Gökçe Günel, Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations (Duke University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Gökçe Günel (GG): My research on Floating Power began in May 2016 during a visit to the floating power plant company’s headquarters in Istanbul. At the time, I was finishing my first book, Spaceship in the Desert, which investigated the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructure in Abu Dhabi. One of its chapters, which I enjoyed writing and often presented, examines what it means for people in Masdar City to describe the city as a “spaceship in the desert,” and draws on analyses of ships and frontiers. I became interested in learning more about ships that generate electricity for national grids, which extended my existing questions about aspirations for enclosure, alongside energy production. Since then, I have taught a course called Ships in the Anthropological Imagination, which further substantiated this interest. Over the years, I have come to realize that my research projects, in fact, explore what we might call total institutions and the ways they exceed their boundaries. Ships are an excellent example.
Yet such spatial interests were complemented with a curiosity about time. I was drawn to the temporal horizons of these ships, which were marketed as temporary stopgap solutions to a renewable future. Spaceship in the Desert was very much about how decision-makers in an oil-rich country imagine a future beyond oil; temporality was a significant focus of the book. How would oil-rich nations prepare for an era when oil would no longer be available or valuable? With Floating Power, I examined a different temporal horizon focused on solving immediate problems with existing technologies. Businesspeople in Turkey described the powerships as cin fikir, a quirky yet creative solution that made use of what was there. My ethnographic research later revealed that powerships often became long-term infrastructure in the countries they served through ten- to twenty-year take-or-pay contracts. The book is an investigation into how these infrastructures—which I call “technologies of deferral”—actually forestall the transformations they promise by locking countries into long-term fossil fuel dependency.
Back in May 2016, I hoped to conduct fieldwork on Karpower’s floating power plants in Lebanon, which were often featured in the media. I was about to start a tenure-track position at the University of Arizona’s School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Carrying out a project between Istanbul and Beirut made perfect sense. But when I asked if I could visit them, executives instead urged me to research their ship in Tema, Ghana, noting its unique role in the company’s expansion into African countries. An employee told me that the company was “bringing light to places that were dark,” which sparked my curiosity about the company’s developmental narrative. In some ways, I followed the route these executives laid out for me, beginning research in Accra and Tema in December 2016. This invitation led me to think ethnographically about geopolitics and geoeconomics, enabling me to investigate how businesspeople in Turkey work in African countries. I observed how actors from Turkey used a language of “friendship” to differentiate themselves from Global North powers. But at the same time, Turkey’s seemingly more advanced position on a developmental timeline enabled these actors to convince Ghanaians that they could help them progress. Therefore, such relations between South-South actors also draw on the temporal horizons that distinguish the Global North and the Global South. Over the years, I sought to contextualize the ship within the Ghanaian grid, which also led me to conduct research with other power producers, including solar power stations, as well as with people who tried to sell electricity, such as electric car experts.
How do ideas of linear progress become mobilized when building energy infrastructure? This is another temporal question that overlays the book. Floating Power explores this broader question, revealing the enduring significance of developmental narratives. Ghana was expected to follow a predetermined path, moving from fossil fuels to renewables. Yet this path did not match the empirical realities of their grid. This observation prompted me to critique liberal assumptions that position the Global South behind the Global North on a universal timeline. I hope that the book conveys this question with nuance.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
GG: Overall, my research investigates a fundamental contemporary question: How do the various infrastructures that satisfy our daily needs transform in response to energy and climate change-related concerns? While my first book explored high-tech, futuristic infrastructure in an oil-rich country, Floating Power spotlights seemingly provisional, makeshift projects by examining Turkish-built floating power plants in Ghana. A central theoretical contribution of this book is the concept of “energy accumulation.” I argue against the dominant, unilinear narrative of “energy transition,” which evokes the possibility of substituting fossil fuels with renewables. Instead, my ethnographic work in Turkey and Ghana reveals a landscape of accumulation, where various types of infrastructure—hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar—layer upon one another. This all-of-the-above approach relies upon and reproduces what I call “technologies of deferral,” such as the powership, which are perceived as temporary stopgaps but often become semi-permanent fixtures. This book also highlights the emergent thick geopolitical and geoeconomic connections between Turkey and African countries, demonstrating how South-South relations are reshaping global energy networks and vice versa.
