring urgent renewal. All construction and demolition halt, and annotations are added to land title deeds to flag the area as hazardous. The Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, TOKİ, and appointed local governments then assume full authority, unless challenged through legal action – as I explore in the Eskişehir case.

Despite claims of disaster preparedness, TOKİ’s projects have often failed to deliver safe housing. Exempt from taxes and Court of Accounts audits, TOKİ operates through patronage networks (Civelek Reference Civelek2019). Its buildings frequently use low-quality materials and lack structural safety, undermining the very goals used to justify their construction. Meanwhile, TOKİ has failed to meet its obligations to disaster victims, and numerous designated emergency assembly areas – especially in İstanbul – have been converted into shopping malls or religious centers. Yet when buildings collapse or there is mismanagement, instead of taking responsibility, authorities tend to attribute the events to nature or divine forces, framing them as inevitable or beyond human control. This exemplifies how “capitalism as disaster” is manufactured in Turkey (Matthewman Reference Matthewman2015).

A spectacular case and relationalities of emergencies: Sur, Diyarbakır

To explicitly demonstrate the simultaneity and entanglement of multiple forms of emergency governance – and their orchestration for accumulation and control – I begin with one of the most dramatic cases: Sur, Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. In Sur, overlapping emergency measures and legal instruments converged around three interlinked aims: (a) restructuring space for capital accumulation; (b) governing the Kurdish population; and (c) reorganizing the labor force.

Located in southeastern Turkey, Diyarbakır Province and its historic district, Sur, have long been home to diverse civilizations, cultures, and religions. With nearly twenty million Kurds in the country, Diyarbakır is often considered the “de facto capital” of Turkey’s Kurdistan (Yıldız Reference Yıldız, Cercel, Fusco and Lavis2021). Throughout the history of the Republic, Diyarbakır and the surrounding Kurdish cities have epitomized overlapping of emergency regimes where violence and racialized capitalism intersect.

The structural entanglement of capitalism and racialized domination is evident in the state’s treatment of Kurds. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s (2019) distinction between exploitation and expropriation, the Kurdish case illustrates how these logics are unevenly applied. While some are integrated into labor markets under exploitative conditions, others are subjected to expropriation through land seizure, displacement, militarization, and the denial of political rights. This dual process sustains ethnic hierarchies within capitalist development. As Fraser (Reference Fraser2019) emphasizes, these configurations shift across historical regimes, reshaping Kurdish marginalization and forms of resistance. I build on this framework to trace a historical continuum of racialized capitalism and states of exception in the region.

Though often framed as responses to security threats, emergency rule in Diyarbakır has also served to reshape urban space and labor relations. The long-standing construction of Kurds as internal enemies has enabled policies of forced displacement, expropriation, and redevelopment. These dynamics reflect “expropriation as a mode of accumulation” (Fraser Reference Fraser2019), where dispossession and political subjection fuel capital expansion. Ayata and Yükseker (Reference Ayata and Yükseker2005) show that the mass internal displacement of the 1990s produced a precarious and mobile labor force, absorbed into low-wage and informal sectors. More recently, Karatasli and Kumral (Reference Karatasli and Kumral2019) examine how conflict-driven dispossession contributes to class formation, while Ercan (Reference Ercan2019) analyzes the role of post-peace process urban warfare in legitimizing aggressive redevelopment under racialized securitization.

Complementing these accounts, Taş (Reference Taş2022) argues that the Kurdish region has become a laboratory for Turkey’s neocolonial governance strategies, where urban transformation serves not only economic but also ethnocratic and ideological ends. Through the deployment of military urbanism and symbolic architectural erasure, urban renewal in cities like Diyarbakır is instrumentalized to dismantle Kurdish political, cultural, and spatial infrastructures. These interventions reflect a mode of racialized capitalism in which expropriation operates through both material dispossession and spatial–cultural domination – recasting urban space in the image of a homogenizing national order.

These urban redevelopment projects have served not only to erase political opposition but also to reconfigure urban space for profit under the pretense of security. Emergency interventions have always created expropriable populations, shaped through dispossession, displacement, and disposability. The mentioned studies above suggest that emergency governance in Diyarbakır should be read not simply as repression, but as a political–economic project that combines control with extraction.

