A Border Dam Across Regimes: From 'Friendship Garden' to 'Water Imperialism' in East Anatolia

• In Event: Politics of Infrastructure across the Soviet/Post-Soviet Transition

Abstract

This paper will present a biography of the Akhurian Reservoir Dam, a significant yet little-known
hub in East Anatolia’s water infrastructure. With one foot in Armenia and the other in Turkey, at
the time of its construction in the 1970s, the dam straddled the Iron Curtain at its most intimate
point. (Excepting a narrow slice of Norway, Turkey was the only NATO member directly abutting
Soviet territory). The dam’s lifecycle—from proposal to operation, to maintenance—suggests an
alternative periodization of the interwar, Cold war, and post-communist periods. In the East
Anatolian borderland, a specific assemblage of aridity, ethnic cleansing, local expertise, and the
dam’s materiality created a regional logic that was only loosely tied to diplomacy in Ankara,
Moscow, Washington, and Yerevan. This paper will explore this assemblage and its legacies,
from the early 1920s to today. In addition to contributing to a discussion of post/socialist
infrastructure, the paper will challenge historiographical narratives that interpret dam-building
solely as a form of regime legitimation and technopolitical ostentation.

Author

• Taylor Zajicek, Williams College