A full audience gathered at the Geneva Graduate Institute on 20 October for the launch of Professor Umut Yıldırım's latest book, Everyday Decolonization: War and Resistance in Turkey's Extractive Regime. The event offered a thought exploration of the relationship between war, extraction, dispossession and everyday forms of resistance, while opening important reflections for migration research.
Introduced by colleagues as a highly respected anthropologist whose work has significantly advanced understandings of state violence, Kurdish politics and political ecology, Professor Yıldırım presented the central arguments of her book through a series of stories rooted in the lived experiences of Kurdish communities in southeastern Turkey.
At the core of the book lies a powerful rethinking of extraction. Rather than viewing extraction solely as the removal of minerals, land or natural resources, Umut Yıldırım describes it as a broader political process that appropriates lives, histories, emotions and futures. Through this lens, extraction becomes a key mechanism through which states reshape territories, populations and social relations.
The book draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Kurdish regions where decades of conflict have transformed both landscapes and communities. Mountains, villages, agricultural lands and urban neighbourhoods are presented as places where histories of violence, displacement and resistance intersect. Particular attention is given to the ways communities maintain relationships with land and memory despite ongoing processes of militarisation, environmental destruction and political marginalisation.
These themes speak directly to central concerns of migration scholarship. Throughout the discussion, it became clear that migration cannot be reduced to movement across borders. The displacement of communities, the destruction of livelihoods, the loss of access to ancestral lands and the fragmentation of social worlds all shape migration trajectories long before migration itself takes place.
One striking example discussed during the event concerned the Hevsel Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage site that has become a symbol of competing claims over land, heritage and environmental governance. Through such cases, Umut Yıldırım illustrates how state-led development, security policies and ecological interventions can simultaneously transform landscapes and alter the conditions that enable people to remain in place.
Yet the book is not only about dispossession. It is equally a study of resilience and what the author calls "everyday decolonization". Rather than focusing exclusively on organised political movements, she highlights ordinary practices through which people sustain community life, preserve memories, care for each other and maintain connections to land. These everyday acts become forms of resistance that challenge attempts to erase histories and identities.
For the Global Migration Centre, the discussion offered valuable insights into the complex relationships between conflict, environmental change, governance and human mobility. It highlighted how migration research benefits from examining the social and political conditions that shape whether people can remain, return or rebuild their lives in places marked by violence and displacement.
As debates on forced migration, climate change and displacement continue to grow in importance worldwide, Yıldırım's work provides a timely reminder that questions of mobility are inseparable from questions of land, justice, memory and belonging.
Learn more about the event here.
About Professor Umut Yıldırım.