Marching on the Army’s Stomach: Military Procurement and Urban Development in Turkey

As an institution that diverts crucial human and material resources from productive sectors to destructive ends, the military is not typically seen as a developmental actor. In contrast to this predominant public and scholarly view, "soldiers bring development wherever they go" and "the military breathes life into our lives" were common refrains that I heard from my interlocutors during my dissertation fieldwork in Thrace, Turkey's northwestern borderlands. How can we understand the paradoxical coupling of vitality and development with an institution mastering the art of warfare, organized violence, and destruction?

Based on three years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Çorlu, a garrison city in Thrace, this paper offers an account of urban military dependence that shifts the literature's focus on Western countries that mobilize sophisticated military-industrial complexes with high levels of arms exports, professional militaries, and privatized defense functions. It lays bare the mechanisms through which militarist conceptions of development find purchase in a country that relies on a nascent defense industry with large-scale arms imports and mass male conscription. Drawing on an original dataset on local military expenditure compiled from archival sources, the paper documents the centrality of military spending to the local economies in Thrace during the Cold War. Building on interviews with civilians, military contractors, and veterans, it demonstrates how a predominantly male coalition of local notables, businesses, and workers allied with the Army Corps stationed in their city to capture resources that would not have been typically available to a city the size of Çorlu. Ultimately, the paper illustrates how Turkey’s historical role in the international division of labor under NATO, supplying cheap and abundant manpower to Western industrial warfare, rendered military procurement for basic provisions, such as foodstuff, forage, and shelter, a critical domain of capital accumulation and urban military dependence in Turkey.