This political–economic logic can be traced back to the early Republican era: based on Article 86 of the 1924 Constitution, the first state of siege of the Republic with an aim to suppress Kurdish uprisingsFootnote ⁵ was proclaimed on February 23–24, 1925 and lasted until December 23, 1927 in fourteen Kurdish provinces, including Diyarbakır. In contemporary Turkey, particularly since the 1980s, the armed conflict between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê; PKK)Footnote ⁶ has resulted in significant political and economic instability (Günay and Yörük Reference Günay and Yörük2019; Güneş and Zeydanlıoğlu Reference Güneş and Zeydanlıoğlu2014; Yüksel Reference Yüksel2011). The conflict has claimed the lives of 45,000 people, led to the evacuation of 4,000 rural settlements, and resulted in the internal displacement of nearly four million people. The economic cost of the armed conflict for Turkey until only 2005 is estimated to be between US$150 and 170 billion (Mutlu Reference Mutlu2011).

Crucially, a state of siege was declared in Diyarbakır on April 26, 1979 and repeatedly extended until 1987. Despite the transition to civilian government under the Motherland Party after three years of military junta after the 1980 coup, the state of siege persisted in Diyarbakır, Mardin, and Siirt until July 19, 1987.Footnote ⁷ After the enactment of the State of Emergency Law (Law No. 2935), the state of siege was replaced by a state of emergency on May 20, 1987.Footnote ⁸ This was renewed forty-six times across thirteen provinces and lasted until November 30, 2002, during which “super governors” with extraordinary powers governed the emergency zone.Footnote ⁹ Thus, from the initial state of siege in 1979 until 2002, Diyarbakır was consistently subjected to the violence of emergency governance. In the absence of the rule of law, exceptionality gained a “prosaic” character (Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2019, 730) and became the norm for the population (Bezci and Öztan Reference Bezci and Öztan2016, 171).

During the 1980s and 1990s, state-enforced evacuations particularly in rural Kurdish settings led to massive forced migration to urban areas, not only to Kurdish cities like Diyarbakır but also to western cities. This contributed significantly to the rise of gecekondu settlements. Diyarbakır’s population grew drastically, exacerbating poverty and unemployment (Yüksel Reference Yüksel2011, 443). Genç (Reference Genç2021, 1688) describes the massive migration to Sur as “traumatic urbanization” where traditional courtyard houses were replaced by multi-story apartments and new gecekondu zones.

As previously noted, Kurdish gecekondu settlers were often associated with political extremism and urban crime, justifying expedited urban renewal projects. However, amidst the “ceaseless terrorization of everyday life,” Sur emerged as a stronghold of the Kurdish movement, symbolizing “the city of struggle” (Genç Reference Genç2021, 1688). Despite the enduring character of the state of emergency and accompanying violence, populations have not been passive recipients of OHAL governance. Instead, they have actively asserted their rights, challenging Agambenian notions of the absolute effectiveness of emergency states.

With pragmatic aims for political gain, the newly formed AKP government lifted OHAL in 2002 under banners such as “democratic initiative” (demokratik açılım), “national unity and solidarity” (millî birlik ve beraberlik), the Oslo process, and the Peace Process (barış/çözüm süreci) (Günay and Yörük Reference Günay and Yörük2019, 25), leading to a “relatively peaceful period” in Diyarbakır (Yüksel Reference Yüksel2011, 447). During this post-conflict era, there was substantial capital accumulation through the construction sector and international trade in Diyarbakır (Genç Reference Genç2021, 1689). The election of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (Halkın Demokrasi Partisi; HADEP) to the metropolitan municipality “nationally and internationally opened up a space for … political and intellectual networks” and contributed to Diyarbakır’s rebranding through urban projects (Yüksel Reference Yüksel2011, 447).

In 2009, the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality and TOKİ introduced an urban renewal project in four neighborhoods of Sur entitled “Sur’s Historical Protection Project.”Footnote ¹⁰ In 2011, then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan declared that the urban renewal projects would increase employment and make Diyarbakır an international tourism destination (The Guardian 2016). Finally, in 2012, Law No. 6306 provided the opportunity to resume the halted renewal program in Sur, which was declared a risk zone. Yet, public opposition continued to stall progress. Contrary to Agambenian thinking, this demonstrates that states of emergency and their asserted absolute authority can be challenged – a theme further explored in the Eskişehir case. Meanwhile, in July 2015, Sur was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site (UNESCO 2015) under the title “Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape.”

A real opportunity to restructure space – and manage the Kurdish population – emerged after the June 2015 general elections, when the AKP lost its parliamentary majority. In the aftermath of the elections and the suicide bombing in Suruç, the so-called peace process collapsed, leading to renewed armed conflict between Turkish military forces and Kurdish fighters in southeastern Turkey. Starting in August 2015, Turkey imposed indefinite curfews in seven southeastern provinces, including Diyarbakır, compounded by electricity and water cuts. During brief reprieves between curfews, many families were forced to flee. On December 11, 2015, just before a final curfew was imposed (lasting approximately five months), police announced that residents would be displaced. This curfew marked a state of emergency in which all freedoms and rights were effectively suspended, and violence encapsulated the area for an indefinite period. As a result, 24,000 Sur residents were displaced.

