Defending the Sacrificial Frontier: The Military’s Conception As an Environmental Steward in Turkey

‘As you know, there are two things that come to mind when one thinks of greenspace: military posts and graveyards,’ announced Turkish President Erdogan in a speech delivered after the failed coup of July 15, 2016. Erdogan’s words were intended to assuage public concerns that a post-coup governmental plan to relocate major military units away from metropolitan areas was a mere fig leaf to open vacated military zones to development. Still, the association of the military with ecological conservation runs deep not only within the military community and political establishment but also across broad segments of the Turkish society. This paper grapples with the puzzle of how the military is cast as an environmental steward despite the evidence that militaries, both in Turkey and globally, are tremendous drains on national resources and polluters of the environment in the era of Anthropocene?

Based on three years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in a garrison town in Thrace, Turkey’s northwestern borderlands, this paper explores militarist ecological discourses and environmental movements in Turkey. Using archival sources, it first situates the military’s activities on the environmental front from a historical standpoint, ranging from forestation efforts driven by forced conscript labor to mass campaigns for raising ecological awareness. It then recounts the recent history of Thrace’s rapid transformation from a heavily militarized Cold War borderland into a sacrificial frontier for capitalist extraction and expansion. Next, it focuses on environmental activism in the borderland, particularly regarding the crisis in Thrace’s interconnected water systems. Finally, it identifies ecology as the central point of articulation between local perceptions of capitalist expansion, globalization, defense restructuring, and a growing nostalgia for the military.