Political twists and turns in left-behind places: reactions of an extractive heartland to changing state strategies

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the twists and turns that characterise the political reactions of some ‘left-behind’ places. Offering a situated, context-sensitive and temporal analysis of Turkey’s once extractive heartland, we unveil a volatile and particularly fragile political terrain and throw light on its contingency on changing modes of state intervention and power-laden strategies responsive to disaffection and discontent. We suggest that this power-laden mechanism that plays down, if not eradicates, the ability of places to transform and thrive precludes conceptions that invariably position left-behind places as ‘vengeful’ and invites dynamic and context-sensitive comprehensions of discontent and agential and processual reconceptions of left-behindness.


INTRODUCTION
Despite the recent acknowledgement of varieties of 'left behindness' (Furlong, 2019;MacKinnon et al., 2022;Pike et al., 2023) and attempts to disclose the varied political reactions of places (De Ruyter et al., 2021;Goodwin, 2017;Surridge et al., 2021;Sykes, 2020), scholarly approaches, for the most part, remain focused on 'vengeful' left-behind places, with a particular focus on the factors that threaten political stability within and across national and macro-regional political economies.Past critical accounts seeking to reveal and comprehend such varied experiences have advocated for a context-sensitive comprehension of broader socio-economic and political changes (MacLeod & Jones, 2018;McKay, 2019) and their ramifications for local communities (Dorling & Pritchard, 2010), as well as the acknowledgement of place-based dynamics (Bromley-Davenport et al., 2019;Nurse & Sykes, 2019;Telford & Wistow, 2020), although they have remained in the shadow of stylistic generalisations and causal explanations.This paper contributes to this limited body of literature but diverges from these in its reveal of the 'twists and turns' that characterise the political reactions of places.We also offer an alternative reading of such situations, by attending to place-based dynamics and contextualising these within processes of neoliberalisation and changing state strategies.
An existing body of literature suggests that historical geographical divides have given momentum to the political resentment of certain disregarded locations and disclosing a complex set of socio-economic and cultural factors in the background (e.g., Inglehart & Norris, 2016;Kenny & Luca, 2021;Los et al., 2017).Further studies have suggested that the political resentment of such 'left-behind' places is an outcome of the long-term political and economic changes that carried these places to the margins of economic and political importance (Gordon, 2018;Langella & Manning, 2016;Sensier & Devine, 2017) and the policies that either overlooked them (Leyshon, 2021;MacKinnon et al., 2022;Rodriguez-Pose, 2018) or failed to prevent or alleviate their decline (Coyle & Ford, 2017;North, 2017;Tomaney & Pike, 2018).MacLeod and Jones (2018) postulate that the gradual suspension of optimism under these conditions led to disappointment, and eventually eroded the consent for the political mainstreamconsidered by MacLeavy and Jones (2021) to be a manifestation of the crisis of the earlier neoliberal state intervention modes.
This article builds upon the above readings and extends them by offering a situated, context-sensitive, and temporal analysis of the phenomenon and delineating the politically contested relationships with specific regimes of accumulation and state interventions.We maintain that while broader political-economic processes and being excluded from the benefits arising from specific regimes of accumulation and state intervention provide impetus to political resentment (MacLeavy & Jones, 2021;MacLeod & Jones, 2018), the disaffection and grievances do not necessarily amount to full-blown discontent or unwavering political resentment.Such varying reactions are contingent on the dynamic interactions that unfold between the place-based experiences of state accumulation strategies and programmes of action and those strategies enacted in response to (perceptions of) disaffection and discontent (Jessop, 2016;MacKinnon, 2021;Zhang & He, 2021).When viewed in this way, the enquiry transforms into an excavation of the role of the state, the diffuse nature of its power and its contested relations with local actors (Allen, 2016;Bayırbağ, 2010;Davies, 2014aDavies, , 2014b;;Jessop, 1990), which this paper probes through its empirical focus on Zonguldak.Once the extractive heartland of state-led industrialisation efforts, and later the primary locus of deindustrialisation and outmigration, a series of broader political-economic processes appear to have carried Zonguldak to the margins of socio-economic and political development.While such processes typically spur vengeful political reactions from the locality, the specific situation in Zonguldak is less clear-cut.
Drawing upon primary qualitative data derived from a workshop, unstructured interviews and focus group meetings with representatives of government bodies, chambers, and local professional and civic organisations, supported by official documents detailing the policies, strategies and programmes of action and data on local and national elections, we unveil a fragile and volatile political terrain and throw light on its contingence on changing state strategies and those strategies responsive to disaffection and discontent.This power-laden mechanism that shapes the efforts and outcomes of local development, plays down, if not eradicates, the ability of the locality to transform and thrive and underscores the politics of 'left-behindness'.
The paper begins by outlining its foundations in studies of left-behind places and providing a theoretical account of how accounting for neoliberalisation, state intervention and power can help us delineate more thoroughly the mechanisms that link local development to places' political reactions.After setting out the design and methodology of the research in section 2, an account of the locality's experience with broader political-economic processes is provided in section 3. Section 4 then looks into the twists and turns in the locality's political reactions, revealing how the power-laden strategies of alliance-building and rivalry have shaped the local development efforts and outcomes and influenced local political reactions.The paper concludes in section 5 with a presentation of the implications of our findings, highlighting the importance of conceiving discontent as a dynamic and context-sensitive phenomenon and advancing agential and processual conceptions of left behindness.

