At 4:17 on Monday morning, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey near the Syrian border. Hours later, another enormous earthquake measuring 7.5 struck further north. Entire neighbourhoods collapsed across cities including Antakya, Kahramanmaraş, Adıyaman and Gaziantep, while northern Syria suffered catastrophic destruction of its own. By tonight, more than 33,000 people have been confirmed dead across Turkey and Syria, and that figure continues rising as rescuers search through thousands of destroyed buildings.
No government caused the tectonic plates beneath Anatolia to move. Turkey lies in one of the world’s most seismically active regions, where several major fault systems interact. Earthquakes are unavoidable consequences of geology.
The scale of human destruction is not determined by geology alone.
This distinction matters because the phrase “natural disaster” can hide political responsibility. An earthquake is natural. Whether an apartment building remains standing during it depends partly on engineering, construction materials, building codes, enforcement, land use and corruption. Whether trapped residents survive depends partly on roads, communications, emergency planning, rescue equipment and the speed with which the state can mobilise resources.
The hazard is natural.
Vulnerability is partly constructed.
That does not mean every collapsed building represents government negligence. Monday’s earthquakes were extraordinarily powerful and affected an enormous geographical area. Even well-designed infrastructure can fail during extreme seismic events, and the second major earthquake compounded damage before emergency systems had recovered from the first. Winter weather, damaged roads and airports, aftershocks and the sheer scale of destruction have made rescue exceptionally difficult.
Those constraints need to be recognised before turning tragedy into an easy political accusation.
But recognising an extreme hazard does not eliminate the responsibility to prepare for it.
Turkey has known for decades that catastrophic earthquakes are possible. The 1999 İzmit earthquake, which killed more than 17,000 people, produced extensive debate about weak construction, inadequate regulation and government preparedness. Building standards were subsequently strengthened, and Turkey introduced measures intended to improve seismic resilience.
That history changes the accountability question.
A completely unforeseeable disaster tests improvisation.
A foreseeable disaster tests preparation.
Earthquakes cannot be predicted precisely enough to evacuate cities days in advance. Their general geographical risk can be mapped.
That means governments cannot control when the hazard arrives, but they can influence what the hazard finds when it arrives.
This is where state capacity becomes physical.
We often discuss state capacity abstractly through tax collection, bureaucracy or institutional quality. An earthquake makes it visible in concrete and steel.
Did the building inspector actually inspect the building?
Was the contractor required to follow the seismic code?
Were lower-quality materials substituted?
Were illegal modifications ignored?
Did political connections protect developers from enforcement?
Were emergency assembly areas preserved?
Could rescue teams reach affected neighbourhoods?
Was specialised equipment available?
These questions sound administrative compared with presidential elections or constitutional crises.
They determine whether people survive.
This is why bureaucracy should not be treated as synonymous with pointless paperwork. Good bureaucracy converts collective knowledge into predictable behaviour.
Engineers know how to make buildings substantially more resistant to earthquakes. A building code converts that engineering knowledge into a legal requirement. Inspectors verify compliance. Courts and regulators create consequences for violations.
The chain is only as strong as its weakest institutional link.
A perfect building code enforced badly is not a perfect building code.
This is the difference between de jure institutions and de facto institutions.
On paper, a state can possess sophisticated regulation.
In practice, enforcement determines whether the regulation exists in citizens’ lives.
This applies far beyond construction. A country can have excellent environmental law and polluted rivers, strong anti-corruption statutes and widespread bribery, constitutional rights and arbitrary detention.
Rules do not implement themselves.
Institutions require capacity.
Turkey’s construction sector deserves particular scrutiny because building has played an important role in the country’s economic development during Erdoğan’s two decades in power. Large infrastructure projects, housing expansion and urban redevelopment have transformed Turkish cities.
Construction generates growth quickly because it creates employment, investment and visible assets. Governments can point towards roads, bridges, airports and apartment blocks as tangible evidence of development.
The political incentives are therefore powerful.
The costs of weak construction quality can remain invisible for years.
A poorly reinforced building looks almost identical to a properly reinforced building on an ordinary Tuesday.
The difference appears during an earthquake.
This creates an information asymmetry between builders and residents. A property buyer can observe the size of an apartment, location, kitchen and price. They may be unable to determine whether concrete quality, reinforcement and structural design meet seismic standards.
That is precisely where regulation has an economic justification.
Markets work poorly when sellers know substantially more about hidden safety characteristics than buyers.
Building inspections reduce the information asymmetry.
