[This article is the first in a four-part series. Click here to read Part I; click here to read Part II; and click here to read Part III.]
The three-part roundtable you are about to read was written in the wake of the 6 February earthquakes that devastated large parts of Kurdistan, Syria, and Turkey in 2023. At the time, the scale of destruction and the exposure of structural inequalities through rescue and aid produced an acute sense of urgency. The thoughts and experiences we share here emerged in that conjuncture. They were conceived as an immediate intervention into an unfolding disaster—one in which state complicity, racialized and gendered forms of disposability, and the politics of exclusionary reconstruction and repair were already becoming visible, even as bodies were still being pulled from the rubble. Let alone dissipating in the three years since the disaster, this urgency has become compounded albeit not always legibly to the news cycle. The framing of the earthquakes as a national emergency has become a prolonged condition that structures governance practices. Reconstruction has become the stuff of profit, dispossession, and political consolidation. Many of the questions raised in this roundtable—about whose lives were deemed grievable, whose losses were rendered invisible, and how disaster was mobilized to reorganize space, labour, and citizenship—have only become more pressing with time.
In time for the third anniversary, the Turkish state’s “Construction of the Century” has been exposed by grassroots monitors like the Hatay Earthquake Victims Association—based in and named after one of the most devastated provinces—as a “window-dressing” operation that masks a fragmented reality. The center of this province has now been effectively split into six disconnected zones (including high-security state-built blocks and “Reserve Area” neighbourhoods where property rights are frozen), overriding the existing urban fabric in favour of profitable urban transformation. The systemic stonewalling of investigations into the officials responsible for building collapses remains a central pillar of the legal landscape, as documented by recent human rights reports. Also in Turkey, the amended Law No. 6306 has matured into a mechanism for the wholesale transfer of land to the Treasury, leaving over 360,000 people still trapped in container cities as of January 2026. These survivors are now facing a “debt trap” following the expiration of force majeure (mücbir sebep) status in November 2025.
Meanwhile, in post-Assad Syria, the transition has installed a new government whose opaque mega-projects risk replicating old patterns of elite capture. As of early 2026, critical analyses from Lugarit and the Arab Reform Initiative warn that reconstruction is being used as a tool of demographic punishment, particularly in the conflict-ridden northeast where over 170,000 people were newly displaced in January 2026 alone. Since 2023, the politics of reconstruction have intersected with electoral authoritarianism and racial-capitalist land-grabs that commodify the right to housing. Human Rights Watch (2026) highlights that while the Syrian transitional authorities have established commissions for the missing, they systematically exclude abuses not committed by the former regime. In both nation states, resilience has become orientated towards profit-making rather than life-making. As we revisit these events in 2026, the risk is no longer just the physical rubble, but the hardening of decades of systemic injustices into the built environment.
In short, mainstream approaches to repair and reconstruction have compounded an already catastrophic humanitarian situation. The fragmentation of governance, the politicization of aid, and the persistence of border regimes have meant that reconstruction has been partial, uneven, and often externally dictated. Our insistence here on thinking across borders—refusing the nation statist framing that takes Turkey and Syria as a given while separating indigenous populations of this region from one another—remains crucial. It is not so much that disasters of this kind do not respect borders as popular wisdom would like to have it. Rather, nation statist bordering logics are reproduced at every turn and at various material-spatial scales (ranging from the body through streets and neighbourhoods to entire regions), redistributing harm and vulnerability unevenly in the process.
The delay in our roundtable’s publication itself is noteworthy here, as the publisher who had invited us to publish the piece with them suddenly became unresponsive and we, in turn, also experienced difficulties resuscitating the process. This arduous publication story itself makes visible the long temporalities of violence and recovery that characterize disasters and the challenges involved in sustaining the collective work that is needed for repairing otherwise. A disaster that was initially framed as an exceptional rupture has revealed itself as an intensification of existing processes. In the years since 2023, the Turkish state’s reconstruction policies have accelerated patterns of urban transformation that long predate the earthquakes, deepening housing precarity and facilitating the transfer of land and resources to politically connected actors. In northern Syria, ongoing conflict, sanctions, and aid restrictions have continued to shape uneven access to shelter, healthcare, and livelihood, leaving earthquake‑affected communities in a state of protracted vulnerability.
