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Abstract
This thesis studies the politics of life and labor in Southeast Turkey, a region affected by postwar transitions involving the Turkish state, Kurdish insurgent groups, and the displacement of millions of refugees since the war in Syria. Focusing on the region’s cotton agro-industry and the supply chains it feeds, it argues that understanding the extractive nature of labor in cotton production warrants attention to geopolitics (viewing capitalism as a biopolitical formation). Taking everyday life as a lens of inquiry and drawing on five months of fieldwork (2021-2023), including 102 interviews and participant observation, the analysis traces how this region and its residents, especially Kurdish people and Syrian refugees, are rendered extractable through exclusionary governmental practices of state and non-state actors, along continuums of violence that connect war and peace, public and private, and production and social reproduction. These include the ongoing differentiation of the workforce through feminization and racialization, uneven access to resources such as water through development counterinsurgency, and the contracting out of social protections among labor brokers, the state, and various “classes of capital”. Through and despite these practices, people negotiate their subjectivities, make claims of belonging, and create meanings of home and hope for the future. The thesis contributes to feminist IPE by bridging material, performative, and subjective dimensions of social reproduction, clarifying the relationship between social reproduction and the everyday, and bringing this literature into dialogue with feminist and critical security studies.