“Social Development” as a Governmental Strategy in the Southeastern Anatolia Project

This paper examines the “social development” practices carried out within the framework of the Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesior GAP) in Turkey in the 1990s. In its initial phase, GAP was a state-run regional development project in southeast Anatolia which consisted of massive infrastructural investments. But beginning in the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, the scope of GAP expanded to include a set of social projects. The emergence and transformation of the notion of social development within GAP constitute the major focus of this study.