The then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu in February 2016 declared that the operations and curfews that began in July 2015 were the right decision:

In his speech, the interlacing of different forms of states of emergency was strikingly articulated. Davutoğlu further justified “urgent expropriation” as a purely legal step that would not endanger property rights but rather guarantee them. On March 25, 2016, the Council of Ministers declared urgent expropriation of 80 percent of Sur’s lands. The remaining 20 percent was already publicly owned, mostly by TOKİ. The legal basis of this decision was the risk-zone declaration under Law No. 6306. Since then, widespread displacement and demolitions continued. The aftermath of displacement in Sur not only enabled land expropriation and speculative urban renewal but also contributed to the formation of a precarious labor force. The 24,000 residents expelled during the curfews re-entered labor markets characterized by informality, discrimination, and insecurity – often joining other internally displaced Kurds in western cities.

Emergency measures in Sur – curfews, forced migration, and redevelopment – functioned not only to control territory but also to restructure labor: expelling politicized residents, centralizing property under state control, and facilitating capital-intensive redevelopment that relies on cheap labor pools (Ercan Reference Ercan2019; Karatasli and Kumral Reference Karatasli and Kumral2019; Taş Reference Taş2022). In this sense, the dispossession caused by emergency rule feeds directly into labor expropriation, revealing another dimension of what Fraser (Reference Fraser2019) calls “accumulation by expropriation.” Yet this labor dimension remains largely unaddressed not only in official narratives, which focus solely on land, legality, but also in critical urban scholarship. Reframing emergency governance to include the biopolitical reconfiguration of labor opens the way for a more holistic understanding of how racialized capitalism operates through overlapping logics of control and extraction.

On the path toward rule and accumulation, Sur presents a spectacular case of layered imposition of states of emergency under different names and justifications, all propelled by undeniable violence. Its history demonstrates interventions across multiple policy domains and the mobilization of military power to achieve domination. This dramatic case helps us understand how emergency declarations, disaster capitalism, governance, and dispossession are deeply intertwined. At the same time, numerous less dramatic – yet equally consequential – cases show that states of emergency continue to be applied with overlapping purposes, albeit more subtly. In the next section, I turn to a non-spectacular case from Eskişehir to expand this analysis.

Instrumentalization of the emergency by a non-spectacular case: Eskişehir

Eskişehir, a city in northwestern Turkey with a population of 800,000, has been governed by center-left parties since 1999 under Yılmaz Büyükerşen’s leadership.Footnote ¹¹ Since then, the municipality has launched several urban transformation projectsFootnote ¹² under the banners of modernization and Europeanization, promising economic revitalization, increased tourism, and public benefit. One recurring focus has been the renewal of the Porsuk River banks in the Köprübaşı zone, initiated in 2001 and pursued through successive projects – all of which were annulled by court decisions following lawsuits from local residents and shop owners. I describe this pattern as Russian doll-like urbanization, where each failed project gives rise to a new one (Civelek Reference Civelek2023).

Project cancellations were based on varying legal grounds, including lack of public participation, disregard for ownership rights, vague urban plans, misuse of the “public interest” concept, and insufficient scientific justification (Civelek Reference Civelek2023). During the court process, experts concluded that the “public interest does not mean to defunctionalize the current usage of the entire built environment and open it for new consumption areas” (Field notes, July 12, 2017). For the first two projects, therefore, the Expropriation Law and the Municipal Law were not powerful enough for activation of the renewal plans, which meant that the municipality needed to invent new strategies for the next renewal attempt. Despite the CHP’s parliamentary opposition to Law No. 6306, Eskişehir’s municipality seized the critical conjunctural moment (Clarke Reference Clarke2014) to declare the area a risk zone. Echoing national disaster narratives, the mayor stated that the law had “rescued the municipality” (Field notes, June 20, 2016).

A 56-hectare area along the Porsuk River, home to 15,000 people, was declared an earthquake risk zone – despite contested risk levels. Following the declaration, construction was banned, title deeds were annotated, and property transactions became nearly impossible. The area entered a prolonged state of waiting, leading to notable physical decay.

Furthermore, the emergency declaration also acted as a “political technology” (Collier and Lakoff Reference Collier and Lakoff2021) to suppress local opposition. After two failed attempts – halted by residents’ legal challenges – the municipality leveraged Law No. 6306 to override dissent, particularly from previous complainants. At the Communication Center, the mayor expressed gratitude to the national government for the law’s timing while criticizing earlier opposition:

Some members of the Chamber of Civil Engineers, Chamber of Architects, and journalists criticized the center-left municipality for making use of the draconian new law, particularly taking the CHP’s parliamentary opposition to the law into account. A bureaucrat within the Provincial Directorate of the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization in Eskişehir emphasized that the mayor has wanted to renew this zone for a long time, but he could not achieve his plans because of the court cases. “Finally, he wanted to use this very strong law to try his chance again” (Field notes, July 18, 2015).

