INFRASTRUCTURAL IMPERIALISM:
GLOBAL "BIG BROTHERS" AND GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES
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Just down the hill from my house in north Cyprus is a once pristine beach where Caretta Caretta sea turtles lay their eggs and which was, for close to three years, jammed with the traffic of cargo boats laying a pipeline onto the shore. This project, which Turkish President Erdoğan has dubbed “The Project of the Century," today brings fresh water by undersea pipeline from Anamur, on the southern Turkish coast, to north Cyprus. For this project, massive dams have been built on both ends of the pipeline, and much of the north Cyprus countryside and many of its roads were torn up to lay pipes in order to pump the water. Erdoğan has also called this “Peace Water,” and construction included a terminal that is able to pump water to the island’s south in the event of a negotiated solution.
Map showing the pipeline from the Turkish shore to north Cyprus (from the website of the Turkish Water Directorate).
When the project was first announced, Turkish Cypriots were skeptical, as there have been many failed projects to bring water to the island from Anatolia. But as the project was nearing completion in 2015, they entered something of a panic, since many people suddenly realized that they had been given very little information about and almost no say in how the water was to be distributed and used. For many, rather than being a sign of their development, the water project is yet another mark of Turkey’s increasing presence and dominance in the island—quite literally an “umbilical cord” to the “mother.”
Map showing the pipeline from the Turkish shore to north Cyprus (from the website of the Turkish Water Directorate).
When the project was first announced, Turkish Cypriots were skeptical, as there have been many failed projects to bring water to the island from Anatolia. But as the project was nearing completion in 2015, they entered something of a panic, since many people suddenly realized that they had been given very little information about and almost no say in how the water was to be distributed and used. For many, rather than being a sign of their development, the water project is yet another mark of Turkey’s increasing presence and dominance in the island—quite literally an “umbilical cord” to the “mother.”
A small impact grant from the London School of Economics gave me the opportunity to involve a colleague from Political Geography, Dr. Michael Mason, in a report on the potential impact of the pipeline on climate change management and planning in an island that is predicted to become hotter and increasingly dry. The report focused both on the types of climate change planning that the already implemented project would make possible and the politics of a pipeline that brought the "stateness" of the patron state into Turkish Cypriots lives in palpable ways.