A justice approach to climate and environmental issues in Turkey's Kurdish region

Nisan Alici was awarded a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant (ECSRG). The grant allowed Nisan to research green transitional justice in Turkey’s Kurdish region. Here she discusses the research and her conclusions.

This research examines the intersection of conflict, peace processes, and environmental harm through the lens of green transitional justice in Turkey’s Kurdish region. Frequently described by activists as a site of ecocide, the region has experienced extensive environmental destruction throughout the protracted Kurdish conflict. The analysis draws on a month-long fieldwork conducted in May 2025, including interviews with environmental activists, lawyers, and small-scale farmers who have experienced and actively resisted environmental degradation. These accounts provide insight into the social and political drivers of environmental harm, as well as the challenges and possibilities for redress. Set against the backdrop of an ongoing peace process, the findings suggest that transitions to peace generate both opportunities and new risks. While the absence of armed conflict removes the security-based justification for environmental destruction, the absence of guerilla forces may also intensify harm in less visible ways, such as through the expansion of multinational extractive projects.

This pilot research with a month-long fieldwork conducted in Diyarbakır (Amed in Kurdish) in Turkey in May 2025 formed the first phase of a larger, ongoing research programme. Carried out in collaboration with Dr Suanne M Segovia-Tzompa (Swedish Defence University), this initial phase laid the empirical groundwork for a broader investigation into the interlinks between conflict, justice, and environmental harm. To foreground the perspectives of those at the forefront of the ecology movement and those directly experience the social and economic outcomes of environmental destruction, we included notions of participatory research from the outset. Before we travelled to the field site, we began engaging in informal conversations through phone calls and WhatsApp messages with several activists and lawyers, aiming to shape the research design, specifically data collection. These initial conversations informed the scope of the research, helping us map different forms of environmental destruction in Diyarbakir city centre and the surrounding districts and villages. Conducting preliminary conversations prior to arrival also contributed to a more grounded and dialogical research process once fieldwork began.

The research adopted a qualitative, multi-method approach. Data collection included:

• Individual and small group semi-structured, in-depth interviews with environmental activists, Kurdish lawyers, practitioners, and small-scale farmers
• Walking interviews - allowing participants to situate their narratives spatially and materially within affected landscapes.
• Informal meetings and encounters, which proved essential for building trust and capturing politically sensitive perspectives that would not be otherwise possible to gather
• Document analysis, primarily drawing on legal documents, reports, NGO documents, and archival materials shared by interlocutors during fieldwork.

The fieldwork began on 5 May 2025, a date of significant political importance. On that same day, the Kurdish armed group PKK released a public statement announcing the laying down of arms, ending a 41-year-long guerrilla conflict with the Turkish state. This development followed the initiation of a renewed peace process in October 2024, generating widespread expectations and uncertainties around conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Across interviews, activists, local communities, and environmental lawyers consistently described environmental destruction in the Kurdish region as a crime of ecocide. Many referred to the region as an expansive “crime scene,” referring to dam construction, mining projects, deforestation, depopulating, and forced displacement as interconnected forms of ecological violence. Participants framed environmental harm not as isolated incidents, but as structurally embedded within decades of conflict, militarisation, and counterinsurgency tactics. The securitised status of the region, they argued, facilitated extractive and destructive practices while suspending meaningful legal accountability and community participation. 

Conducting fieldwork at a historical turning point deeply impacted both the substance and tone of our data. Conversations with interlocutors were consistently framed by reflections on the potential impact of a possible post-conflict reality on the environment. The opportunities and challenges arising from the ongoing peace process became an important point of inquiry for this research project. If the peace process succeeds, the potential strengthening of justice mechanisms and constitutional reforms (which do not seem very likely at the moment), and more power to local government, might pave the way for communities to build a self-governance process. It is also thought that the decline in the securitisation (and militarisation) of the region will allow the community to have fuller access to their environment. Because certain zones were militarised areas, it was used as to legitimise keeping the community afar where the environmentally destructive projects were happening. However, transitioning from conflict to peace may create new challenges, as established in the literature looking at other regions. These challenges seem to hold true for the Kurdish region as well, as expressed several times by our participants. In such contexts, access to nature gets easier and influx of international investment tends to increase. Moving beyond negative peace to positive peace requires long-term commitment to address structural inequalities and justice. Given the Kurds have experienced structural inequality in the forms of displacement, dispossession of land, loss of livelihoods among other things, the call for “a fundamental shift in how we do and think about transitional justice” speaks to the needs of the current peace process. An important challenge is that transitional justice even in its most mainstream, liberal form has not been part of the peace process in Turkey, let alone accounting for environmental harms. What type of justice mechanisms and to what extent will be available for conflict-related human rights violations is still unknown. Under such conditions and in the light of the potential challenges and opportunities arising from the transition, applying a justice lens to the environmental harm, conflict, and peace nexus is more important than ever.

Photo by Nisan Alici - Fieldwork in Diyarbakir, May 2025