NEOLIBERALISATION AND UNEVEN GEOGRAPHIES OF DEVELOPMENT
The past decades have witnessed a change in focus in academic studies of the processes of globalisation and neoliberalisation, and a rising interest in spatial and scalar state restructuring in response to the crisis of the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime (Brenner, 2004;Jessop, 2016;Jessop et al., 2008).This growing body of literature has highlighted the primacy of places at the competitive edge of neoliberal development (Brenner & Theodore, 2002), positing that the crisis-led spatiotemporal fixes of neoliberalism (Jessop, 2018) have served to reproduce and intensify the uneven development between geographies (Hadjimichalis, 1987;Harvey, 2011;Hudson, 2007;Smith, 2010).The spatial and scalar restructuring under neoliberalisation, it has been suggested, have rendered many places incompetent to 'engender either a sustainable regime of economic growth or a territorially cohesive framework of political regulation at any spatial scale', the 'polarizing socioeconomic consequences' of which are anticipated to have inevitable prominent political outcomes (Brenner, 2004, p. 300).Despite such vocal prefigurations, however, studies of regions experiencing economic decline or continued deprivation have remained in the shadow of the focus on the production of space in neoliberalism's favoured realms.

Left-behind places: towards a variegated account
Elections and referendums in recent years have sparked renewed debate on economically lagging and declining places (MacKinnon et al., 2022) due to their tendencies to support right-wing parties, to vote for Brexit or to harbour distrust in the European Union (EU) (Dijkstra et al., 2020;Ivaldi & ve Gombin, 2015;Urlich-Shad & Duncan, 2018;Wilkinson, 2019).The places labelled as 'left behind' are usually old industrial towns, rural areas, suburbs and other peripheral locations, and they are characterised by long-term decline, myriad socio-economic problems and the sense of 'not being listened to' (MacLeod & Jones, 2018), of 'being ignored' (McQuarrie, 2017) and of 'not existing' (McKenzie, 2017a(McKenzie, , 2017b)).For Hendrickson et al. (2018), the ballot box is considered in such locations as 'the last chance to reverse their declining fortunes' (p.5), while for Wright (2017) it is considered 'an opportunity to reclaim lost power ' (p. 191).The political reaction of so-called 'left-behind places' has thus been widely conceptualised as a 'revolt of the Rust Belt' (McQuarrie, 2017) or a 'revenge of the places that don't matter' (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018).
This recent emphasis has opened a conceptual and empirical window on a new way of thinking about places facing significant socio-economic challenges, revealing how historical geographical divides have fuelled disaffection and grievances and threatened political stability across a range of national political economies, and uncovering the complex set of socio-economic and cultural factors in the background (e.g., Gordon, 2018;Inglehart & Norris, 2016;Kenny & Luca, 2021;Los et al., 2017).However, there remain a series of limitations to these generalisations and the importance attributed to causal explanations that narrow our understanding of the phenomenon of leftbehind places.For one, discontent does not emerge exclusively from left-behind places (Goodwin, 2017;MacLeavy & Jones, 2021;Surridge et al., 2021), but also from 'not so vengeful' places.Evidence in the case of Brexit, for example, suggests that in the affluent and middle-income regions of Britain where the majority voted to remain, leave votes reached non-negligibly substantial proportions (Koch, 2017;MacLeavy & Jones, 2021;Sykes, 2020), weakening the common conception that 'vengeful' political attitudes exist only in left-behind places.
These conceptions are further undermined by neglect, as scholarship shies away from engaging with the leftbehind places with equally prominent socio-economic challenges, but that are less inclined to support rightwing parties, vote for Brexit or distrust the EU (Furlong, 2019).An analysis of the support of populist parties in Europe, however, unearths 'radically different responses', despite the comparable sizes and effects of the same cultural drivers of political resentment (Gordon, 2018, p. 111).Dorling (2016), for example, spotlights 'the least prosperous' but pro-remain places in Britain, while in Glasgow, De Ruyter et al. (2021) note that comparable severities of deprivation as the vengeful left-behind places in Britain did not produce similar proportions of pro-leave votes.Similarly, in Liverpool 'wards that have similar socio-economic conditions and which are highly ranked in the Index of Multiple Deprivation … voted differently in the referendum' (Nurse & Sykes, 2019, p. 16).In yet another revealing case, Wales, Goodwin-Hawkins and Jones (2019, p. 330) identified some left-behind places with 'a substantial majority for remaining', including those that had witnessed a long-term industrial decline, as well as significant losses in retail and public sector employment, as well as others with 'wafer-thin margins'.
