Sovereign accumulation and the recursiveness of dispossession in post-genocide Turkey

The Armenian genocide not only constituted a necropolitical project of deportation and mass murder. It also constituted a moment of primitive accumulation that laid the foundation for a postimperial national economy and fundamentally altered class relations. It did so by forming a key moment for the elaboration of a racialised property regime built on the fundamental exclusion of non-Muslims. I argue that we see reverberations of this property regime in the way local actors today, including local municipalities, residents, treasure hunters and descendants of survivors, engage with the land as a necro-geography filled with ruinous remains of Armenian settlements. We see it through the ways in which individual objects and material assemblages become objects of desire for new projects of accumulation.