Sedef Shipyard in Tuzla, 2018. Photo by the author.
Cin Fikir: Infrastructure, War and Progress
Gökçe Günel
On an exceptionally warm morning in March 2018, I visited the Sedef Shipyard in Tuzla, Istanbul, and met up with Fikri, an employee of Karpower for over a decade.
In addressing urgent electricity demands, many countries are looking toward quick power generation systems. One emergent system is powerships: floating power plants that anchor at a harbor, plug into a national grid, and generate electricity with heavy fuel oil or natural gas. The Turkish company Karadeniz Holding – or Karpower, as it is known to its many clients – has become an increasingly popular producer of powerships in the past decade. A family-owned business, Karpower builds the ships on spec at various shipyards in Istanbul and leases them to places with high energy demands.
A mechanical engineer in his late forties with a strong interest in nautical design, Fikri had collaborated with a small team to plan and build the initial floating power plants in 2008 and 2009. The Sedef Shipyard is the largest private shipyard in Turkey, situated among forty other shipyards of various sizes in the Tuzla neighborhood. At the time of my visit in 2018, it was the only shipyard that housed a 300-ton crane, strong enough to lift the machines that made up the floating power plants. “Between 2000 and 2005, everyone was building ships here in Tuzla; there was such a boom that design units couldn’t handle production,” Fikri recalled, “but then the 2008 crisis hit, and the shipping industry still hasn’t recovered from that shock.”
Complete with tall, orderly exhaust stacks whose gleam can be seen far away, powerships combine elements of thermal power plants with those of large ships. Many from the business community in Turkey told me in interviews or informal conversations that the floating power plants were a cin fikir. A rather difficult term to translate, cin fikir signifies a quirky, effortless, but genius idea that circumvents expectations and aims to provide a shortcut or to fool others.
In trying to define cin fikir more clearly, several people referred to a well-known cartoon character in Turkey called Porof Zihni Sinir, created in 1977 by caricature artist İrfan Sayar for the popular left-leaning Gırgır magazine (similar to Mad magazine in the United States). A cunning and imaginative professor whose humorous inventions question the relationship between people and objects, Sinir’s many projects offer unconventional responses to everyday chores. For instance, in one cartoon, Sinir lays out the designs for a rocking chair that doubles as a bed. In another, a railcar offers services as a construction vehicle. In a third drawing, a sewing machine is placed atop a bicycle. In these examples, everyday objects serve two rarely combined services simultaneously, echoing how powerships incorporate the capacities of both ships and thermal power plants. People from the business world in Turkey believe that cin fikir in the Karpower case had been somewhat risky but was well timed and eventually successful.
Perhaps less known to many of the project’s followers are the historical underpinnings of how Karpower’s powerships emerged as a cin fikir solution. The 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2008 Great Recession successively created opportunities for Karpower to expand its presence in electricity markets, leading to the production of its floating power plants. Originally a company trading heavy industrial machinery, Karpower built its first heavy-fuel-oil-powered thermal plant in 1999 in Silopi, Şırnak, a Kurdish-majority town on the Turkish border with Iraq and Syria, near the border post of Habur Gate. This small 35-megawatt plant provided electricity to northern Iraq over twelve years through transmission lines that crossed the border, rendering Karadeniz the first private company to export electricity from Turkey.