Singling out left-behind places as 'vengeful' may seem to undermine the diverging reactions of places to processes of marginalisation and may also do little to advance our understanding of why contention circumvents some leftbehind places while manifesting as political resentment in others.For example, our understanding of what steered the political resentment of places such as Merseyside and Stoke on Trent in England is limited, despite additional funding and investment brought to diversify and revitalise the local economies (Etherington et al., 2022;Mahoney & Kearon, 2018).Many contend that the introduced policies resonated less with the lived experiences of local communities (Clarke & Newman, 2017;Closs Stephens, 2016;MacLeod & Jones, 2018;Marr, 2016), and suggest that grievances are driven by the gap between what was expected or promised by these policies, and what was actually achieved (Langella & Manning, 2016;McQuarrie, 2017).In other cases, where the materialisation of policies has been slow (Evans, 2002;North, 2017;Özatağan & Eraydin, 2021), this has usually been attributed to the lack of capacity and shortfalls in governance that have hindered the adaption of left-behind places, bringing about a need for top-down policy guidance, often from the nationstate (Bernt, 2019;Joo & Seo, 2018).
All this barely recognised evidence suggests that the conflicts in left-behind places do not necessarily lead to political resentment, raising a need to flesh out the underlying complexities and contradictions.Addressing this point, there is a body of literature suggesting that longterm political and economic changes and the uneven spatialities of neoliberal globalisation provided the momentum for such political resentment (Gordon, 2018;Langella & Manning, 2016;Sensier & Devine, 2017), along with policies that either overlooked (Leyshon, 2021;MacKinnon, 2021;Rodriguez-Pose, 2018) or failed to prevent or alleviate their problems (Coyle & Ford, 2017;North, 2017;Tomaney & Pike, 2018).'Consent for the neoliberal political-economic mainstream' has gradually been suspended against this backdrop (MacLeod & Jones, 2018, p. 126), epitomising, as MacLeavy and Jones (2021) and Jessop (2018) put it, the crisis of the earlier modes of neoliberalisation and state interventionan interpretation that underscores the politically contested relationships of localities and their communities, and suggests a need to contextualise the political reactions of places in view of the effects of neoliberalisation and state intervention.

Neoliberalisation, state strategies and power
As has now been well established, neoliberalism is more than a mere '[increase in the] reliance of the market mechanism', which 'entails a primacy of the political (understood here to include the polity, politics and policy) rather than the free market' (Jessop, 2018(Jessop, , p. 1729)).It is a political-economic regime that entails novel modes of capital accumulation and state intervention (Brenner et al., 2010), and as such is contextually embedded and path-dependent, taking shape as much under the influence of global economic dynamics as by the institutions, traditions, regulations and struggles inherited from past political-economic regimes (Peck et al., 2009).Highlighting neoliberalism's variegated and mutating nature, Brenner and Theodore (2002) highlight the different articulations of the neoliberal project, and varying institutional trajectories taken in the process of managing its recurring crises.'Neoliberalism, in this sense, is not what it used to be (and it can never be what it used to be),' featuring 'shape-shifting capacities' that are linked to 'its close encounters with (and enfoldment into) diverse forms of state and extrastate power' (Peck, 2010, p. 106, emphasis original).
This last point has been taken up by a growing body of literature that meticulously investigates the changing state strategies and the modalities of power that guide their realisation.This scholarship posits the state 'as the key producer of programmes of neoliberal transformation' (MacLeavy & Jones, 2021, p. 447), yet does so with due regard for the diverse array of actors, their practices, and their complex social, economic, political and ideological motives (Jessop, 2010(Jessop, , 2016;;Oosterlynck, 2010;Varró, 2010).Unravelling the articulation between such social forces and relationships, such works have probed 'the contingent mechanisms or processes in and through which state projects are politically made and contested' (MacLeavy & Jones, 2021, p. 447).Several other studies addressing these issues have highlighted the agency of national state actors in launching spatial strategies and programmes of action (hegemonic projects) and mobilising discourse to legitimise the political-economic agenda, and to do so in ways that (temporarily) resolve conflicts between different economic, social, and political interests and maintain broader societal consent (MacKinnon, 2021;MacKinnon & Shaw, 2010).Others, including Bayırbağ (2010Bayırbağ ( , 2013)), describe the agency of local actors in actively carrying their interests to the state agenda and negotiating with state actors to mobilise their power into providing political support, while still others address the rivalries and coalitions between national and local state actors (Zhang, 2023).
The outcomes of state spatial strategies and programmes of action, however, are hardly certain.The underpinning strategic selectivity (Brenner, 2004;Jones, 1997;Park, 2008;Wu, 2016) that privileges certain localities, actors and interests while neglecting others may trigger antagonisms (Newman, 2014) and increase the gap between discourses of legitimation and everyday pragmatics, and may lead to disappointment (Etherington & Jones, 2018), rendering broader societal consent highly fragile (Li & Wu, 2012;Zhang & He, 2021).It is in this politically contested terrain, where various discourses, strategies, policies, projects and practices associated with a certain state strategy are actively 'produced, negotiated, experienced, mobilised and governed' (Tomba, 2014, p. 19), that various power-laden strategies are needed to guide the realisation of state strategies and programmes of action.On the issue of state strategies in response to (perceptions of) disaffection and discontent, Jessop (2016, p. 11) maintains that 'beyond coercion, imperative coordination and positive law … the state can mobilise active consent or passive compliance from forces situated and/or operating beyond the state in its narrow juridicopolitical sense'.
