When do forests matter?

This article traces how forests in Turkey acquire meaning through their entanglement with nationalism, securitization, and racialized governance. The catastrophic wildfires of 2021, which destroyed over 150,000 hectares along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, became a site where ecological devastation was quickly translated into nationalist paranoia. Refugees and Kurdish insurgents were accused of arson, and fire was narrated as evidence of invasion, conspiracy, and betrayal. These claims drew on deeper histories in which forests have been managed through militarized strategies—burned during counterinsurgency operations, surveilled for signs of fugitivity, and recast as threatened zones in the service of territorial control. Building on the concept of “political forests,” the article shows how wooded landscapes in Turkey function as terrains of belonging, where ecological crisis intensifies nationalist claims, legitimizes violence, and reinforces exclusionary forms of governance. The 2021 fires illuminate the ways forests matter as stages for securing identity, policing movement, and naturalizing punitive state power.