Neoliberal developmentalism, authoritarian populism, and extractivism in the countryside: the Soma mining disaster in Turkey

Abstract

While state-society relations in Turkey have historically been top-down and coups d’état periodically interrupted democratic politics, the recent authoritarian turn under Erdoğan is remarkable. Two dynamics are especially salient. First, Erdoğan and his AKP have been particularly effective in deepening the neoliberalisation of economy and society. Their policies have created a new form of neoliberal developmentalism, where solutions to all social ills have come to be seen as possible through rapid economic growth. Second, they have intensified the transformation of the countryside, where new forms of dispossession and deagrarianisation open the way to an unprecedented extractivist drive. Together, neoliberal developmentalism and extractivism have resulted in growing social dissent. The eruption of anger after the Soma coal mining disaster that killed 301 miners is one such case. The paper shows how Erdoğan and the AKP use populist tactics (ranging from an uptick in nationalist discourse to the provision of ‘coal aid’ in winter) to assuage their critics. Where these prove inadequate, an increasingly violent crackdown on social dissent is being deployed in the name of peace and order as the country remains in a state of emergency since the attempted coup of July 2016.

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The Journal of Peasant Studies
ISSN: 0306-6150 (Print) 1743-9361 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20
Neoliberal developmentalism, authoritarian
populism, and extractivism in the countryside: the
Soma mining disaster in Turkey
Fikret Adaman, Murat Arsel & Bengi Akbulut
To cite this article: Fikret Adaman, Murat Arsel & Bengi Akbulut (2018): Neoliberal
developmentalism, authoritarian populism, and extractivism in the countryside: the Soma mining
disaster in Turkey, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2018.1515737
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1515737
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FORUM ON AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM
Neoliberal developmentalism, authoritarian populism, and
extractivism in the countryside: the Soma mining disaster in
Turkey
Fikret Adaman
a
, Murat Arsel
b
and Bengi Akbulut
c
a
Department of Economics, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey;
b
International Institute of Social Studies –
Erasmus University Rotterdam;
c
Department of Geography, Planning & Environment, Concordia University,
Montréal, Québec, Canada
ABSTRACT
While state-society relations in Turkey have historically been top-
down and coups d’état periodically interrupted democratic politics,
the recent authoritarian turn under Erdoğan is remarkable. Two
dynamics are especially salient. First, Erdoğan and his AKP have
been particularly effective in deepening the neoliberalisation of
economy and society. Their policies have created a new form of
neoliberal developmentalism, where solutions to all social ills have
come to be seen as possible through rapid economic growth.
Second, they have intensified the transformation of the
countryside, where new forms of dispossession and
deagrarianisation open the way to an unprecedented extractivist
drive. Together, neoliberal developmentalism and extractivism
have resulted in growing social dissent. The eruption of anger
after the Soma coal mining disaster that killed 301 miners is one
such case. The paper shows how Erdoğan and the AKP use
populist tactics (ranging from an uptick in nationalist discourse to
the provision of ‘coal aid’in winter) to assuage their critics. Where
these prove inadequate, an increasingly violent crackdown on
social dissent is being deployed in the name of peace and order
as the country remains in a state of emergency since the
attempted coup of July 2016.
KEYWORDS
Authoritarian populism;
extractivism; Turkey;
neoliberal
developmentalism; coal
1. Introduction
Three hundred and one men perished in the worst mining disaster in Turkish history at the
Soma underground coal mine on 13 May 2014. Rushing to the area to supervise the rescue
efforts and to comfort the devastated community, the then Prime Minister Erdoğan
adopted a tone that was marked by its combination of defiance and fatalism. In response
to a question regarding which authorities should be seen as responsible for such a tragic
loss of life, he began by reading from a list of mining disasters around the world, quoting
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Murat Arsel arsel@iss.nl
Editorial Note: This paper is part of the ‘JPS Forum on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, framed and introduced
by Ian Scoones and colleagues in their joint paper, ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism’,
published in JPS in January 2018. The contributions to this forum will be published separately and in clusters in 2018
and 2019. This forum is one of the initial outcomes of the activities of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI,
www.iss.nl/erpi).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1515737

death tolls recorded mainly in mid-19th and early-twentieth century England as well as a
few major episodes from the 1950s and 1960s in China and Japan. He then employed the
relatively obscure Islamic term fıtrat
1
,which has since become a colloquialism to ridicule
his haplessness in the face of this tragedy to chide the journalists for not recognizing that
large scale deaths are an inherent and inevitable aspect of coal mining.
Failed to be assuaged by these words, the residents of the town of Soma fiercely
protested Erdoğan and his large entourage (as others coming to join the protests
from the region were blocked by security from entering the town) and the Prime Min-
ister was forced to take refuge in a shop in order to escape the angry townspeople.
Adding to the state’s tone-deaf reaction, one of Erdoğan’saideswasphotographedlit-
erally kicking a man that was knocked down by security forces who were charging the
demonstrators with their batons. Even though the people of Soma had voted for Erdo-
ğan’s Justice and Development Party (the AKP in its Turkish acronym) at a rate that
exceeded the national average, the town then turned against Erdoğan and his govern-
ment as the disaster was not seen as a mere accident, let alone one that was inherent
to the business of coal mining. Wasn’t it true that a local MP (from the main opposition
party) had called for an investigation into safety concerns at the Soma mining site just
two weeks prior the tragedy –only to be rejected by the AKP? Wasn’t it true that the
heat in the galleries had increased to alarming levels before the accident, yet activities
were allowed to continue? Wasn’tittruethattherescueoperation was poorly executed
due to lack of preparation? Wasn’t it true that the private company running the site had
been one of the enfants bien-aimés of the AKP?
2
Finally, although not explicitly men-
tioned, wasn’titalsotruethatthelocalswereforced to switch from an agrarian lifestyle
to mining after a series of policies that had all but destroyed the viability of peasant
agriculture in the area?
Taken together, these rhetorical questions point towards the inconvenient truth
that the Soma disaster was a long time coming. Ersoy (2017) is therefore correct
when he describes the tragedy with reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s famous
(1981)novelChronicle of a Death Foretold, where a homicide that will take place in
a small town is already known by all residents but no one dares to do anything to
prevent it.
3
Similarly, while living with the knowledge that a major disaster was in
the making, thousands of men every day went down to the mines and most of the
ones that survived continue to do so today. The first goal of this paper is therefore
to provide an explanation for this choice within the context of Erdoğan’s authoritarian
populism, one that builds on structural dynamics of the political economy of devel-
opment in Turkey.
Another inconvenient truth is that the fury of the Soma community in the days follow-
ing the disaster did not translate into a lasting political movement or even a sustained
electoral ‘punishment’of Erdoğan. In fact, the protests gradually faded and the people
of Soma supported Erdoğan and his AKP anew in numbers that once again outstripped
1
Originally an Arabic word that does not have an exact equivalent in English, fıtrat denotes the inherent nature of a person
or a thing.
2
This line of accusations has led many to coin the term “murder”for the incident (see, e.g., Williams 2014; Bracke 2016), as
opposed to the term “accident”that the government and the pro-government media have opted for. In this article the
terms “disaster”and “tragedy”have been used interchangeably in the interest of using less loaded terminology.
3
This vision is shared by many reports written on the disaster: Türkiye Barolar Birliği(2014); Türk Sosyal Bilimler Derneği
Çalışma Grubu (2016); Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Soma Araştırma Grubu (2017).
2F. ADAMAN ET AL.

