Bilge Firat
I am Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Associate at Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at UTEP, and Visiting Research Fellow at Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies, United Nations Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é (2021-2022). Trained as a political anthropologist (PhD '11, Binghamton Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é), I pursue questions of access and accountability through the corridors of power from high politics and international diplomacy to energy and transport infrastructures. My research interests include regionalism and regional integration, lobbying and informal governance, geopolitics and statecraft, the development of energy-transport infrastructures, and cultures of expertise.
My previous book Diplomacy and Lobbying During Turkey’s Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics (Manchester Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é Press, 2019) hones in on (in)formal negotiations of power, policy and statecraft among diplomats and lobbyists during Turkey’s contentious integration to the European Union (EU). In this ethnography of lobbying and diplomacy, I argue that the Turkish membership, which was to ultimately open up decision-making processes and structures of this country and those of the EU to outsiders, bore for both sides too big a cost to see it through. In effect, the Turkish and EU elites managed this cost with the bureaucratic politics of non-membership based on tactics of containment, which lead to actors’ disintegration from one another at the individual-bureaucratic level, while paradoxically contributing to their standing as “effective negotiators” within their own policy communities. Published by MUP's Political and Administrative Ethnography Series, this is the first book-length account of the actually existing negotiations between the supranational EU and Turkey, a nation-state.
Situated at the intersection of the everyday works of geopolitics and the prefigurative role of carbon-based energy-transport infrastructures for postcarbon society, economy, and politics, my current line of research looks at the interplay between infrastructural geopolitics and geopolitical infrastructures. I am writing an ethnographic account of the makings of markets, infrastructure, and expertise in the Southern Gas Corridor, a multi-country socio-material assemblage of several long-range cross-border natural gas pipelines that have been operational between Europe and the Caspian Basin since 2020.
I am also interested in the making of infrastructural states more broadly, and cross-border energy-transport infrastructures in the US-Mexico borderlands.
At UTEP, I teach courses on comparative regions, globalization, infrastructure, and ethnographic methods.
I welcome queries and other communication from prospective students and future colleagues on any or all of the above issues, especially anthropological contemplations of geopolitics, infrastructure, and expertise.
Publications
2022 Geopolitics as an Ethnographic Object and Agenda. Geography Compass 16(7): e12649.
2019 (Paperback edition available in April 2022) Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: the Private Life of Politics. Manchester: Manchester Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é Press, Political and Administrative Ethnography Series.
2018 Integrative Currents? Electrifying the Turkey-EU Relations in Times of Blackout. In Szolucha, Anna (ed.), Energy, Resource Extraction and Society: Impacts and Contested Futures, pp. 177-196. New York: Routledge.
2017 Infrastructure as New Life? Platypus, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) Blog:
2017 Divided by Democracy? Reflections on the Turkish Referendum From the Top. Emergency for Turkish Democracy. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Series on Emergency for Turkish Democracy:
2016 Political Documents and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurs: Lobbying the European Parliament during Turkey’s EU Integration. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(2):190-205.
2016 “The Most Eastern of the West, the Most Western of the East”: Energy-Transport Infrastructures and Regional Politics of the Periphery in Turkey. Economic Anthropology 3(1):81-93.
2015 White Elephants and Cannibals through the Glass Wall of Policymaking in Euroland: Enlargement, Energy, and Infrastructure. Reviews & Critical Commentary, Council for European Studies, September 16:
2014 Europeanization alla Turca? A Communicative Engagement Event Towards the Positive Agenda. The Wenner Gren Blog:
2014 Culture, Power, and Policymaking in the New Europe. Special issue of Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Vol. 23 Issue 1
2014 Crisis, Power, and Policymaking in the New Europe: Why Should Anthropologists Care? Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23(1):1-20.
2014 The Accession Pedagogy: Power, Policy, and Politics in Turkey’s Bid for EU Membership. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23(1): 99-120.
2013 Failed Promises: Economic Integration, Bureaucratic Encounters, and the EU-Turkey Customs Union. Dialectical Anthropology 37(1):1-26.
2009 Negotiating Europe/Avrupa: Prelude for an Anthropological Approach to Turkish Europeanization and the Cultures of EU lobbying in Brussels. European Journal of Turkish Studies, 9 Special Issue on EU-Turkey: Sociological Approaches.