In 1999, this small 35-megawatt addition was noteworthy for the Iraqi grid. In his thesis “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems,” Thomas E. Griffith Jr. (1994), then a major with the US Air Force (USAF), shows how the Gulf War in 1991 decimated Iraq’s electricity production, reducing the grid’s 9,500-megawatt capacity to less than 300 megawatts, and criticizes US military attacks on national electrical power systems. Unlike other goods, electricity cannot be stockpiled and set aside for emergency use and, therefore, was turned into the primary target of US aerial attacks. A report dated October 1991 documents how some of the destroyed infrastructure was repaired using salvaged parts and improvised methods, and how this led to a wide range of safety risks and severely negative impacts on water purification, wastewater treatment, and broader public health infrastructure (Doleh et al., 1991). In his book Cities Under Siege, geographer Stephen Graham (2010, pp. 280–81) makes similar observations: “It has become clear that the wholesale demodernization of metropolitan life in Iraq, a profoundly urbanized nation, in 1991—followed by the sanctions imposed between 1991 and 2003, making it impossible to reconstruct life-sustaining infrastructures—created one of the largest engineered public-health catastrophes of the late twentieth century. Even USAF papers admit that the public-health disaster created by the bombing of Iraq’s electricity infrastructure killed at least thirty times as many civilians as did the actual fighting.”
The effects of US aerial bombings on Iraq’s electricity infrastructure in 1991 were so devastating for the Iraqi population that the Gulf War became an iconic argument, even among representatives of the US military, against aerial bombardment of critical national infrastructure. Critics and perpetrators alike agreed that the war had “demodernized” Iraq. The military interventions and remodernization efforts that followed facilitated the growth and development of Turkish corporations. In 2002, Karadeniz Holding’s subsidiary Kartet, benefiting from the Turkish energy industry’s liberalization and unbundling efforts, acquired additional export and wholesale licenses for exporting electricity to Iraq.
The US occupation of Iraq started in March 2003. By then, the Turkish parliament had already voted against assisting the United States in the invasion of Iraq and prevented US troops from being deployed on Turkish territories. Many in Turkey and around the world interpreted the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an “oil war,” although the meaning of the term largely remained ambiguous. In analyzing US violence in Iraq, political scientist Timothy Mitchell (2011, pp. 229–30) suggests that the oil industry’s persistent goal of manufacturing and preserving the scarcity of oil, and thereby maintaining its high profit margins, could be achieved only if the oil industry collaborated with particular political forces in oil-producing countries such as Iraq. He underlines that these entanglements indicate not the oil industry’s power to manipulate local politics but its powerlessness. In other words, given that the oil industry did not have the political coherence to uphold such scarcity on its own, it had to cooperate with domestic political forces to help it achieve its goals. This desire to manage oil supply for global markets and to achieve the necessary levels of scarcity to ensure profitability led to a context where Iraq had no access to the direct material benefits of its own oil production. Instead, it had to buy modest volumes of electricity from a heavy-fuel-oil-burning facility in Silopi. In occupying Iraq, the United States attempted simultaneously to manage oil supplies to maintain global capital flows and to position the United States and its allies as a remodernizing force that was to bring Iraq back onto an imaginary linear development timeline.
In September 2003, six months into the occupation, then energy and natural resources minister of Turkey, Hilmi Güler, attended the opening of Karadeniz Holding’s new larger power plant in Silopi: “This is also foreign policy service. Our country will serve as an island of stability and confidence to this region [northern Iraq]. We see the first steps toward this goal here.” In a video recording of the event, he dances ikiayak with a troupe of folklore dancers from Şırnak and chats cordially with US General David H. Petraeus, the army commander who had led US troops into battle in March 2003 and who was responsible for the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq at the time. Apart from the dancers, all the attendees were men. Echoing the emphasis on peace-building, the director of the Karadeniz Holding board Rauf Osman Karadeniz suggested: “The energy we transmit will carry with it the love and friendship in our hearts to every house it will light up.” He labeled their work “friendship energy” (dostluk enerjisi), a slogan that would later evolve into their now well-known motto “The power of friendship.” The video recording of the ceremony closes with the governor of Nineveh and the Turkish energy minister shaking hands on stage while the song “Victory” by the Australian/British classical crossover band Bond plays in the background. By promoting stability, love, friendship, and victory in a festive atmosphere, these performances created an affect of attachment between corporate actors and the regions they serviced, a sensibility that would continue to enliven the company’s future projects. At the same time, representatives of Karadeniz Holding took on significant roles as foreign policy actors, mediating relations between Turkey, Iraq, and the United States. As demand in Iraq increased, the company augmented its thermal production capacity by purchasing electricity from the Turkish grid to provide power to the Duhok and Zakho regions immediately across the border in northern Iraq.
