A Project of Destruction, Peace, or Technology? Untangling the Relationship between the Gap Project and Environmental Issues of the Region.

The Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) began in the 1970s to generate energy and irrigate arid lands through the construction of dams and hydropower plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and extensive irrigation networks in southeastern Turkey. Over time, the project expanded to achieve a wider range of goals in different fields and fundamentally transformed the Southeast Anatolia region. It is also widely claimed that GAP has an impact on the environmental security of the three countries of Iraq, Syria and Iran, and that security considerations and political calculations in the region are the reason for the GAP project. However, this supposed link between the Gap and the region's environmental security has often been viewed in a simplistic manner, and the question of how the two are linked – or not – has remained unanswered until now. The purpose of this article is to fill this research gap and examine the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the interrelationship between the GAP project and the environmental issue of the region based on various primary and secondary data sources Accordingly, the article identifies and discusses the major narratives in which the gap is imagined as an environmental threat and political conspiracy.