With the Risk Zone Project, the municipality’s discourse shifted from its previous focus on the “public interest” towards the risk of disasters and the emergency of urban renewal. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of how the municipality made use of emergency discourse is what I observed at the Communication CenterFootnote ¹³ of the Risk Zone Project in July 2016. During a meeting with the municipality’s planners and a real estate valuation company, the mayor put emphasis on possible questions and challenges that might come from property owners. To reply to such challenges, the mayor ordered the officers to “follow the earthquake and emergency path.” He said: “Just warn people about earthquakes. Emphasize that an earthquake is coming, and we can’t take risks, we don’t have time to wait, we have to do something” (Field notes, July 21, 2016).

Meanwhile, the riskiness of the zone has been disputed. The head of the Chamber of Geological Engineers who is also a professor of Geology at Anadolu University in Eskişehir explained to me that after the 1999 Marmara earthquake the university and chamber started a detailed project to prepare the earthquake map of Eskişehir. According to this map, there are riskier zones that need intervention. Therefore, he guessed that since the zone is very valuable, there will be huge amounts of rent-seeking. He continued: “If their main motivation was to avoid the risk of earthquakes, they would have chosen riskier zones. The mayor was obsessed about renewing this zone and now he’s found a way to do it with claims of disasters” (Field notes, March 18, 2016).

The municipality was not attentive to such criticisms. While it claimed that İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ) had conducted research on the zone, those research results, scientific data, or risk maps were not provided to the public, which raised doubts about the existence of any such research. The head of the Chamber of Geological Engineers further highlighted that he asked the municipality several times to provide him with the data that they claim they use. However, the municipality only answered that they took İTÜ’s data without sharing any further details. Ironically, in times of such critiques, the municipality hid behind the law and criticized its draconian features which reflects the characteristics of a “cunning state” (Randeria Reference Randeria2003). For instance, during the opening ceremony of the Communication Center, the mayor portrayed the law as one of the most powerful in history and insisted that they had no choice but to apply it, effectively framing their actions as passive enforcement (Field research, July 16, 2016).

Finally, although Law No. 6360 has been the strongest law in terms of restrictions on property rights, the emergency declaration could not display an absolute power to decide for the future of the zone. In 2017, residents of the risk zone applied to the court to annul the project. The Council of State appointed three experts from the Departments of Geological Engineering and Civil Engineering at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara to conduct research about the decision of the zone’s riskiness. I interviewed those experts to learn about their decision. One of the geological engineers explained the lack of research and data showing what kind of methods and research they used regarding the land and buildings to be declared at risk. “The municipal officers explained a few simple methods and tests without providing further data,” the expert claimed (Field notes, April 10, 2019). This supports the claim of the head of the Chamber of Geological Engineers mentioned above. Moreover, another expert highlighted that he examined many other risk-zone projects and, in almost every case, “there is mostly a rent-seeking logic or some kind of political benefits behind them” (Field notes, April 10, 2019).

Although the municipality did not expect cancellation of the project, on October 3, 2018, the Council of State granted a motion of suspension of the execution of the Risk Zone Project while the annulment decision arrived on May 9, 2019. The suspension created disappointment within the municipality and the mayor commented on the suspension as “black humor” (Esgazete 2018). More significantly, he mentioned the need for a new urban renewal project regardless of any decisions of the Council of State. He said: “It is clear that we need to replace the Risk Zone Project with another urban renewal project. I do not know how exactly we will proceed with it, but our staff will think about it from now on” (Esgazete 2018). The municipality showed confidence that a cancellation would not lead them to abandon their ambitions for the next project. Based on the Zoning Law and Expropriation Law, in 2019, the municipality declared the Porsuk I and II Projects on the banks of the Porsuk River, becoming the newest units of the municipality’s growing pile of urban renewal projects since 1999. Although the Risk Zone Urban Renewal Project was cancelled, the designation and boundaries of the 56-hectare risk zone remain unchanged.

The Eskişehir case shows that states of emergency are not omnipotent or uncontested. As highlighted by the conflicting and challenging views surrounding the designation of risk zones, emergency governance remains a fragile yet functional tool – its effectiveness dependent on political timing, institutional alignment, and the ability to neutralize resistance. By recognizing these frictions, we can better understand both the power and the limits of states of emergency as instruments of rule and accumulation.