Across these sites, the language of resilience has been mobilized to normalize abandonment and to individualize survival. Reading this roundtable now thus requires holding together two temporal registers. It serves as both a historical document of the initial grief and anger, and as a framework for understanding the trajectories that have since unfolded with grim consistency. The roundtable participants’ attention to racialized labor regimes, gendered care work, migrant and refugee precarity, and the criminalization of dissent anticipated developments that have come to structure the post‑earthquake order.
What unites the contributions in this roundtable is a shared refusal to go beyond questioning the assumption that earthquakes are natural disasters divorced from politics by showing how the politics in question must be understood as embodied, place-based, and shaped by systemic injustices and the struggles for justice they have been met with. The contributors foreground disaster as a social relation: one that exposes how infrastructures are built and neglected, how populations are differentially protected or abandoned, and how crises are seized upon to reorder space and power. Many, writing as scholar‑activists, move between analysis and commitment, documenting violence while remaining attentive to practices of care, resistance, and collective survival.
This roundtable does not so much resist closure on the whole as it seeks a closure that is grounded in those fighting against systemic injustices. The questions we posed in late 2023 remain unanswered: Who has the right to remain, to rebuild, to mourn, to decide? What forms of life are made possible—or impossible—through reconstruction? And what is the relationship between solidarities forged in disaster and the sustained political work of organizing and mobilizing from an antipatriarchal and antiracist standpoint?
Taken together, the three contributions approach the question of repair from distinct but interlocking angles. The first piece foregrounds reparations—or what the authors describe as the limits and dangers of repair without reparations—by situating the earthquakes within longer histories of racialization, dispossession, and state violence in the region. It interrogates dominant narratives of meritocracy, science, and resilience, arguing that disaster preparedness and reconstruction cannot be disentangled from struggles over political status, land, and memory. The second contribution centres solidarity as a lived and contested practice, drawing on feminist, migrant, and grassroots organizing in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes to show how care work, mutual aid, and gendered labour became sites of both survival and political possibility. The third piece engages critically with healing, refusing therapeutic closure while asking what forms of collective repair might emerge from practices of commoning, ancestral knowledge, and community-led infrastructures that resist both state abandonment and extractivist reconstruction.
Instead of updating each contribution to account for subsequent events, we have chosen to situate them through this preface, allowing the texts to stand as both historical intervention and ongoing provocation. Read today, these contributions offer less a definitive account of what followed the earthquakes than a framework for understanding why what followed took the shape it did. They also gesture toward futures that were—and remain—contested. Not only do the problems we diagnose here persist; the struggles we think with also continue, often out of sight, in the ruins and the rebuilt landscapes of the post‑earthquake region, and to the rhythm of tectonics and context-specific traditions of survival and resistance rather than the news cycle. We hope that readers will find in this roundtable a tool for thinking with the present rather than belated commentary. The temporal gap between writing and publication mirrors the disjunctures experienced by those still living with the consequences of the earthquakes: the lag between promise and delivery, between visibility and care, between survival and justice, between urgency and systemicity.
Read this Roundtable
Reparations: Part I of a Roundtable on Repairing the Irreparable after the Earthquake by Merve Bedir, Eray Çaylı, Nilgün Yelpaze, and Nazlı Tümerdem
Solidarity: Part II of a Roundtable on Repairing the Irreparable after the Earthquake by Merve Bedir, Eray Çaylı, Nilgün Yelpaze, and Nazlı Tümerdem
Healing: Part III of a Roundtable on Repairing the Irreparable after the Earthquake by Merve Bedir, Eray Çaylı, Nilgün Yelpaze, and Nazlı Tümerdem