the national average in the 2017 referendum on constitutional changes to strengthen the
powers of the presidency.
4
The second goal of the paper is therefore to account for the
acquiescence of the Soma community with Erdoğan’s rule in the aftermath of the
mining disaster or, in other words, to demonstrate how authoritarian populism can con-
tinue to generate a semblance of societal legitimacy.
In tackling these two questions, our goal is ‘to understand, but not judge’(Scoones et al.
2018, 3) the decisions and actions of the Soma community as part of a structural frame-
work. Our proceeding analysis locates the genesis of the Soma disaster and its surprising
denouement within three interrelated dynamics: the rise of authoritarian populism, neo-
liberal developmentalism, and extractivism. They have not only been ascendant around
the world in recent years but have effectively defied a left-right divide by manifesting
themselves in diverse political economic settings. Their co-emergence can be located at
the intersection of neoliberal capitalism’s crises of accumulation –which became all too
evident at the time of the Great Recession –and inequality. These global crises have
had pronounced –and differentiated –national effects, often leading to another crisis
for national states, that of legitimacy. Extractivism and authoritarian populism, which
have emerged as parts of attempts to shore up waning legitimacy, are essentially the
different sides of the same coin. Where possible, charismatic leaders have sought to
pump some dynamism into faltering economies by intensifying extractivist processes.
As and when further extraction has failed to deliver or, as in the case of Soma, exacerbated
other existing issues, they have turned to authoritarianism. In that sense, both extractivism
and authoritarian populism are best seen not as exceptions to neoliberal developmental-
ism but as contemporary features.
The paper develops this argument further by exploring the two questions above
within the context of Soma. In response to its first question regarding why workers
sought jobs and continued to work in a highly risky mine, the paper explores the
impacts of neoliberal developmentalism on the agricultural sector in Turkey to argue
that peasants from the Soma region were pushed out of their agrarian livelihoods.
The specific manifestation of neoliberal development in its overwhelming focus on
extraction and construction, both of which are linked to the energy sector, formed
the pull factors that drew (semi)proletarianized workers into the Soma mine. The
paper also argues that the lax standards regarding workplace safety and the informa-
lization of the labour force which further coerced them into working in unsafe con-
ditions were structural features of the coal mining sector which prioritized increased
production over all other concerns. All in all, peasants-turned-miners in the Soma
region did not have much to rely on to counter neoliberal policies that have been
transforming their rural lives and offering them jobs in the extractives sector. Put
simply, despite appearing to choose to workinanevidentlydangerousworkplace,it
is more appropriate to argue that long-term economic policies compelled them to
become miners. It is this absence of a real alternative that also partly explains why
the post-disaster scenario failed to exact a price on Erdoğan or his AKP. To the
extent that there was an initial burst of political possibility, this was extinguished by
4
The results are particularly significant since the referendum was widely interpreted as a test of Erdoğan’s popularity in a
particularly turbulent moment in Turkey, marked not simply by an attempted coup d’état in July 2016 but also the oppres-
sive crackdown against all forms of political dissent that varnished his authoritarian credentials.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3

a combination of authoritarian actions (e.g. tear gassing of demonstrators) and populist
moves (e.g. paying out exceptionally large compensation to families of the victims of
this specific disaster even when thousands of others go unnoticed). Our understanding
of these dynamics in the context of Soma are relevant for contemporary Turkish politics
not because Soma was an exception but because its experience is increasingly normal-
ized in various ways across the country.
While our aim in tackling these questions is not operationalising a Gramscian theoreti-
cal framework per se, we ground our understanding of legitimacy and its distinction from
authoritarian populism firmly within it. Following his famous formulation of hegemony as
‘consent backed by coercion’, the Gramscian literature emphasizes the role of active
consent and legitimacy for the state’s claim to govern, which the ruling groups seek to
acquire through a combination of material and ideological practices of intellectual,
moral, and political leadership as well as persuasion (Gramsci 1971). Hegemony is thus
differentiated from domination, yet it is never absolute and always prone to crises. The
hegemonic function of the state breaks down when dominant groups fail to establish
effective moral-ideological leadership and active consent (Gramsci 1971; see also Poulant-
zas 1978). Gramscian scholars discuss the breakdown of the state’s hegemonic function
especially within the context of transition to exceptional state forms. Most notably Pou-
lantzas (1978) elaborates on state forms that emerge when societal consent cannot be
established via organic links between the state and the society, and a repressive state
apparatus, increased bureaucratization, and a heavier reliance on material concessions
to subordinate classes are substituted in their place.
Following this literature, we use the concept of authoritarian populism to demarcate its
difference from a hegemonic project which is based on the acquisition of active consent,
and to highlight that it implies the breakdown of a claim to rule backed by societal legiti-
macy. While heightened use of authoritarian measures signifies reliance on coercion
(rather than consent) to maintain the state rule, populist policies represent heavier depen-
dence on the distribution of material concessions to secure support. Extractivism, on the
other hand, serves as the supposed vehicle of economic growth, which becomes a press-
ing political objective within this context as it enables the distribution of (populist)
material concessions. Extractivism and authoritarian populism thus emerge as parts of
attempts to shore up waning legitimacy, as we claim above. Perhaps more importantly,
the Gramscian framework illuminates a vast ‘grey’area between a successful hegemonic
project based on societal legitimacy and an open contestation of state rule. That state rule
can still be maintained by a heavier reliance on a repressive state apparatus and/or
material concessions attests to this. In other words, the absence of visible social opposition
cannot be taken as evidence of societal legitimacy, but rather likely to represent some mix
of less visible forms of contestation and acquiescence. Within the context of Soma, the
dynamics that have displaced peasants from agriculture into mining (the ‘push’and
‘pull’factors we refer below) are critical in accounting for the acquiescence that fills
that grey area.
In the next section, we characterize the broad contours of the contemporary global
moment that led to the emergence of authoritarian populism, also discussing some of
their specificities in the Turkish context. This is followed by a narrative of ‘push’and
‘pull’factors that resulted in peasants from the region becoming miners and the ways
in which a lax safety system was allowed to persist even when disaster was clearly in
4F. ADAMAN ET AL.