In the early years of the invasion, Karadeniz Holding emerged as one of the many contractors the US military supported in rebuilding Iraq, even though the relationship between these actors was indirect. Entanglements between corporations and militaries not only require militaries to create opportunities for corporate actors to provide goods and services but also necessitate active support from these corporations. The opening of the facility in Silopi demonstrated how such entanglements extend beyond national borders, shaping not only US operations in Iraq but also relations between Iraq and Turkey, and how they lend backing to particular governmental and corporate actors over others and facilitate their growth. In the process, corporations are transformed. Ideas of war and security also shift, allowing the US military to pull loosely associated allies into the process of invading and “remodernizing” Iraq. “In two-and-a-half years, the Iraqi people have made amazing progress. They’ve gone from living under the boot of a brutal tyrant, to liberation, to free elections, to a democratic constitution,” then US president George W. Bush addressed the Council on Foreign Relations at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, in December 2005.
As the occupation of Iraq deepened and changed character, the Karadeniz family came up with a new method for selling electricity to the country, finally making claims to their cin fikir. The Great Recession of 2008 adversely affected various markets, but the shipping industry was especially hard hit. The dry bulk freight market, in particular, faced significant challenges due to a decline in demand for maritime transport coinciding with an increase in the supply of large dry bulk carriers designed to carry vast amounts of unpackaged cargo. According to data from Lloyd’s Shipping Economist, an annual journal of shipping economics, the idling rate of the world’s dry bulk fleet reached almost 4.5 percent in May 2009, while the number of ships sent for demolition and ship breaking skyrocketed by a factor of ten (Lloyd’s, 2009, pp. 6). As more dry bulk carriers became available on the secondhand ship market, their prices declined. Under such dire market conditions, Karadeniz Holding started looking for a ship that could carry its dual-fuel engines, shifting ship use from trade to energy production.
In early 2009, Karadeniz Holding acquired the freighter ship Melpomeni from the Greek maritime company Vulcanus Technical Maritime Enterprises. Originally built in 1984 by the Japanese shipyard Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding in Ichihara, Chiba, the 617-foot-long Melpomeni changed names and owners several times over the course of its twenty-five-year life. Before arriving in Tuzla, it had belonged to Misr Shipping Company in Egypt, then Bright Star Marine in Malta, and finally Vulcanus. During the Great Recession, when commercial banks significantly reduced the volume of loans to the shipping industry, Karadeniz Holding received a $130 million loan from the Turkish commercial bank Yapı Kredi and began retrofitting Melpomeni in the Sedef Shipyard. With twelve German-made MAN Diesel dual-fuel engines in its four holds, the ship acquired a classification as a “special service floating power plant” from the international certification agency Bureau Veritas and promised to shape the future of electricity production (Maritime Directory, 2010). Sharon A. Wiener, the US consul general to Turkey, wrote in February 2010: “The mobile sea-based power plant tracks with Karadeniz’s stated desire for now to not actually build anything within Iraq (too complicated) but rather to continue the company’s profitable relationship with the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity (the Iraqi Minister of Electricity, Karim Wahid al-Aboudi, was the Commissioner of Electricity under the Coalition Provisional Authority and Karadeniz’s relationship with him extends back to that time) (Wikileaks, 2010).” As the leaked US Embassy cable demonstrates, the cin fikir’s temporary and flexible status allowed the company to stay out of Iraq while continuing a profitable relationship with the Iraqi ministry and helping the United States reinforce the remodernization trajectory of the occupied country
.The company’s first floating power plant, Doğan Bey, arrived at Umm Qasr Port in Basra, Iraq, in May 2010 and began producing 126 megawatts of electricity for the Iraqi grid. In 2010, Umm Qasr was not just Iraq’s only deepwater port and its sole maritime connection to the Arabian Gulf, but also the former site of Camp Bucca, the largest US military detention facility in occupied Iraq until its closure in January 2011, and the planned location for Basra Logistics City (Cowen, 2014, pp. 167–70). In their new form as floating power plants, such electricity production facilities had become appendages that could expedite the construction of logistics cities, such as the one proposed in Basra. As infrastructural spaces, they constituted pillars of what architect Keller Easterling (2014) labels “extrastatecraft,” or government interests pursued by relying on entities beyond the state, serving the interests of both the US and the Turkish governments. In August 2010, Rauf Bey, a second floating power plant with a 179-megawatt generation capacity and, like Doğan Bey, sailing under a Liberian flag, arrived in Basra, offering electricity to about one million people in and around the Al Zubair district and bridging shortages. The floating power plants stayed in Iraq for five years, departing only in 2015 as the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed political control of the country. Perhaps there is an irony in how such remodernization campaigns came to an end with the emergence of a force such as ISIS, deemed the opposite of modern by many.