While writing this monograph, I coauthored another book with Chika Watanabe, titled Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide, which challenges the Malinowskian ideal of long-term, immersive, uninterrupted fieldwork. We show that this ideal is rooted in masculinist and ableist assumptions that sideline the everyday realities of researchers’ lives—including caregiving responsibilities, health concerns, and the precarity of the neoliberal academic labor market. Beyond its contributions to debates on energy and geopolitics, Floating Power extends this methodological question by drawing on research conducted across many locations and on an international scale between 2016 and 2023, mostly during spring, summer, and winter breaks, as my other personal and professional responsibilities allowed. For instance, that first visit I paid to the company headquarters in May 2016 was possible because I was in Turkey to see my family. Many of the connections I cultivated for the project also come from personal networks, such as friends of friends. These research experiences are complemented by my daily life in Houston, Texas, where I regularly observe the energy industry's transformations. In this sense, since I became a faculty member at Rice University in 2019, my home has doubled as a field site, offering me unique ways of thinking about energy infrastructure. The book would have looked very different if it had been written elsewhere.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
GG: Like my first book, Spaceship in the Desert (2019), this book investigates how infrastructure transforms amid challenges related to energy and climate change. In each case, I was curious to learn more about an inventive and imaginative project that brought diverse groups of people together. Both monographs draw on ethnographic research to analyze large-scale technological projects intended to address current and future environmental questions, even though the projects differ significantly. While Spaceship in the Desert focused on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructure in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, mainly studying the Masdar City project, Floating Power shifts its focus to Ghana and investigates the geopolitical and geoeconomic connections that new energy infrastructures rely on and reproduce. For instance, the book’s first chapter historicizes how Turkish-built floating power plants, which now power Ghana’s national electricity grid, were first deployed in Iraq following US-sponsored military interventions, such as the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion, and eventually began serving other countries during various electricity shortages. Therefore, even though the book centers on relations between Turkey and Ghana, it also shows how energy infrastructure is shaped by multiple layers of imperial power and is born of careful planning among international partners.
One surprising and important development I encountered while researching this book is that the many power plants the Ghanaian government leased during a period of power outages, such as the Turkish-built floating power plant at the center of the book, have led to overcapacity, creating the unexpected problem of excess electricity. Therefore, while the book starts with the development of floating power plants in Iraq, it ends with creative decision-makers in Ghana who are building electric car infrastructure so they can sell excess electricity to middle- and upper-middle-class consumers on the grid.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
GG: The book is intended for a broad, interdisciplinary readership, including scholars in anthropology, science and technology studies, architecture and architectural history, geography, and environmental studies, as well as practitioners interested in energy policy. For instance, I presented it at the International Energy Agency in Paris in April 2026. Overall, it seeks to critique liberal assumptions regarding linear progress, which are enlivened by energy transition narratives. It also aims to demonstrate how South-South relations structure energy futures. It is concise and written in accessible language.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
GG: I am currently completing the production process for Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide, co-authored with Chika Watanabe. We are very excited about its publication, as we believe it will foreground many of the assumptions we carry about ethnographic research and perhaps even correct them. As I mentioned earlier, the book explores how researchers’ personal lives shape knowledge production and extends some of the arguments we made in our American Ethnologist article in 2024. It will be published by the University of Chicago Press in January 2027.
Since 2023, I have served as an editor of Limn, a scholar-led, open-access publication, which seeks to render timely issues timeless through short, accessible articles. We have created a lively, engaging peer-review system for Limn that allows the authors to give each other feedback through an online workshop, one of the exciting aspects of being an editor. Together with Michaela Büsse, May Ee Wong, and Jamie L Jones, I am currently editing Limn 15: The Great Offshore, which explores “offshores,” spaces such as detention centers, charter cities, etc., as laboratories for new socio-technical orders. This issue will be available in November 2026. We look forward to celebrating it at the AAA conference in St Louis.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, pages 37 to 44)
Powerships’ Origins in the Crisis of Demodernization
The 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2008 Great Recession successively created opportunities for Karadeniz Holding to expand its presence in electricity markets, leading to the production of its floating power plants. Originally a company trading heavy industrial machinery, Karadeniz had built its first heavy fuel oil–powered thermal plant in 1999 in Silopi, Şırnak, a Kurdish-majority town on the Turkish border with Iraq and Syria, near the border post of Habur Gate (also known as Ibrahim Khalil border crossing). This small 35-megawatt plant provided electricity to northern Iraq over twelve years through transmission lines that crossed the border, rendering Karadeniz the first private company to export electricity from Turkey.