the making. The penultimate section discusses the underlying reasons as to how Erdoğan’s
authoritarian populism ‘works’. The concluding section argues that, within the context of
Turkey, authoritarian developmentalism is itself animated and sustained by the country’s
long-established economic growth fetish, which has its roots deep into Turkey’s post-
Ottoman transition process and which the AKP has been particularly adept at weaponizing
to sustain its rule.
2. Authoritarianism, neoliberal developmentalism, and extractivism
The tragedy of Soma was shaped at the confluence of three related dynamics, namely the
rise of authoritarian populism, extractivism, and neoliberal developmentalism. The global
(re)emergence of authoritarian populism is surprising because the post-1989 world was
meant to be showcasing the triumph of neoliberal ideology not just in economics but
also through the spread of electoral democracy. While elections as a mechanism have
proven durable, they have recently delivered a surprising cast of charismatic but author-
itarian leaders that include Erdoğan, Modi, and Trump. Coming to the power on similarly
demagogic platforms that made reference to past national glories and the promise to
return to greatness, most of these leaders have made a rejuvenated state a key ambition.
The resulting political reality however is far from a ‘democratic’state as these leaders have
been equating any criticism of their political performance to the subversion of state power,
enacting heavy-handed policies aimed to stifle political dissent and press freedom.
The rise of authoritarian populism around the world defies easy classification across the
left-right spectrum, demonstrated by the rise of Rafael Correa and Evo Morales in Latin
America as part of the ‘left turn’that promised to construct the ‘Socialism of the
twenty-first century’(Arsel, Hogenboom, and Pellegrini 2016) as well as the rise of Naren-
dra Modi in India who effectively used demagogic nostalgia to sell a vision of a resurgent
Indian superpower (Ravindran and Hale 2017). The examples of countries experiencing a
combination of authoritarianism and populism in different guises go beyond these and
certainly include the Phillippines (Thompson 2016), Hungary (Buzogány 2017), and the
United States (Koch 2017), among others. It is important in this context not to use the
term authoritarian populism mechanistically, without paying due attention to historic pro-
cesses setting the stage for these leaders to emerge. For instance, Rafael Correa’s rise to
authoritarianism came after a particularly pronounced period of political instability
where a decade saw seven different presidents. Evo Morales’election was a watershed
in the Bolivian history as he became the first indigenous president in a country whose
majority indigenous population had been governed by those who were not only not indi-
genous themselves but often showed active disdain towards them (Schilling-Vacaflor and
Eichler 2017). Thus, it is necessary to take a more historicized approach that recognizes
how unique circumstances contributed to the emergence of these leaders so as to
avoid both the analytical pitfall of using the concept of populism simplistically as a pejora-
tive and the political trap of resigning to the continued abuses of power by these leaders
because they position themselves as a defence against an ancien régime that lacked legiti-
macy for other reasons.
In fact, the rise of authoritarian populism on both the left and the right of the political
spectrum has been in response to the crises of neoliberalism, which have manifested
themselves in faltering accumulation and growing socio-economic inequality. The
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 5

dominant economic model for the spate of populist leaders that came –and continue to
come –to power have been extractivism (and, in many cases, a renewed focus on infra-
structure construction), which can create the illusion of dynamic economic growth. The
resources in question are different in various contexts. From oil to minerals to the ‘agro-
extractivism’, a new regime of accumulation where novel alliances between state and cor-
porate actors (some of which are state-owned themselves) have intensified the speed and
expanded the reach of commodity extraction. This made it possible for these adminis-
trations to boost economic growth rates and, to a certain extent, create employment
opportunities for the segments of society that have been disfavoured by neoliberalism
as well as populist distribution of material concessions to them as mechanisms to
garner political support substituting for active consent. While even left-leaning propo-
nents of this extractivist approach shied away from effective wealth redistribution to
address societal inequality, extractivism has made it possible for them to achieve a
degree of redistributive economic growth. Put differently, the type of policies enabled
by extractivism are populist mainly because they do not aim at genuine socio-economic
transformation.
It is important to note in this regard that the unsustainability of extractivism has been
challenged forcefully by authoritarian populist leaders. This has been done either by refer-
ence to the alleged superiority of the commodity that is being extracted –e.g. agro-extrac-
tion of biofuel as a substitute to fossil fuels or mining of copper for use in putatively
sustainable electric cars –or in the name of the authoritarian leader who claims for
himself green credentials, such as Erdoğan himself who argued that he –not the activists
in the now famous Gezi Park uprising –is the ‘true environmentalist’(Arsel, Adaman, and
Akbulut 2017). Nevertheless, in the face of sustained criticism of extractivist practices both
left- and right-leaning authoritarian populist leaders have not shied away from targeting
activists and generally creating an unsafe environment for them, as manifested by the
increases in the incarceration and assassination of activists in recent years. As discussed
below, authoritarianism of course goes beyond direct and physical coercion and can
characterize state-society relationships overall.
Neither the involvement of the state in extractivism nor its populist guise has meant,
however, that neoliberalism has been side-lined. Rather, assuming a more ‘developmen-
talist’outlook –for instance, Trump’s allusions to the US becoming a ‘Third World’
country –neoliberalism’s appeal to the supremacy of the logic of economistic calculations
gets extended to the national level through arguments that all manners of social ills can be
addressed only through rapid economic development (Madra and Adaman 2018). As such,
neoliberal developmentalism makes use of state power in its various guises –from plan-
ning to cronyism to outright corruption –to achieve and sustain continued economic
growth at all costs, including the sacrifice of ecological integrity, erosion of democratic
norms, and oppression of societal resistance (Harvey 2005; Klein 2008).
5
5
We define neoliberalism as a drive towards depoliticization of the social and political realm through its economization
(Madra and Adaman 2014,2018). By assuming that human beings comprehend and affirmatively respond to economic
incentives, neoliberalism is understood as aiming to solve all social and political problems by creating appropriate econ-
omic incentives. Once human behavior is conceptualized as a form of cost-benefit calculus, neoliberalism can accommo-
date a range of theoretical and political positions with diverse policy implications, including those that can be identified
as state interventionism. Within this general framework, neoliberalism has historically always promoted growth as an
essential element to “all our social and political ends”(Rodrik 2017).
6F. ADAMAN ET AL.

Erdoğan’s ascent and persistent hold on power epitomize the ways in which authoritar-
ian populism, extractivism, and neoliberal developmentalism come together. The rise of
his AKP (in 2002) was rightly celebrated as part of the normalization of the country,
which had not only suffered periodic coups d’état but also witnessed the forceful suppres-
sion of public piety in the name of secularism. The latter was indeed one of the founding
principles of the state, whose founders –chiefly among them Mustafa Kemal who later
took the surname of Atatürk, the father of Turks –had diagnosed the slow decline and
demise of the Ottoman Empire as a function of Islam’s purported resistance to science
and technology in particular and Western modernity in general. Secularism was therefore
not only a political posture; it was also seen as a prerequisite to national economic devel-
opment, which would only be possible if the model of the advanced industrial West could
be emulated without interference from (putatively backward) Islamic values. That the AKP,
formed mainly by political outsiders coming from ‘traditional’quarters of the other country
who had been at the receiving end of ‘civilizational’policies of the modernization drive of
the state, overcame various attempts of the country’s twin centres of power, the civilian
bureaucracy, and military chiefs, to win elections repeatedly and comfortably did therefore
signal a sea change in Turkish politics (Özden 2014; Özden, Akça, and Berkmen 2014;
Özselçuk 2015; Özden, Bekmen, and Akça 2018).
The AKP did also bring with it a series of political liberalization measures. Most symbolically,
in a context where there remained a constitutional ban on ‘traditional’headgear, which pre-
vented womenfrom the wearing of the türban (headscarf), pious women had been keptout of
university education and right of public sector employment as teachers, doctors or lawyers.
The repeal of such restrictions were therefore signs of much needed progress in terms of
civil rights. Not all such instances of liberalization under Erdoğan’s rule have been maintained,
and there have been dramatic reversals in political and civil liberties especially since the
attempted coup d’état of July 2016. For instance, the steps taken towards recognizing the
rights of the Kurdish community have unfortunately proven to be short-lived and have
since been replaced with a new and even more draconian regime of oppression. In a
related vein, hundreds of thousands of public sector employees including academics have
been sacked without due process, thousands have been locked up with spurious charges
in a crackdown on dissent that put journalists, intellectuals, and non-governmental organiz-
ation activists behind bars without recourse to meaningful judicial remedies. Nevertheless,
the AKP and Erdoğan were able to secure surprisingly persistent credibility with certain seg-
ments of the society, tempering their authoritarianism with populism.
While the populism –economic as well as otherwise –of the AKP was always part of its
appeal, its authoritarianism was neither predestined nor inevitable. The main mechanism
for the AKP to garner and maintain legitimacy has been through its economic policies
which, as the story of the Soma mine will demonstrate in more detail, simultaneously
created precarity and offered its (temporary) solution. The AKP had come to power at
the height of a political crisis that bankrupted the credibility of the existing political
parties that had failed to chart a stable path from the country’s long-standing patrimonial
state tradition (where social ills would ultimately be the responsibility of the devlet baba
[father state]) towards the laissez-faire system of neoliberalism. The main rupture that
came with the AKP was its ability to ‘successfully’implement the neoliberalizing policies
Turkey had for twenty years attempted to implement.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 7