In addressing the ways in which active consent is mobilised, several scholars have highlighted the power-laden arrangements of strategic alliance building, the topological unfolding of which takes place at a distance through rhetorical articulations of state discourses for legitimation.Allen (2016, p. 65) asserts that such rhetorical acts seek to 'win over hearts and minds' and take advantage of the power of seduction to persuade various actors to align their interests with those of the state.They exert 'quiet influence', as while the underlying relations of domination and control are deliberately masked, they work effectively to influence development agendas in ways that lead to the desired outcomes (Allen, 2016;Allen & Cochrane, 2010).This is often reinforced through certain values that 'would be hard to contest' and 'appear to be of obvious benefit to all' (Allen, 2016, p. 73) and through 'specific local practices … that are most relevant to people's interests and daily life' (Zhang & He, 2021, p. 1524).The acknowledgement of these acts brings out consensual arrangements, specifically the enrolment of a diverse set of actors, near and far, to the goals of the national (MacKinnon, 2021;McGuirk, 2004;Zhang & He, 2021) and the local (Allen & Cochrane, 2010;Davies et al., 2020;Etherington & Jones, 2018;Penny, 2017) state.
The fragility underpinning the achievement of consent through consensual arrangements (Allen, 2016), often drawing from the rivalry between actors and the incongruence of diverse interests, requires strategic reflection and working out the balance between different power-laden arrangements.After all, as McGuirk ( 2005) maintains, the (re)making of neoliberalism involves intricate strategies, which often constitute hybrid governance forms.These strategies involve coercive arrangements that rely on threats and constraints and are exercised bluntly to constrain other actors and institutions by restricting their access to opportunities, and rendering compliance their only viable option (Allen, 2016).According to Davies (2014a), these range from economic compulsions, including instances of disinvestment, crisis, and austerity (Chien, 2013;Davies et al., 2020;Hastings et al., 2017;Wu, 2018), to acts of administrative domination, through the hierarchical governance of institutions (Karaman, 2014;Tansel, 2019), urgent executive decrees (Fearn & Davoudi, 2021;Genç, 2022), bureaucratic impediments and financial penalties (Kuyucu, 2018;Penny, 2017).
In essence, considering such power-laden strategies to consent generation in response to (perceptions of) disaffection and discontent may offer an alternative view of how and when disaffection and grievances around state spatial strategies lead to political resentment.The following sections provide insights through a situated, contextsensitive, temporal examination of how these mechanisms play out in the case of Zonguldak.Such an analysis, we suggest, offers a means by which the stylistic generalisations that dominate prevailing accounts of the 'left behind' places phenomenon can be overcome while illuminating the complexities and contradictions underlying the varied reactions of different locations.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
The Zonguldak case study was carried out as part of a JPI Urban Europe/Era-Net Cofund project (3S RECIPE) on the policies and actions deployed in Europe's inner-peripheral places in response to the broader political and economic changes.The study was conducted between 2017 and 2019, and drew upon three different sources of data: (1) statistics pertaining to the locality's socio-economic development; (2) policy and planning documents conveying information about the applied agendas, strategies and programmes of action; and (3) primary qualitative data derived from a workshop (W); 1 from three dedicated focus group meetings that focused on economic development and finance (FGM 1), urban development (FGM 2) and liveability (FGM 3); and eight unstructured interviews (I) with senior representatives of the local government (LS) and locally assigned national government bodies (CS); officials from local government (LO) and locally assigned national government bodies (CO); and representatives of chambers, and professional and civic organisations (CC) (see Appendix A in the supplemental data online). 2The original study drawing upon this research identified a seemingly benevolent impulse to de-growth machine politics and reconceptualised it as a strategy of realignment involving the national, regional and local states (Özatağan & Eraydin, 2021).
For the present study, we first revisited the detailed and contextual information collected as part of the above research, providing us with an understanding of the ramifications for the local community of the broader politicaleconomic changes. 3We were also able to uncover the localised experiences of the state accumulation strategies and programmes of action, and the perceptions of local stakeholders towards them.Second, we analysed past local and national election results to understand the locality's political reactions, underscoring their links to the stakeholder narratives of the locality's political dynamics.Third, the original material was supported by a follow-up unstructured in-depth interview with a key respondent who had held multiple positions in the regional development agency, governorship, local government, city council and chamber of city planners.This interview was conducted in 2021 following the 2019 local elections and provided an understanding of the changing political dynamics, the underlying motivations and how the changes that followed the elections were received by the local population.The near two-year study gap since the local elections provided us with a nuanced understanding of the context, with minimal bias associated with the political and administrative turbulence that followed the change in local government and the effect of the pandemic, which hit the locality hard.
The investigation as a whole revealed the strong competition between the right-wing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi -AKP) and the centreleft Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi -CHP) in the local elections, contrasting the persistent dominance of the former in general elections since 2002 (Table 1), and a window on the twists and turns that characterised the political reactions of the locality, allowing a systematic exploration of their links to the localised experiences of the state strategies and the different modalities of power that guided their realisation.

NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATION, REGIONAL DECLINE AND THE POLITICAL RESENTMENT OF TURKEY'S EXTRACTIVE HEARTLAND
Once a rural mining town, Zonguldak was the keystone in Turkey's post-independence state-led industrialisation efforts.The nationalisation of coal mining and the establishment of the state-controlled Turkish Charcoal Enterprise (TTK) to support iron and steel manufacturing in the broader region not only bolstered coal production but also provided the locality with a privileged position in the national economy and politics.Coal mining constituted 'The economic base and social and cultural fabric of the locality … and [laid] the footprints of the locality's industrial heritage' (I-LO3), while 'The TTK provided life-long employment, pension guarantees, and housing dedicated to its workers, together with a range of social facilities.… It also provided employment opportunities for children.Those who graduated were assured jobs in the TTK' (FGM3-LS1).
These institutions, which linked the community to the then left-leaning CHP (I-LO3), have profoundly eroded following the neoliberal state restructuring enforced by the conservative centre-right Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi -ANAP) in 1980 (Boratav, 1988;Kazgan, 1985;Şenses, 2012).In particular, the downsizing of the TTK, along with the weakening of the labour union (Amele Birliği), placed the locality on a divergent path, disrupting its industrial identity, and triggering a sense of deliberate neglect.On this latter point, I-LO3 referred to the industrial action against plans to shutter all mines in the coal basin and the resistance of the local community, and said: 'In response to its support of the labour strike in the 1990s, the state penalised the locality simply by disinvestment [and] … disconnect[ing] its ties with Ankara.The city became a CHP stronghold in reaction to these acts.' The sense of political belonging implicated in this quote resonates in the narratives that positioned Zonguldak as a 'CHP fortress', although this has faded over time.The revolt revoked plans to terminate coal production in the basin yet instigated an ambiguous strategy where the phasing out of coal production continued through pit closures, privatisations and suspended investments (Şengül & Aytekin, 2011), but TTK's leverage in coal production along with the institutional links that connected the locality to national politics persisted.By 2000, coal production had declined to 2.4 million tonnes from its 8.5 million peak in 1975, along with employment, which dropped to 19,000 in 2000 from 42,000 in 1980 (TTK, 2018).Although the locality was identified as a 'lagging region' and earmarked for incentives (Dinçer & Özarslan, 2003), its contribution to national income dropped to and remained at less than 1% throughout the 2000s and the rising rates of unemployment, 4 and outmigration saw the population decline to 104,000 in 2000 from its 118,000 peak in 1985. 5The economic crises and political stalemate of the late 1990s further triggered a sense of disaffection and undermined the local trust in the mainstream political parties, including the CHP.Under such circumstances, the locality, along with many other politically and economically marginalised locations, was seduced by the promises of the populist right-wing AKP (Table 1), epitomising a redistribution crisis (Bayırbağ, 2013;cf. MacLeavy & Jones, 2021) and reflecting what Rodriguez-Pose (2018) dubbed the 'revenge of places that don't matter'.

AFTER BEING LEFT BEHIND: CHANGING STATE STRATEGIES AND POWER AT THE EXTRACTIVE HEARTLAND
The victory of the AKP in the general elections was a critical turning point in the formation of a new state accumulation strategy that would bring together a broad social base.This was achieved through a political commitment to the neoliberal regime of accumulation and the roll-out of an authoritarian populism model (Adaman & Akbulut, 2019;Akçay, 2018;Eraydin & Tasan-Kok, 2014;Tansel, 2019).The populist backbone of this model involved fostering economic growth and granting benefits, privileges, and concessions to the localities from which it received political support.Indeed, a range of strategically driven public investments followed in places that had long been at the margins of social and economic development (Luca, 2021;Luca & Rodriguez-Pose, 2015, 2019), materialised through the institutionalisation of a highly centralised state form (Kuyucu, 2017;Tansel, 2019).National state bodies were given extraordinary powers to selectively promote business interests (Özcan & Gündüz, 2015;Yeşilbağ, 2022) and mobilise resources (Atasoy, 2017;Kuyucu & Ünsal, 2010), and did so by aligning the regulations and legislation (Kayasü & Yetişkul, 2014;Savaşkan, 2021;Yeşilbağ, 2020) with policy priorities.

Rewarding political support: aligning different interests and enabling local development
Against this backdrop, the political support for the candidate of the ruling AKP in the local elections two years after the general elections signalled the beginning of the national government's 'reach into' the locality.Zonguldak was identified as spatially strategic in the state's accumulation strategies and a key node in a megaproject comprising ports, industrial regions and free-trade zones, as well as several transportation projects, including 'new highways and railway improvements' (FGM2-CO2) seeking to better 'connect the locality to the main industrial nodes, gateways and metropolitan areas of the country' (FGM2-CO1).The underpinning spatial selectivity privileged a series of peripheral towns in the region (ÇŞB, 2017a, 2017b) for accommodating 'the suggested land-use changes, and the [subsequent] housing demand' (FGM3-CO2).A series of executive decisions cleared the way for the required land expropriations and loosened and/or released environmental regulations assessments (Adaman & Akbulut, 2019;Erensü, 2017).Furthermore, in concert with the state's strategic interest in energy independence, the region saw the planning and implementation of several power plants, while in alignment with the state's construction-based growth strategy, a range of urban (re-)development projects were enacted in the locality to develop a residential real estate market (Özatağan & Eraydin, 2021).Such acts exemplify the power of the state in exercising its authority over localities by casting shared visions; orchestrating discourses, strategies, policies and projects; and mobilising stakeholders.Indeed, these grandiose projects provided the symbolic actions to narrate and manifest success (Tansel, 2019;Yeşilbağ, 2020Yeşilbağ, , 2022) ) and mobilised a coalition of business classes, local governments, and social groups in pursuit of the benefits of the (perceived) opportunities arising from the influx of capital and industries into the region, the vivified labour and property market, and improved living conditions (BAKKA, 2013).
