Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 - From Catastrophe to Struggle: Rethinking Capitalism amid Wars and Disasters, İstanbul, Türkiye, 3 - 05 Nisan 2026, (Yayınlanmadı)
This paper examines Turkey’s green transition as a paradigmatic case of how ecological transformation unfolds within hybrid and semi-peripheral political economies in the Anthropocene. Rather than constituting a rupture with neoliberal orthodoxy, Turkey’s climate agenda represents a recalibrated formation—reloaded neoliberalism—that absorbs environmental pressures while preserving existing class relations, authoritarian statecraft and Islamic-populist ideological repertoires. Building on insights from critical global political economy and Gramscian state theory, the paper argues that the Turkish state strategically recomposes neoliberalism through selective green compliance, technocratic governance, and the moral idioms of Islamic stewardship. Turkey’s alignment with the European Green Deal, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and international climate finance reflects a form of conditional integration shaped by trade dependence and geopolitical asymmetry. Yet this external compliance coexists with intensified fossil-fuel developmentalism, extensive coal subsidies, and the repression of ecological resistance. The result is a dual- track transition: outward-facing green signalling aimed at maintaining export competitiveness, and inward-facing extractivism anchored in state–capital alliances and regime stability. The paper shows how business associations such as TÜSİAD and MÜSİAD, alongside fragmented labour confederations, are incorporated into a controlled process of passive revolution, where green transformation is technocratically managed while redistributive or democratic demands are marginalised. Populist-Islamic narratives allow the government to present its climate policies as patriotic, moral, and nationally sovereign, even as environmental regulation becomes a vehicle for elite accumulation and disciplinary state intervention. By conceptualising Turkey’s green transition as reloaded neoliberalism, the paper contributes to broader debates on green capitalism in the Global South. It highlights how climate governance is shaped by uneven development, ideological co-optation and authoritarian restructuring, illustrating that decarbonisation in semi-peripheral contexts is neither linear nor depoliticised, but a contested terrain where ecological imperatives collide with class power, state control and hegemonic rearticulation.