In 1999, Karadeniz Holding’s small 35-megawatt addition was noteworthy for the Iraqi grid. In his thesis “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems,” Thomas E. Griffith Jr. (1994), then a major with the US Air Force, shows how the Gulf War in 1991 decimated Iraq’s electricity production capacity, reducing the grid’s 9,500-megawatt volume to less than 300 megawatts, and criticizes US military attacks on national electrical power systems. Unlike other goods, electricity cannot be stockpiled and set aside for emergency use, and had therefore become the primary target of US aerial attacks (see also chapter 2). A report dated October 1991 documents how some of the destroyed infrastructure was repaired using salvaged parts and improvised methods, and how this led to a wide range of safety risks and severely negative impacts on water purification, wastewater treatment, and broader public health infrastructure (Doleh et al. 1991). In his book Cities Under Siege, geographer Stephen Graham (2010, 280–81) makes similar observations: “It has become clear that the wholesale demodernization of metropolitan life in Iraq, a profoundly urbanized nation, in 1991—followed by the sanctions imposed between 1991 and 2003, making it impossible to reconstruct life-sustaining infrastructures—created one of the largest engineered public-health catastrophes of the late twentieth century. Even usaf papers admit that the public-health disaster created by the bombing of Iraq’s electricity infrastructure killed at least thirty times as many civilians as did the actual fighting.” The effects of US aerial bombings on Iraq’s electricity infrastructure in 1991 were so devastating for the Iraqi population that the Gulf War became a notable example, even among representatives of the US military, against aerial bombardment of critical national infrastructure (see, for instance, Crawford 1997). Critics and perpetrators alike agreed that the war had “demodernized” Iraq. In 2002, Karadeniz Holding’s subsidiary Kartet, benefiting from the Turkish energy industry’s liberalization and unbundling efforts, acquired additional export and wholesale licenses for exporting electricity to Iraq. The military interventions and the remodernization efforts in Iraq that followed facilitated the growth and development of Turkish corporations such as Karadeniz Holding.
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In September 2003, six months into the occupation, then energy and natural resources minister of Turkey Hilmi Güler attended the opening of Karadeniz Holding’s new larger power plant in Silopi: “This is also foreign policy service. Our country will serve as an island of stability and confidence to this region [northern Iraq]. We see the first steps toward this goal here.” In a video recording of the event, he dances ikiayak with a troupe of folklore dancers from Şırnak and chats cordially with US General David H. Petraeus, the army commander who had led US troops into battle in March 2003 and who was responsible for the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq at the time. Apart from the dancers, all the attendees were men. Echoing the emphasis on peace building, the director of the Karadeniz Holding board, Rauf Osman Karadeniz, suggested, “The energy we transmit will carry with it the love and friendship in our hearts to every house it will light up.” He labeled their work “friendship energy” (dostluk enerjisi), a slogan that would later evolve into their now well-known motto “The power of friendship.” The video recording of the ceremony closes with the governor of the Iraqi province Nineveh and the Turkish energy minister shaking hands on stage while the song “Victory” by the Australian/British classical crossover band Bond plays in the background (Karadeniz Holding 2015). By promoting stability, love, friendship, and victory in a festive atmosphere, these performances created an affect of attachment between corporate actors and the regions they serviced, a sensibility that continued to enliven Karadeniz Holding’s future projects. In the meantime, representatives of Karadeniz Holding took on significant roles as foreign policy actors, mediating relations between Turkey, Iraq, and the United States. As demand in Iraq increased, Karadeniz augmented its thermal production capacity by purchasing electricity from the Turkish grid and continued providing power to the Duhok and Zakho regions immediately across the border in northern Iraq.