Crucially, however, a series of controversies surrounded the transformation they brought about, which fed into senses of disaffection and discontent.First, as one of the participants highlighted, 'They are very expensive projects' (FGM3-LS1), and some have had dire consequences for the environment, public health and liveability.Indeed, local stakeholders noted that 'these projects … will result in high levels of industrial contamination, … and will inevitably exacerbate outmigration' (FGM3-CO2), and expressed their outrage at the 'ignor[ance of] the [resulting] ecological fatalities' (W-CC3).Second, while positioned as projects in the national interest, they culminated in grievances, being considered 'inimical to the will of local communities' (W-LS3).The study participants complained about 'the receding of societal needs in development processes' (W-CC1) and urged 'collective efforts to carry out projects for community welfare … [projects that] attend to public health, culture, and livelihood' (FGM3-CO1).Third, local stakeholders voiced their disaffection at the 'increased densities without [the] necessary investment in physical and social infrastructure' (FGM2-CO5), highlighting that the implemented projects actually 'worsened the quality of everyday living, caused distress, and fed into misery' (FGM2-CC1) and complaining that 'It is the local community who bears the brunt of the adversities' (W-CC2).
As can be understood from these narratives, the state accumulation strategy, and its aligned programmes of action in Zonguldak had a controversial resonance in the lived experiences of the local community, contributing to the erosion of broader consent.This sense of disaffection was reflected at the ballot box, with 'the [candidate of the ruling government losing] to the CHP candidate in the next ( 2009

Dynamics of rivalry: restraining local development and eroding future optimism
While the commitment to state spatial strategies endured in the years following the local election, the dynamics behind the rivalry between the national and the local state led to a change in the shape of the state's dominating presence in the locality.In particular, the locality was faced with brash acts of domination that hinged on the expanded powers of the national state.
The state powers wielded over the locality included controls over fiscal resources, which had already been eroded by the decline in mining production, resulting in a loss of tax revenues for the local government, and by the declining population which led also to a cut in revenues received from the national government (Özatağan & Eraydin, 2021).With the centralisation measures aimed at strengthening the power of the national state bodies over the designation of budget revenues to localities (Savaşkan, 2021), the local government saw the share of its own budget revenues drop from 54% in 2007 to as low as 36% in 2016.Moreover, 'cuts of up to 50% are incurred over budget revenues [designated by the national government] for overdue debts to various state bodies' (I-LS1).The accrued liabilities resulting from the budget deficits 'constrained [the local government's] capacity to apply for EU funds [or] to start putting into action projects approved for funding from BAKKA [the Regional Development Agency]' (I-LS1).Second, under the laws regulating the extraction of resources and the resulting condition of land ownership that typifies the locality, a range of state bodies retained the power to decide on permitted land uses on various sites, and thus control development in the locality.As I-LO1 specified: '80 percent of the land is owned by various national-level state bodiesthe TTK, the Treasury and the municipality', and the latter has 'sold [many of its] properties because of debts' (I-LS1).
Indeed, several of the participants highlighted the state-enacted regulations and national state bodies as stumbling blocks hindering the locality's development.
Positioning the TTK at the centre of these dynamics, one of the participants claimed that the 'TTK has turned into a burden on the locality' (FGM1-CC1), while another complained that 'we are the Municipality, but it is the TTK that owns the city' (FGM3-LS1).Several respondents gave their views on this issue, commenting that various initiatives that were crucial for the locality's development 'could not have been carried into the implementation stage' and stressing the 'inefficiencies, delays and deadlocks encountered because the property is owned by national state bodies, in particular the TTK and the Treasury' (FGM3-CS1).
Crucially, the national government reworked the powers of state bodies, including the TTK, to diversify the brash acts used for control and constraint.I-LO1, for instance, mentioned the disclosure of key information by the TTK: 'we (the local government) need information about the TTK's future extraction areas to inform our urban plans … because they present potential risks for settling in.However, the TTK … does not share them'.Furthermore, commenting on an industrial heritage project that was developed to protect an unused building owned by the TTK, I-CS1 noted that 'the TTK backed off' from its involvement in the project, while one participant stated that: 'A forthcoming law will urge the TTK transfer its properties to the Treasury' (FGM1-CO1), which is expected to restrict even further the implementation of local government projects.This is reminiscent of the obstacles noted by Kuyucu (2018) hindering urban regeneration in places governed by opposition parties, which include refusals by national state bodies to transfer property ownership to local governments and top-down alterations to or bypassing of municipal planning decisions related to regeneration areas, hindering the materialisation of locally grown projects, while ensuring the completion of controversial ones.