These policies not only further marginalized a wide array of communities –the pea-
sants, the elderly, the unemployed, etc. –by undermining their ability to gain a foothold
in the new economy, they also punched holes through the already meagre safety nets that
existed. Instead, the AKP was able to offer a booming economy
6
in which jobs in construc-
tion, extraction, and the informal sector were widely available. These jobs –and the infra-
structural improvements they brought –combined with the overturning of decades old
restrictions on religious practices formed the basis of the AKP’s populism. This was but-
tressed with a strategy of redistributing the benefits of the economic boom whose long
term sustainability is very much questioned (Adaman et al. 2014) mainly through social
assistance, which, together with the promise of employment, made up the material back-
bone of the AKP’s populism (Sayarı2011; Bozkurt 2013). In Gramscian terms, these prac-
tices represented mechanisms of establishing consent via distribution of material
concessions to subordinate classes, on which the AKP came to rely more heavily on as
its hegemonic project increasingly ran into crises.
However, the 2008 financial crisis and related disillusionment with the country’s pro-
spects of EU membership made it much harder to keep this precarious system going.
Not only the global economy was no longer favourable to the type of investment boom
required for the continuation of extraction and construction, societal dissent in the face
of environmental and social costs of the AKP’s economic model
7
also began to mount.
The authoritarian and centralizing turn of the AKP emerged in response. The primary
target of the AKP’s authoritarianism and populism often overlapped in those segments
that had been suffering the negative impacts of neoliberal policies all along, which may
seem ironic at first sight but is fully consistent with the Gramscian policy tools of
consent and coercion.
8
3. Chronicle of a tragedy foretold
The fatal tragedy at Soma occurred when a fire spread in the galleries after a wall collapsed
and exposed self-burning coal, producing a lot of heat and fumes that trapped hundreds
of miners inside the mine. Almost all the miners and engineers working in the mine were
aware of the presence of self-burning coal. The temperature in the galleries had already
increased drastically, warning systems indicated carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon
dioxide (CO
2
) levels above the standard levels in the days before the tragedy, but no
serious measures were taken to mitigate the situation.
A month or so before the accident the temperature in the tunnels started to rise steadily. We
were sweating like hell. Then, a continuous headache and an upset stomach …When I went to
the doctor, he gave me a painkiller …and no further inquiry. At the end, the coal we extracted
turned out to be warm, even hot, indicating that there must be a fire somewhere …But they
6
Akbulut and Adaman (2013) provides an account of the consent-building trajectory of Erdoğan through growth; see also
Arsel (2005) for a similar perspective.
7
The title of Yeşilyurt-Gündüz’s(2015) article in Monthly Review speaks for itself: “The ‘New Turkey’: Fetishizing Growth with
Fatal Results”; see also Adaman and Arsel (2005,2010,2013).
8
See Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment under Erdoğan (Adaman, Akbulut and Arsel
2017), which discusses how the AKP’s policies have had a detrimental impact on the environment, sustainability, and the
long-term health of the Turkish economy, arguing that environmental conflicts in Turkey are not merely about the
environment but intersect with contemporary politics of religion, ethnicity, gender, and class within the context of
top-down, modernising economic development.
8F. ADAMAN ET AL.

said ‘keep extracting’, and that is what we did. (32-year-old miner with an experience of 9
years; interviewed 11 July 2014)
When the fire and the fumes began to spread, and thus the gravity of the situation was
realised, an immense rescue operation was organised. However, a number of factors
made these efforts ineffective:
9
lack of proper air circulation, increased number of
miners working in each shift beyond the mine’s capacity, lack of safe rooms for
miners to take refuge in during emergencies, and improper guidelines for mine evacua-
tion in case of an emergency. It was in such a setting that the disaster unfolded, made all
the more tragic by the fact that the mining site had already passed all government
inspections.
This section chronicles the steps towards the tragedy, explaining the decision of
mining workers through factors that pushed them out of their fields and pulled them
into the mines, which account in significant part for the acquiescence that marked the
aftermath of the disaster. These push and pull factors were a direct result of the AKP’s
economic policies that were built around extraction, construction, and populism. They
were also directly responsible for the unsafe work environment that prevailed in the
Soma mine.
3.1. The push factor
When the Turkish Republic was formed in 1923 over the remnants of the Ottoman Empire,
it was mainly an agrarian country with more than three quarters of the population residing
in rural areas (and the share of the agricultural sector in the total employment was even
higher). Despite the late-blooming of Turkish industrialisation and the accompanying
urbanisation circa the 1950s that started to reduce the importance of the countryside,
the development of agriculture continued to be seen until 1980 as the main precondition
of the country’s overall development. The function of the rural sector was seen instrumen-
tally as a supplier of ingredients to mainly the food-processing industry as well as a food
provider to urban centres. Thus, the agricultural sector continued to be heavily subsidised
during this time (through inter alia cheap credits for mechanisation, support price policies,
subsidies for agricultural inputs, and above all a protectionist trade regime), enabling
farmers to enjoy considerable immunity to fluctuations in the market. Consequently,
erosion of peasant practices and the hegemony of market rationality in agriculture were
not so significant in this era (Keyder and Yenal 2011). However, with Turkey’s shift to neo-
liberal policies (the starting date is usually taken as January 1980 –see, e.g. Önişand
Şenses 2009), the role of rural players started to weaken, the influence of international
players such as the IMF and the World Bank began to grow stronger, and a market ideol-
ogy (whose main manifestation was in the removal of agricultural subsidies) was pro-
moted as the only path to enhancing efficiency.
Although liberalisation policies in the agricultural sector began to be implemented
initially back in 1994, they truly kicked offwith the so-called ‘Agricultural Reform
Implementation Project (ARIP)’in 2001. ARIP, a World Bank initiative, aimed at ‘reducing
subsidies, substituting a support system for agricultural producers, and agro-industries,
with incentives to increase productivity, responsive to real comparative advantages’
9
For a thorough analysis of the emergency and disaster management for the Soma case, see Demiroz and Kapucu (2016).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 9

