Middle East Technical University, Department of Sociology, October 2026
Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Besim Can Zırh
Read the thesis (open access, METU)

Lake Marmara, in Manisa province, has been drying up for years. The dissertation asks why this is happening and what it means for the people whose livelihoods depend on the lake and the surrounding fields. Rather than treating the desiccation as a technical or purely ecological event, I read it as a political-ecological process in which agrarian change, water governance and state practice are entangled.

The research is based on qualitative fieldwork around the lake: semi-structured interviews, repeated site visits, and a close reading of legal and policy documents. I spoke with villagers and farmers, lawyers, public officials and NGO representatives, and traced how each of them encounters, interprets and responds to the lake’s disappearance.

Expanded dispossession

The dissertation’s main conceptual contribution is a framework I call expanded dispossession. Building on David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” and in dialogue with Rosa Luxemburg, I argue that environmental crises do not merely occasion a single moment of enclosure. They set in motion successive, cascading dispossessions: of water, of soil, of harvests, of future income, and of the political capacity to claim redress. “Waiting for the state” captures the position in which affected communities find themselves — not passive, but held in place by bureaucratic time while losses accumulate.

Ongoing work

I am now developing journal articles from the dissertation, including:

• A theoretical piece that situates expanded dispossession in current debates on political ecology and agrarian change.

• An empirical piece on bureaucratic delay and governance failure in Turkish water and wetland policy.

• Comparative work on wetland loss and rural livelihoods in the Aegean region.

Keywords: Lake Marmara · political ecology · expanded dispossession · rural livelihoods · wetland governance · Türkiye