The range of tactics pursued included bureaucratic impedimentsone such example of which involved an attempt to: approach the Ministry to overcome the property problems that arose when bringing a recreation project to the implementation stage.The process is being prolonged due to the permissions required from different national-level institutions.The Ministry seemed supportive, but the decision is still pending … . (FGM3-LS1) The stakeholders also expressed grievances at the lack of consultations with the local government on decisions that would affect the locality.For example, when talking about improving the quality of life of the local community, some stakeholders stressed that doing so 'required the local government to act' (FGM3-CC3) but highlighted that '[the local government] is not consulted because of the conflicts that (might) arise' (FGM3-LS1).Crucially, several stakeholders expressed frustration at the constant state of tension between the local government and the national state bodies, which 'has prevented rallying together' (FGM3-CC3), and the 'conflicts of interests' (W-CC11) and 'calculations of potential votes' (I-CS2) affecting the (in)decision regarding the locality's development.
Such acts demonstrate the ability of the national state to control what is and what is not possible in a locality through its control over a range of national state bodies, and underpin the 'toll', recently underscored by Kuyucu (2018Kuyucu ( , p. 1168) ) 'for cities that are not favoured by the centre'.Crucially, these acts have gradually eroded future optimism (MacLeod & Jones, 2018), both with regards to the prospects for positive change and the capacity of the local government to alleviate the locality's enduring problems.However, as Allen (2016)  What the governor did was to introduce projects that responded to local sensibilities related to the locality's industrial past, cultural identity and quality of life, and that would, hence, hardly be contested (Allen, 2016;Zhang & He, 2021).Crucially, compelled by the pressures it faced and propelled by the prospect of infusing the projects it had developed into the new agenda to regain its lost legitimacy ahead of the local elections, the local government was drawn into the process.After all, the governorship had the financial resources that the municipality lacked to 'carry into implementation stage … the various industrial, cultural and historic heritage and conservation projects conceptually developed by the local government' (I-LO3).
This process hinged on the power of another state body, namely, the regional development agency, BAKKA, which channelled regional development funds into the financing of projects developed under this new agenda (cf.Varró, 2010).BAKKA was also able to influence decisions by providing 'a platform that would maintain uniformity and pave the way for partnerships … its management board being comprised of the most powerful agents of the Region' (I-CO1).Indeed, the emerging policy landscape was in stark contrast to the former, and was appreciated for its cordiality, although the following comment throws into sharp relief how BAKKA controlled the process to ensure compliance with national state strategies: 'We must comply with the national state vision … regarding the kinds of projects to which we will channel our resources' (I-CO1).
While anxiety prevailed, particularly with regards to the 'messiness and lack of strategic direction' (FGM1-CO1) and the 'ambiguity in the future orientation of the locality's development and identity' (FGM3-CC3), the 'seductive appeal' (Allen, 2016, p. 75) of the depictions of industrial heritage, culture and recreation, spoke to local sensibilities, brought feelings of excitement and hope, and served to draw in various local stakeholders, including those who had been most critical of past policies.Such 'subtle' acts of control and influence offer clear evidence of the state's power to exercise its authority over local actors through 'closer collaboration', 'negotiation' and 'persuasion' (p.70), the effectiveness of which became apparent in the municipal elections of 2019 when the CHP's eight-year governorship of the locality came to an end as the locality lent its support to the candidate of the ruling AKP.
So how, then, was this result interpreted?For some, the locality's turn to the ruling AKP was attributed to micro-level party politics: 'It was not the AKP who won, it was the CHP who lost' (I-CO2).For others, ideological alignments with the conservative right-wing values AKP represented would have been influential (Los et al., 2017;Kaufmann, 2016;Ulrich-Shad & Duncan, 2018).Still to be considered, however, would be the anticipations that the national state would better respond to the locality's needs.As lamented by one of the participants: 'We'd had enough of waiting.We've been waiting for 30 years' (W-CC21) while another stated, 'What we see [in this locality] is nothing but disaffection' (FGM3-CO2).Our evidence, along with these latter quotes, suggests that stuck amidst changing modes of state intervention and shifting modalities of power, the locality took a dim view of the existing situation, strategically reflected on the 'seductive invitations' of national state bodies sent shortly before the election, and supported the candidate of the ruling AKP with the hopeful prospect of a favourable state intervention.The changes that this political negotiation brought about in the locality resonate in the following quotation: 'Now, there is a flow of projects from the national state and its institutions.The city turned into a construction site.The Housing Development Agency, [for example], has projects everywhere in the city' (I-CO2).The respondent goes on to say, but with caution, that 'We are happy to see the execution of various projects that were previously pending or unlaunched, as long as they are not harmful to the locality, though.'