(World Bank n.d.). Its main component targeted the subsidised crop pricing mechanism
(together with a set of institutions that were charged with specific functions, e.g. state-
owned purchasing cooperatives) which was seen as a severe deviation from the logic of
the market mechanism and whose elimination would more or less automatically result
in enhanced efficiency. ARIP in their stead suggested implementing a direct income
support system to financially help the countryside (for an eight-year period).
10
Although
the subsidised pricing system was open to a patron-client type of relationship
11
, the
suggested system opened the way for big corporations, domestic and international, to
enter the sector and establish a near monopsony in some crops and localities. With
regard to direct income support, the system was based to compute the level of the
support exclusively as a function of land size, which by and large ended up in making
the poor poorer and the rich richer (see, e.g. Akder 2010).
Thus, with the ending of the national developmentalist era that heavily supported the
agricultural sector and farmers, through successive waves of ‘structural’reforms and
measures, with ARIP having given the coup de grace, the social and economic transform-
ation of the rural sector became visible. With a diminished price support system, repealed
subsidies and lessened credit opportunities, farmers by and large were left to confront the
market forces (national as well as international –see Aydın2010), which brought about
important implications for not only farmers’living and production conditions but popu-
lation dynamics as well (Keyder and Yenal 2010,2011,2013; see also Aydın2010;İlkkara-
can and Tunalı2010).
The villages of Soma (and those of Akhisar, a neighbouring town) were historically
known as agricultural sites and the dynamics described above played out much the
same way there as well. The main crop of the region had been tobacco; its production
began to decrease quite drastically, first with the liberalisation policies, and then with
ARIP. Production levels in Soma dropped drastically from around 2,500 to 500 tons per
year from the 2000s till the year of the tragedy (see Figure 1). In the neighbouring town
of Akhisar, production levels fell from 12,000 to around 3,500 tons in the same time
period. These sharp declines also reflected the situation across the country: a decrease
from 290,000 to 62,000 tons (Institute of Statistics of Turkey).
Former tobacco producers in the villages around Soma mostly shifted to olive pro-
duction (see Figure 2) as the area and the infrastructure did not provide many options.
But olive production was not sufficient to lift their income to satisfactory levels; and
since olive production is much less labour-intensive than tobacco production, many
people –especially the young men from around Soma –had little choice but to look
for jobs in the town or city centres, totally or partially disengaged from agricultural pro-
duction. In short, the policies implemented after 1994 resulted in de-peasantisation in
Soma, which accounts for the push of the peasants into wage labour.
10
The ARIP project has been subject to inquiry in the academic circles. Çakmak (2004) provides an early assessment; Akder
(2010) focuses on its overall evaluation; Keyman (2010) contextualises the Project within a larger state-society relation-
ship; Çakmak and Dudu (2010) discusses the sectoral and micro implications; İlkkaracan and Tunalı(2010) considers the
rural labour market in the post-ARIP era; Çalışkan and Adaman (2010) deciphers the logic of neoliberal agricultural reform
initiatives in general.
11
Such relations did lead to some perverse outcomes, such as the cases in which purchase of low quality tobacco and nuts
that could only be disposed of by burning. These occasions were covered by the media as signs of corruption in the state
sector.
10 F. ADAMAN ET AL.

3.2. The pull factor
With the advent of the Erdoğan era, energy was declared as one of the main industries the
country should target. One of the critical objectives set out in The Tenth Development Plan
that covers the 2014–2018 period is to increase the installed capacity of electricity power
plants by 35 percent from 58,000 MW to 78,000 MW in five years –a rather challenging
task (Ministry of Development n.d.).
12
Despite the country’s vast potential for sustainable
sources (e.g. wind, solar) and energy gains through efficiency enhancement, Erdoğan has a
continued appetite for coal-fuelled thermal plants due to vast domestic coal reserves and
thermal plants’relatively cheap technology –if externalities created mainly in the form of
green-gas emissions are not taken into account. Approximately one-third of the electricity
Figure 1. Tobacco production in Soma (tons per year) 2004–2014. Source: Institute of Statistics of
Turkey.
Figure 2. Olive production in Soma (tons per year) 2004–2014. Source: Institute of Statistics of Turkey.
12
Erdoğan’s words, said almost four years before the disaster, are to be noted: “The more a country consumes electricity the
stronger it is, the faster it advances in the path of development. It means that the wheels in the factories are turning, that
production in our enterprises is on the rise, that household consumption is increasing, that technology use is spreading in
the entire country”(Erdoğan: Akarsular satılmıyor 2010). See also Akbulut and Adaman (2013).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11

generated has lately been produced at coal-fuelled thermal power plants in the country,
and the AKP has been determined to rely on this trajectory. It should not come as a sur-
prise, therefore, that roughly one year after the Soma tragedy, the Ministry of Energy and
Natural Resources ‘proudly’announced that Turkey would quadruple its coal-fuelled
power plants by 2020 (Adaman and Arsel 2016).
13
In addition to thermal power plants, coal has also been used by the industry and by
households, where alternative energy sources (e.g. natural gas) are rather unaffordable.
At this junction it is equally important to note that between 2003 and 2015, some 19.2
million tons of coal were distributed for free to ‘families in need’. All combined, the
total annual coal production has been fluctuating around 60 million tons in the past
several years, the bulk of which was excavated from only a few coal mining sites (Soma
being one of them). However, domestic production has been falling short in satisfying
the total demand. Thus, an additional amount of coal, of around 30 million tons per
year, has been imported –almost all of it being used in electricity production (imported
coal in the last years corresponding to more than half of the coal used to this end). It
requires simple mathematics to realise that this planned increase in coal-fuelled thermic
plants will, ceteris paribus, further raise the already high levels of imported coal (not to
mention the additional demand increase arising from the growing population and
economy). And this is indeed where the problem is feared to occur. Increased import
figures for coal are destined to jeopardise the already shaky position of the current
account deficit.
14
It is worth remembering that The Tenth Development Plan also included
another critical objective: ‘To reduce the current account deficit to a reasonable perma-
nent level’. The logical conclusion, therefore, was that domestic production should be
increased, and this was certainly on the Erdoğan government’s to-do list.
As in other areas (e.g. the construction sector, most notably housing and inter-city
roads), the government invited the private sector to take on greater responsibility in
coal production. There were already privately-owned mining sites, but these were
rather small in size. The new vision was to keep state ownership intact and subcontract
its operation to the private sector. This was based on the redevance mechanism, where
the state would lease the mine to a private company with the guarantee to purchase
the produced coal. Given this incentive scheme, private companies, including Soma
Kömür AŞthat was operating the site where the tragedy occurred, opted for the
obvious path of increasing production levels, mainly relying on labour-intensive tech-
niques, without paying much attention to prevention, mitigation, and preparedness in
case of a major mine incident.
15
The employment figure in the mining sector in the
Soma region had therefore increased sharply in Soma, reaching the number of 15 thou-
sand miners (see Figure 3; for a similar emphasis, see Çelik 2016). This was possible
because the law entrusted the companies operating the mines the task of ensuring the
13
It is worth noting that Erdoğan’s appetite to increase the energy production at home has been behind the country’s
increased investment in energy production sources other than coal-fuelled thermal ones as well, including the
nuclear one. The country’sfirst nuclear power plant, at Akkuyu, commenced construction in April 2018; a Franco-Japanese
consortium is to build the second one at Sinop –see Akbulut, Adaman, and Arsel (2017).
14
Turkey’s high current account deficit, largely attributed to structural factors, has been at the core of macroeconomic
policy discussions in recent years; see Kara and Sarıkaya (2014).
15
Those interviewed miners in the region by and large stated that, some variances notwithstanding, the supervisory role of
the state has rather been poor in the mining area at large, hence not backing the claim that the regulation was softened
solely in Soma Kömür AŞdue to alleged strong ties between Ankara and the company.
12 F. ADAMAN ET AL.

