Sertac Sen

SERTAC KAYA SEN, then a graduate student at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Fostering Vitality through War- Making: Militarized Development in Turkey,’ supervised by Dr. Matthew Gutmann. This project seeks to understand how military bases and defense allocations impact socioeconomic life at a community level through fieldwork in a Turkish military-personnel city, Corlu. It investigates the military’s role in transforming the local economies and host societies adjacent to where they are stationed through participant observation, interviews, and archival research. Defining militarized development as a vision of positive social change that is contingent upon militarization, this research focuses on the production of militarized development by both civilian and military populations, and its socioeconomic consequences along the interrelated categories of gender, class, and ethnicity. Findings indicate that daily social and economic relations that the dynamic patterns of national defense posture, foreign policy, political regime, and military organization enable between the civilian and military populations of the city propel the belief that the nation-state’s chief instrument of war-readiness and violence can bring positive social change to people. Therefore, civil-military relations in the capillary rather than in the classical sociological sense lie at the root of the persistence of militarized development.