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As the occupation of Iraq deepened and changed character, the Karadeniz family came up with a new method for selling electricity to the country, finally making claims to their cin fikir. The Great Recession of 2008 adversely affected various markets, but the shipping industry was particularly hard hit (Sibilia 2019). The dry bulk freight market, in particular, faced significant challenges as a result of a decline in demand for maritime transport coinciding with an increase in the number of large dry bulk carriers designed to carry vast amounts of unpackaged cargo. According to data from Lloyd's Shipping Economist (2009), a monthly trade publication for the shipping industry, the idling rate of the world’s dry bulk fleet reached almost 3.7 percent in June 2009, with 354 ships sitting idle, while the number of ships sent for demolition and shipbreaking skyrocketed. As more dry bulk carriers became available on the secondhand ship market, prices decreased. Under these dire market conditions, Karadeniz Holding started looking for a ship that could carry their dual-fuel engines.
In early 2009, Karadeniz Holding acquired the freighter ship Melpomeni from the Greek maritime company Vulcanus Technical Maritime Enterprises. Geographer Elizabeth Sibilia (2019, 470) asks, “Ships, as part of the transportation sector, are only part of the production process when they are on the move. How do ships, as forms of fixed capital in the transport sector, produce value and surplus value, and what are the implications when ships slow down or even stop moving?” She describes the processes of shipbreaking in Bangladesh and of laying up ships in Singapore, both of which were widespread strategies adopted by shipowners during periods of downturn in the industry. Karadeniz Holding executives responded to this question in a way that did not correspond to either of these more apparent pathways. Instead, they created a cin fikir solution that would service their goal of staying both flexible and attached, and allow them to pursue development opportunities in Iraq in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. By bridging the land-sea distinction, they put together “terraqueous infrastructure” that would enable them to transcend the geophysical difference “between firm land and fluid sea” (Campling and Colás 2021, 27). The tension between mobility and immobility led to the unique spatial conditions of the floating power plants, rendering it a cin fikir. In some ways, the ships experienced the same tension that the company employees embodied: remaining flexible and feeling attached.
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The company’s first floating power plant, Doğan Bey, arrived at Umm Qasr Port in Basra, Iraq, in May 2010 and began producing 126 megawatts of electricity for the Iraqi grid. In 2010, Umm Qasr was not just Iraq’s only deepwater port and its one maritime connection to the Arabian Gulf but also, as the former site of Camp Bucca, the largest US military detention facility in occupied Iraq until its closure in January 2011, the planned location for Basra Logistics City (Cowen 2014, 167–70). In their new form as floating power plants, electricity production facilities had become appendages that could expedite the construction of logistics cities, such as the one proposed in Basra. As infrastructural spaces, they constituted pillars of what architect Keller Easterling (2014) labels “extrastatecraft,” serving the interests of both the US and Turkish governments simultaneously. In August 2010, Rauf Bey, a second floating power plant with a 179-megawatt generation capacity and, like Doğan Bey, sailing under a Liberian flag (see Khalili 2020, 238; Appel 2019), arrived in Basra, offering electricity to about one million people in and around the Al Zubair district and bridging shortages. The floating power plants stayed in Iraq for five years, departing only in 2015 as the Islamic State (isis) claimed political control of the country. Perhaps there is an irony in how such remodernization campaigns came to an end with the emergence of a force such as ISIS, deemed the opposite of modern by many.
By 2010, Karadeniz Holding’s energy infrastructure had reached its cin fikir form, escaping territorial confinement and seeking to transcend the distinction between land and sea. Keep in mind that the capacity and desire to ship oil across the oceans by the boatload had created the war-torn Iraqi ports in which the powership materialized. In other words, powerships were created to solve crises that were ultimately born from the capacity and desire to control oil shipments. The floating power plants soon started operating in various countries across the Global South, including Ghana, burning fossil fuels. Iraq offered a test bed for such infrastructure, allowing the company to experiment with this spatial arrangement. Next, their staff, some of whom moved from Iraq to Ghana, had to adopt and cultivate the necessary habits.