implementation of appropriate safety measures, a task that was conveniently left unfilled
in this case. That the company could get away with this choice was because the state by
and large failed to duly perform its supervisory role. The rest is history; or, as was the case
in Gabriel García Márquez’s murder, the tragedy was already predestined.
Thousands of men were no longer able to make a living in the countryside and were
thus looking for jobs that did not require much human capital, preferably in the formal
sector and somewhere near their homes. For such opportunities, they were ready to
shoulder considerable safety risks. The words of a 55-year-old farmer-turned into-a
miner are representative of many more in the region:
Before the 2000s, even though I already got a family with two kids, I was able to make my
living through agriculture and animal husbandry. But then the state dropped its support,
and that is when we found ourselves in hunger. I looked for jobs other than the mining
one, as I knew it was risky. But I could not, as –at the age of forty –I had no knowledge
other than agriculture and no degree other than the primary school one. I was hopeless. At
the end I had to go to mining as it was offering job security. (interviewed 12 July 2014)
The mining sites in the Soma region were mainly operated by established private firms
that offered formal contracts. Given the high prevalence of informality in the country
(close to one out of three workers [see, e.g. Başlevent and Acar 2014]), that would be
an important asset –for it meant job and income security, retirement rights, better
health service, and possibility of credit and mortgage borrowing. These jobs did
involve high risk and adverse working conditions; but given that the only other
options were either unemployment (which does not come with unemployment
salary/basic income) or working without security and insurance in the informal
sector most likely far away from home, many chose to be miners. Some even opted
to remain in their countryside houses, commuting to and from the mining site, but
others preferred to move to the Soma town (which of course increased the cost of
living [e.g. rents] but came with additional benefits [e.g. schooling opportunities for
children]).
In other words, the choice was more than simply an economic one. Most young miners
interviewed revealed that if a young man from the region did not have a formal job (and
the mining industry was offering the bulk of these formal positions), he could not get the
Figure 3. Number of miners in Soma 2010–2014. Source: Soma Municipality Strategic Plan.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 13

approval from the family of the woman he wanted to marry (given the existence of strong,
hierarchical and patriarchal relations in the rural areas). The following quotation can be
heard with slight variations from many miners in the region:
Till I went to [serve the compulsory] military service at the age of 18, I was living with my
parents in the village, earning our living through agriculture –we were poor but self-
sufficient. When I got back [from the military service], I wanted to get married, at which
point I realised that, with insufficient and volatile income flows coming from the village, I
would have no chance to get my wish realised. And the mining sector was –and still is –
the only option in the region. Thus that is what I did. It is vital for a family to have job security,
pension scheme, health insurance, and the likes. You can also get loans easily. (27-year-old
miner with an experience of six years in mining; interviewed 11 July 2014)
3.3. Work environment and social policies
The above two sections have argued that the de-peasantisation of Soma due to neoliberal
economic policies created a workforce willing to take on the difficult job of working in coal
mines and the drive to increase coal production made sure that there was an ample supply
of jobs.
16
The pressure to produce ever more coal –from the intertwining needs of the
state and the private sector –and the availability of cheap labour alone did not alone
create the tragedy. For that an additional spark was needed, which came from Turkey’s
weak attention to working conditions and work safety, characterised by the preventable
death of four workers on a daily basis (Sivil Sayfalar 2016). Within these grim conditions,
the mining sector is considered to be one of the worst ones in that regard (Buğra 2017).
The mining sector, especially the Soma mining site, corresponds to a specific market
form (oligopsony), where labour demand is small while the labour supply large, giving
the few mining companies the power to adopt a hiring mechanism. That mechanism
emerged as the so-called dayıbaşı
17
system, a kind of multi-layered subcontracting for-
mation (Ercan and Oğuz 2015; Çelik 2016,2017). Dayıbaşı, viz. the team leader, is a man
trusted by the company, and experienced in mining. These men are well paid, with
additional incentives connected to quantity produced. They are given the power to
choose their own teams; and in most cases, they rely on their acquaintances, mostly
locality-related. This mechanism created a kind of feudal relationship between them
and young newcomers, who had not much of a say and could not voice their complaints.
Dayıbaşı is given the incentive to push production and workload beyond safety limits,
which would leave the team with little to question, let alone resist. A 25-year-old young
miner’s words resonate the fate of many other new starters into the sector:
I managed to get the job [in the mining site] through a close friend of my uncle, with whom I
also happen to be somehow familiar. He was acting as the team leader, and was like an older
brother, even a father, for me. He taught me mining, what I should do and what I should not
do. If he said ‘keep working’, even if I felt something hazardous, I would –with no question …
When it [the tragedy] happened, I was on my leave; he and many colleagues of mine perished
…Well, thinking retrospectively, I think he was taking too much of a risk. (interviewed 12 July
2014)
16
This said, however, we openly acknowledge Arrighi’s(1970) seminal point that neither the push factor should be read as a
total de-ruralisation, nor the pull factor as a full proletarianisation; the relationship between agrarian transformation and
labour supply (in industry and service sectors) may well not be a linear one.
17
Literally, “head uncle”.
14 F. ADAMAN ET AL.

Most young workers, while they felt the increasing danger, could not do much about it
because their team leaders –whose authority was built on more than employment
relationships –were asking them to ignore the signs.
It is worth recording that the very existence of an informal sector that pays little atten-
tion to work safety has been an important factor for the formal sector in relaxing their own
safety standards. As in the case of ‘bad money drives out good’, low safety standards
would become the norm, and the formal sector would resist demands to increase
safety measures by threatening to switch to informality if pushed further. Meanwhile,
state organs whose responsibility is to check and control working conditions would find
themselves trapped as well: on the one hand, they have not much to say to the formal
side as they are aware that there is little they can do concerning the standards in the infor-
mal; on the other hand, the hegemony to attain high growth figures at any cost have
engulfed them as well.
The workers’union too had not much power and even less interest in raising safety con-
cerns related to the mining site (Ercan and Oğuz 2015). At any rate, when the overall
picture is considered, the power of labour unions had already been curtailed across
most of the country following the shift to neoliberalism, which was initially implemented
during the three years under a military regime following the 1980 coup d’état (Adaman,
Buğra, and İnsel 2009; Çelik 2013). The final parameter that led to the tragedy was the pos-
ition of mining engineers who were responsible for safety in the galleries. Mostly new
graduates, these young people found themselves trapped in the system as well.
Because they also had not much outside options (and were well paid, most with incentives
related to the production level), they by and large accepted the terms of the company, viz.
keeping silent on the likely consequences of the overload and lack of preventive measures.
Be that as it may, those engineers who were near the collapsed wall seem to have rushed
to the area so as to contain the fire rather than try to escape, but alas the fire proved to be
uncontrollable.
4. Explaining the AKP’s survival in Soma
The death of so many miners made Soma an especially visible manifestation of the con-
ditions of contemporary Turkey, demonstrating the destructiveness of the confluence of
extractivism, authoritarian populism, and neoliberal developmentalism. The aftermath of
the tragedy itself is instructive since the AKP, after having been heavily criticised by the
people of Soma, has managed to survive in the town. This is not to suggest that the dis-
aster did not take at least a momentary toll on the popularity of the party. As Table 1 below
shows, there was indeed a dip in the AKP’s share of votes in both Soma and across the
country in the general election of June 2015. While the underlying causes of this
Table 1. AKP’s share of votes in Soma and nationally.
Soma % Turkey %
2007 General election 51.2 46.7
2011 General election 52.8 49.8
2015 June general election 39.9 40.8
2015 November general election 49.7 49.5
2017 Referendum 53.1 51.4
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 15

