This article aims at shedding a light on the emerging forms of agency in rural mobilizations in the context of anti-SHP (small hydropower plants) mobilizations in Turkey. Proliferation of SHP’s throughout Turkey is telling on the extend of commercialization of the nature during Justice and Development Party (AKP) era and case studies permit us to focus on the relations among commercialization, agrarian change and the rural/environmental mobilizations. This article is on the anti- water struggle in Arhavi, a small town in Northeast Turkey, where we can observe the co-option strategies benefiting from crony capitalism are employed to weaken the resistance yet strong resistance persisted. The data demonstrate that the participation by the city-based middle-class actors, whose ancestors are from the locality, contributed to the strength of the resistance. I conceptualize these actors as peri-urban agency and this peri-urbanity has significantly been affected from prior transformation of the agrarian economy and rural livelihood structures. I argue that the metamorphosis of the agency posed by the spatial changes the locality went through is an important factor to be integrated into the analysis of rural movements. That is because they are informative on class base, new middle-class involvement, coalition building and framing strategies of the protestors, which are important in understanding the contentious behavior. Moreover, it opens up a perspective to integrate local imaginaries, reinventions of long-lost traditions and carnivalesque performances based on the past symbols and traditions during the resistance into the analysis
Mots clés :
A104219SK