By 2010, Karadeniz Holding’s energy infrastructure had reached its full cin fikir form, escaping territorial confinement and seeking to transcend the distinction between land and sea. Keep in mind that the capacity and drive to ship oil across the oceans by the boatload had created the war-torn Iraqi ports in which the powership was established. In other words, powerships were designed to solve crises ultimately born from oil trade relations. The floating power plants soon started operating in various countries across the Global South, burning fossil fuels. Iraq offered a test bed for such infrastructure, allowing the company to experiment with this spatial arrangement.
In some ways, the above is an origin story for this particular cin fikir. Its processes underscore the prevailing narrative on global energy hierarchies, where the energy infrastructures of countries in the Global South need to undergo remodernization to sustain their presumed linear developmental path. This linear timeline has been part and parcel of maintaining the global political order, placing Global North countries at the winning end of a trajectory, with Global South countries continually trailing behind. Such a timeline has allowed Global North countries to define what “demodernization” and “remodernization” mean, implementing the terms under which such definitions find material footing. Yet, collaborations between South-South partners such as Turkey and Iraq also rely on and reproduce these hierarchies. As this analysis of energy infrastructure in the early 2000s illustrates, Turkish representatives promoted cin fikir to ensure remodernization, thereby allowing Iraq to move along a timeline to which Turkey had already subscribed. The perception of Turkey’s difference from other international actors, such as the United States, as a Global South country that has pursued progress with some success, supported the proliferation of this cin fikir, keeping the geopolitics of linear progress alive. An investigation into the origin of cin fikir thus reveals one of the many ways in which the imagination of progress is sustained and strengthened.
Cin fikir is perhaps characteristic of contemporary infrastructure development, pointing to the conflicting implications of remodernization campaigns. Such distributed infrastructures have emerged worldwide because of deregulation and privatization, increasing infrastructural demand, and the many disruptions caused by wars and related emergencies. In this sense, it is essential to note that cin fikir is not improvisational, as is sometimes associated with projects in the Global South. Instead, it is shaped by various layers of imperial power and born out of careful planning among multiple international partners. Despite offering temporary relief, such instantiations of cin fikir do not facilitate the production of self-sustaining infrastructures; instead, they deepen and extend geopolitical hierarchies and dependencies globally.
Literature
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Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. Verso.
Wikileaks (2010, February 9). Karadeniz Holdings introduces mobile ship-based power plants. https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10ISTANBUL49_a.html
Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her research investigates how infrastructure transforms amid energy and climate change-related challenges. Her latest book, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. Currently, she is completing a second book project provisionally titled All of the Above: A Global Future of Energy, which analyzes how energy infrastructure shapes South-South relations. Dr. Günel co-authored "A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography" (2020) and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography. The book Patchwork Ethnography is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in 2026.