decline are complex and beyond the scope of this paper, it would not be far fetched to
assume that the Soma disaster contributed to the AKP’s national decline at that
moment. However, the more significant outcome here is found in the fact that this is
the only election out of five in the past 10 years when the AKP’s performance in Soma
is worse than its national percentage. Yet this relative decline is fairly meagre, staying
within a few percentage points. More importantly, by November of the same year, the
AKP was able to regroup not just nationally but in Soma as well.
The first relevant factor is the growing authoritarianism of the state under Erdoğan’s
presidency. Critical voices about the Soma disaster have been ‘successfully’quashed at
the national as well as local levels. Tellingly, many political rallies organized to protest
the AKP’s record relating to the Soma disaster ended up with the protestors getting
tear gassed and dozens of them being arrested. For instance, 36 individuals were detained
pre-emptively in the days following the disaster by the town police. Eight of these were
lawyers who were suspected of having travelled to Soma to protest the situation. They
were all treated harshly, receiving physical and verbal abuse, leading them to complain
that they were detained in a sports complex like ‘Victor Jara’, who was imprisoned and
murdered in a stadium during the Chilean coup d’état of 1973. Using the ‘state of emer-
gency’declared in the area as a legal cover, the police chief pronounced that ‘provocative
acts’would not be tolerated in such an ‘anguished and sensitive period’(‘OHAL ilan edilen
Soma’da’2014). This heavy-handed treatment of all dissent is of course not unique to the
Soma case and has been on the increase since the AKP’s rule took a turn towards author-
itarianism. The state of emergency declared after the attempted coup d’état of 2016 has
not only given the state even more power to silence dissent but has also opened up
the possibility of overriding existing legal mechanisms (e.g. environmental impact assess-
ments) that can be used to stop the implementation of new extraction or construction pro-
jects. The ongoing crackdown on civil and political rights has all but destroyed
oppositional dynamics in contemporary Turkish politics, with countless cases of activists,
campaigners, and ‘ordinary citizens’feeling the brunt of unjustified and excessive state
power.
18
As mentioned earlier, the populism and the authoritarianism of the AKP often con-
verge on the same segments of the society. To this end, a huge support campaign has
been organised shortly after the mining disaster, led by the government as well as
affiliated media and NGOs. Apart from the standard compensations given within the
legislative structure to the families of those miners who lost their lives, the organised
18
According to World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index (which measures countries’rule of law performance across eight
factors: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and
security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice) of 2017–2018, Turkey ranks as 101st out of 113
countries (World Justice Project 2017). A special mention has to be made, nevertheless, of the assault on the free
press. Since the attempted coup d’état of July 2016, several newspapers and TV channels have been shut down with
“decrees with the power of law”that are essentially dictates issued by Erdoğan and his inner circle (KHK in its Turkish
acronym). Hundreds of journalists have been arrested and many have been sacked from their positions by newspaper
owners worried about incurring Erdoğan’s wrath. As many of Turkey’s major news outlets are owned by industrialists
do business either directly with the state or with Erdoğan’s cronies in the economy, most have chosen the path of
self-censoring and the others have been overtly or covertly threatened with tax audits and other possible means of reta-
liation and forced to moderate their criticisms. It is not surprising, therefore, that media coverage of the tragedy, Soma
(especially the ongoing court against the responsible personnel of the mining company) in particular and the mining
sector in general, as well as on other work-related losses, has been marginalised through time. Although in few
places commemorations are being held at the anniversary days, the Soma tragedy is as of today by and large a passé
event.
16 F. ADAMAN ET AL.

help amounted to two flats and 156,566 TL (approximately €50,000) per family, job
opportunities to one family member in the public sector, as well as scholarships for
their children; following the tragedy and the call for support, in-kind goods (from
food items to toys to clothes) were also poured into affected families. Furthermore,
the Cabinet decreed that all debts of small businesspeople from the region to state-
owned financial enterprises (such as Halk Bank) would be postponed without interest
for a year (Hangül 2014). Many other banks followed suit, cancelling the debts of
families who lost members in the accident and offering other measures to ease the
debt burden of their customers from the region (Demir 2014). These efforts have cer-
tainly consolidated the AKP’s populist countenance. And only a few dared to question
why thousands of other families who have lost their loved-ones to work-related acci-
dents were not offered similar support.
19
Despite Erdoğan’s protests that such deaths are inherent to the business of mining,
there have also been improvements made in the regulatory framework. Although criti-
cised by many as too little and too late, the government made some improvements in
the mining sector concerning the labour processes of miners and the safety standards
in mining activities. It was only after the Soma mining tragedy (as well as another major
one in November 2014 just six months after Soma, at the Ermenek mining site, where
18 miners lost their lives) that the AKP finally decided to sign the International Labour
Organisation’s (ILO) convention concerning safety and health in mines (which had
entered into force in 1998). Given the high prevalence of informality in the country, includ-
ing the mining sector, and given the continued pressure to increase domestic coal extrac-
tion, to what extent these improvements will be sustained remains to be seen. But at any
rate, the government has succeeded to give the signal that the mining sector has been
rectified.
Another dimension of the failure of the initial anger to coalesce into a more established
political posture can be seen in the inability of opposition political parties and other local
forces to exercise effective leadership in the area. For instance, attempts to form an
alternative workers’union failed, mainly because of internal fights. Opposition political
parties were not able to articulate an alternative strategy to prevailing neoliberal
climate. The lack of alternatives is not merely in terms of actual employment possibilities,
though this is certainly the case. For instance, after six months of suspended activities
during when the miners’salaries were paid by the state, the mining company had
decided on the grounds of safety concerns to close down some sites, thus terminating
the employment of 2,853 miners. Those affected by these proposed cuts fiercely
opposed this decision, most of them indicating that irrespective of the level of risks
they were ready to go back to the galleries. This desperate reaction prompted a
member of parliament from the main opposition party to remark that the workers were
given a choice between dying in the mine or dying from hunger (Yıldırım and Şen 2014).
Nevertheless, the remarkable absence of sustained political reaction from the residents
of Soma cannot be explained only in relation to a combination of authoritarian and
19
A caveat is to be made that offering jobs in the public sector to one member of the affected families in Soma was gen-
eralised recently (as of 21 May 2018) to cover other mining incidents that occurred during the period between 10 June
2003 till the Soma disaster, which indeed shows how a particularised solution can sometimes lead to the formulation of
new demands by larger sections of the working community and thus bring more –albeit partial –concessions (‘Madende
hayatınıkaybedenlerin yakınlarının’2018). We are thankful to one of the referees who drew our attention to this point.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 17