CONCLUSIONS
Taking a departure from aggregate accounts and causal explanations that dominate scholarship on left-behind places and geographies of discontent and instead adopting a historically rich, place-based approach, this paper has interrogated familiar conceptions that invariably position left-behind places as 'vengeful'.It has also offered an alternative reading that accounts for place-based dynamics (Bromley-Davenport et al., 2019;Nurse & Sykes, 2019;Telford & Wistow, 2020) and contextualises these within processes of neoliberalisation and state intervention (Jessop, 2018;MacLeavy & Jones, 2021;MacLeod & Jones, 2018;MacKinnon, 2021;Zhang & He, 2021), affording deeper consideration to the various power-laden strategies, including those that seek to win over hearts and minds, mask relations of domination and control, and exert quiet influence, and others that impose constraints and restrictions.'subtle' and 'brash' modalities of power and are responsive to disaffection and discontent.While the emergence of discontent exclusively from left-behind places has been called into question by emerging few studies (Koch, 2017;Surridge et al., 2021;Sykes, 2020), the close inspection of Zonguldak shows how the political twists and turns steered the reaction of the local community to legacies of neglect and dimmed hopes for future.Such political fluctuations are suggestive of a particularly fragile political terrain and should be taken more seriously, with deeper consideration afforded to when and how political resentment circumvents some left-behind places.Our analysis suggests that while being excluded from the benefits arising from specific regimes of accumulation and state intervention spurs disaffection and grievances, whether these amount to fullblown discontent or unwavering political resentment is contingent on the dynamic interaction that unfolds between place-based experiences of state strategies and the power-laden strategies enacted in response to (perceptions of) disaffection and discontent.
Such a reading offers a means of avoiding the takenfor-granted assumption that 'there is no impetus to alter the status quo' (Bromley-Davenport et al., 2019, p. 797) in the absence of political resentment, with the possibility that the impetus for change may still exist.This case study of Zonguldak has shown how the impetus for change is there and implicated in the twists and turns as the locality's political reactions evolve under a power-laden mechanism.As the research findings reveal, the arrangements behind this mechanism involve 'brash' arrangements that impose constraints on those pushing for local development, while others operate in more 'subtle' ways, involving actors and institutions within the locality in the shaping of agendas, and aligning different interests in ways that comply with the strategic visions of the state.In both cases, they shape the processes and outcomes of local development: either by allowing localities to benefit from state strategies, based on their political support, or by excluding them from such benefits, and constraining their development should they refuse.This, as we see, plays down, if not eradicates, the ability of places to transform and thrive and underscores the politics of left behindness.
One of the insights emerging from this research lies in the importance of conceiving discontent as a dynamic and context-sensitive phenomenon and advancing agential and processual conceptions of left behindness.Here, the value of deeper, historically grounded, place-based research lies in offering a means by which the variegated mechanisms that close down the space for novelty, experimentality and creativity can be illuminated, place-based approaches that are founded on repertoires of local action can be developed and imaginations of possible 'other' futures can be navigated.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The article was written during Özatağan's visiting fellowship at Newcastle University, Centre for Urban and Regional Research (CURDS), funded by the Council for at Risk Academics and the Institute of International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund (2021-2023).Earlier versions of the paper were presented at a CURDS internal seminar and at the 6th Global Conference on Economic Geography, 7-10 June 2022, Dublin, Ireland.We thank our colleagues who participated in these sessions for their thought-provoking questions and comments, including Danny MacKinnon, Andy Pike, Kean Fan Lim and Emma Ormerod.We also appreciate the careful reading and constructive comments of the three referees and the guest editors, from which the paper benefitted greatly.Any errors that remain lie entirely with the authors.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FUNDING
This study was supported by Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe [grant number 693443].

NOTES
1. Of the four workshops carried out, this paper draws on the qualitative data derived from the first workshop only.2. In compliance with the larger project's strict compliance with national and international ethical guidelines (approved by the main applicant), study participants were informed about the purpose, methods and possible uses of the research and asked to provide verbal consent before participating in the workshop, focus groups and interviews.Any information on the identity and the affiliation of the study participants has been anonymised and coded by ascribing a pseudonym to each participant that reflects the organisation they represent and their position in the institution.3. The quotations presented in this paper have not been previously published.4. The locality ranked 86th among 872 settlements in the country in terms of socio-economic development.Unemployment rose to 9.13% in 2004, slightly below national average (10.8%),placing it 167th in rank out of 872 settlements in the country (Dinçer & Özarslan, 2004). 5. Authors' own calculation based on data from www. tuik.gov.tr

Table 1 .
Election results (%) forZonguldak, 2002-19.a Note: a Figures are for the central district of the province of Zonguldak.Results for 2015 represent November re-elections.June election results are 42.70% for the CHP (Republican People's Party) and 32.50% for the AKP (Justice and Development Party).Figures shown in bold highlight the governing political party.Source: www.tuik.gov.trPolitical twists and turns in left-behind places: reactions of an extractive heartland to changing state strategies 1255 stresses, the effectiveness of such 'calculated interventions' can only be known 'in practice'.In the case of Zonguldak, they failed to secure Political twists and turns in left-behind places: reactions of an extractive heartland to changing state strategies 1257 REGIONAL STUDIES political support for the ruling AKP in the 2014 local elections, and its candidate duly lost again to the main opposition CHP.These circumstances required paying due attention to the failures of past acts ahead of the 2019 local elections and amounted to a trial of a new strategy.
These strategies constitute what Allen (2016) and Allen and Cochrane (2010) conceptualise as