populist measures from the state. Furthermore, Soma is not unique in such a political
stance: examples of similarly puzzling ‘quiescence’have been the focus of many other
studies (e.g. Akbulut, Adaman, and Arsel 2017; Arsel, Pellegrini, and Mena forthcoming),
including Gaventa’s(1980) seminal work on West Virginia coal mining communities.
Despite the strength of Gaventa’s explanation that power operates through complex
and sometimes unseen channels to thwart potential acts of revolts, the example of
Soma differs not because all instances of state and capital dominance in Turkey are in
the open but because almost a century of state-led developmentalism in Turkey has suc-
ceeded in constructing a society which –even at the moment of revolt –recognizes itself
in the state and in its modernizing ambition. In other words, even when the legitimacy of
the state in a particular moment or instance might be diminished –as was the case around
the time of the Soma disaster –the legitimacy of the idea of the state as the vanguard of
Turkish development remains unassailable. In fact, the Turkish state’s hegemonic project
depended on this very notion, as it acquired consent through the promise of modernis-
ation via economic growth –as if corresponding to the general interest of the society
(Akbulut 2011; Akbulut, Adaman, and Arsel 2018).
At a broader level, there remains a lack of alternative to the dominant discourse of the
state that Turkey is destined to renew its lost national greatness, last experienced at the
height of the powers of the Ottoman Empire. This nationalist posture brings with it a
certain economic logic, lending credence to calls to such goals as ‘energy independence’.
Absent a critical discussion of why increases in energy consumption are seen as a sign of
national progress and why such increases have to be enabled by the cheapest and dirtiest
technologies available at home, oppositional forces in Turkey have failed to challenge the
twin forces of extraction and construction. In the absence of an alternative narrative, the
AKP and Erdoğan have been able to contain societal dissent through a combination of
populism and authoritarianism.
5. Conclusion
Neither the Soma disaster nor the authoritarian populism that created the conditions
for its genesis and its surprisingly calm aftermath can be seen as inevitable. This paper
has argued that they have all been underwritten by an economic development
imperative, which Erdoğan and the AKP have used even more successfully than
past administrations. Both authoritarianism and populism (as well as their combined
manifestation) have been deployed particularly boldly in times when economic devel-
opment failed to materialize at a sufficiently fast pace or failed to create sufficient buy-
in from poor and marginalized segments of society. Borrowing from a Gramscian fra-
mework, they represent mechanisms of establishing support within a context marked
by the breakdown of a hegemonic project mobilising active consent. It is therefore
ironic that both the beneficiaries and the victims of authoritarian populism are
those who continue to legitimize a system that is structurally geared to impoverish
them. This was the case of the Soma miners who were first forced offtheir agrarian
lifestyles and then into certain death in a coal mine that was run without concern
for health and safety so as to maximize production. While the death of the 301
miners is of course lamentable, the real tragedy is the fact that the ‘accident’was a
structural feature of the Turkish economy.
18 F. ADAMAN ET AL.

While the tragic spectacle of Soma has resulted in an at least temporary societal push-
back and certain improvements in worker safety, demonstrating once again that the
‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’(Orta Martinez, Pellegrini, and Arsel 2018), it is important
to reflect more broadly on the argument that these deaths are a structural feature of the
economic model. As mentioned earlier, Turkey experiences four preventable deaths of
workers daily. Just as the death of 301 miners cannot be explained away with the
concept of fıtrat, this predictable death toll cannot be explained away as examples of
‘industrial accidents’. They represent a particularly lethal form of ‘slow violence’(Nixon
2011) that has not galvanized even a temporary backlash or a questioning of their under-
lying dynamics.
It is this absence of societal pushback that allows the normalization of the ‘drip,
drip, drip’of individual tragedies that characterise the fundamental threat of author-
itarian populism. As the support of certain segments of society is secured via the
promise of jobs, the delivery of ‘free’coal, or the unrolling of ever faster and more gla-
morous transport networks, the sustenance of alternative visions and associated forms
ofdissentthatcannotbecontainedbyauthoritarian forces becomes increasingly
crucial. The ultimate question posed by the tragedy of Soma is, therefore, how to cul-
tivate the emancipatory potential of radical forces who will need to organize –intel-
lectually, programmatically as well as physically –to break out of the vice-like grip of
authoritarian populism towards a counter-hegemonic project. Within the context of
Turkey, this preparatory work necessarily implies rethinking the country’sfetishism
of economic growth.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions made at various stages of this work by
Önsel Gürel Bayralı, Banu Can, Coşku Çelik, Orkun Doğan, Fethiye Erbil, Nuri Ersoy, Sumru Tamer and
Zafer Yenal, though dissociating them from any views expressed. Two of the authors have paid mul-
tiple visits to the Soma region, starting right after the disaster, interacting with different institutions
and organizations as well as miners’families including those who have been directly affected by the
disaster. We are equally thankful to them, even though their names have not been mentioned for
understandable concerns. Some of these visits were conducted within the project of Boğaziçi Univer-
sity’s Soma Inquiry Report (2017), which is the outcome of the desk- and field-work conducted by a
group of faculty and students of the University, with organizational support from the Rectorate. The
authors would also like to acknowledge the team’s contribution in the formation of the ideas in this
article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Fikret Adaman (B.A. Economics, Boğaziçi University; PhD Economics, University of Manchester) is pro-
fessor at the department of Economics, Boğaziçi University. His research lies within the fields of pol-
itical economy, ecological economics, development studies and history of economic thought. His
joint and independent work appeared in Antipode, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development
and Change, New Left Review, and Journal of Peasant Studies among others. Most recently he has
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 19

co-edited Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment Under
Erdoğan (I.B. Tauris).
Murat Arsel (B.A. Economics and Government, Clark University; PhD Geography, University of Cam-
bridge) is Associate Professor of Environment and Development at the International Institute of
Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research concerns the political economy of
the relationship with capitalism and nature, focusing especially on environmental conflicts and
state-society dynamics. In addition to his empirical work concerning Turkey, he has been working
in Latin America, especially in the Ecuadorian Amazon. His research has been published in journals
such as Ecology and Society, Journal of Economic and Social Geography, Extractive Industries and
Society, and Development and Change. His ‘Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic
Policy and the Environment Under Erdoğan’(I.B. Tauris) was co-edited with Fikret Adaman and
Bengi Akbulut.
Bengi Akbulut (B.A. Economics, Boğaziçi University; PhD Economics, University of Massachusetts at
Amherst) is an Assistant Professor at the department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Con-
cordia University. Her work lies within the fields of political economy, ecological economics, devel-
opment studies and feminist economics. Her joint and independent work appeared in the
Cambridge Journal of Economics, Development and Change and the Journal of Peasant Studies
among others. Most recently she has co-edited a volume on the political ecology of neoliberal
Turkey, Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment Under
Erdoğan (I.B. Tauris).
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