If inspection becomes corrupt or politically compromised, the market cannot correct the problem easily because consumers may discover the true quality only when the building fails.
By then, the cost is irreversible.
Disaster regulation therefore has to operate before citizens know they need it.
This creates another political problem: prevention competes badly for attention.
A government spending money strengthening buildings can receive little visible credit because the benefit is an event that does not happen.
If an earthquake strikes and the building remains standing, nobody sees the deaths that were prevented.
Politicians generally receive greater electoral rewards for opening a new bridge than reinforcing an old apartment block.
That creates systematic incentives to underinvest in resilience.
The same mechanism appeared during Pakistan’s floods last year.
Flood defences are expensive until the flood arrives.
Pandemic stockpiles look wasteful until the pandemic arrives.
Military deterrence looks expensive until deterrence fails.
Resilience has an unusual political economy because its returns are probabilistic and often invisible.
Strong institutions need to compensate for the electoral bias towards visible short-term benefits.
Turkey’s construction amnesties have consequently become an important part of the debate this week. Over the years, Turkish governments have periodically allowed owners of buildings constructed or modified without full compliance with regulations to obtain legal status through amnesty programmes.
The political attraction is understandable. Millions of buildings can contain irregularities. Strictly enforcing every violation could displace residents, destroy household wealth and create enormous political backlash.
An amnesty converts illegality into legal certainty.
It can also create moral hazard.
If developers and owners expect that violations will eventually be legalised, the expected cost of violating building rules falls.
The government says: follow the code.
Past experience says: perhaps there will eventually be an amnesty.
Rational actors respond to the second signal too.
This is how well-intentioned political pragmatism can undermine long-term regulation.
An amnesty solves yesterday’s enforcement problem while potentially creating tomorrow’s incentive problem.
The eventual cost appears only when the underlying safety requirement was protecting citizens against a low-frequency catastrophe.
This does not establish that buildings legalised through amnesties caused the majority of deaths this week. That requires building-level investigation and engineering evidence.
The institutional incentive deserves examination regardless.
Good disaster policy requires governments to make credible commitments that safety standards will actually be enforced.
Credibility again becomes a political resource.
If rules are repeatedly waived, future rules become less effective even before anyone violates them.
The rescue response creates another accountability question. Survivors and opposition politicians have criticised delays in reaching some devastated communities, while Erdoğan has acknowledged shortcomings but emphasised the unprecedented geographical scale of the disaster.
Both considerations can be true.
An enormous earthquake can overwhelm even a competent state.
A state can still perform worse than its capabilities should permit.
The relevant standard cannot be perfection.
It should be counterfactual performance.
Given Turkey’s income, institutions, military, disaster-management agencies and prior earthquake experience, how quickly should the state reasonably have been able to respond?
That is harder to answer than simply counting rescue teams.
It requires comparing capacity with the scale of the shock.
This is where political accountability becomes difficult immediately after disaster. Citizens are grieving and rescuers are still searching for survivors. Aggressive partisan argument can appear exploitative.
Yet postponing every question until the emergency ends can allow evidence to disappear and political attention to move elsewhere.
There needs to be a distinction between operational response and accountability.
During rescue, government and opposition should cooperate where cooperation saves lives.
After and alongside rescue, institutions should preserve evidence and investigate failures.
Unity should not mean immunity.
Turkey’s upcoming election makes that distinction especially important. Erdoğan faces one of the most consequential electoral tests of his career this year amid extremely high inflation, economic dissatisfaction and now a catastrophic earthquake.
The government therefore possesses obvious political incentives to emphasise the unprecedented scale of the natural disaster.
Opposition parties possess obvious incentives to emphasise regulatory and emergency-response failures.
Neither incentive proves either argument wrong.
It tells us to demand evidence.
Political motivation should affect how carefully we evaluate a claim, not whether we automatically reject it.
This is an increasingly important rule in polarised politics.
Partisans can tell the truth for partisan reasons.
Governments can provide accurate information while trying to protect themselves.
Opposition parties can identify genuine failures while trying to win an election.
Motive and accuracy are separate variables.
The Syrian side of the disaster reveals another political dimension: state fragmentation magnifies natural hazards.
Northern Syria has been devastated by more than a decade of civil war. Some affected areas are controlled by the Syrian government, while others remain under opposition control. Infrastructure has already been damaged, millions of people have been displaced and humanitarian organisations operate across complicated front lines and border arrangements.
The same earthquake therefore encounters radically different institutional environments on opposite sides of the border.
In Turkey, the central problem is whether a functioning state prepared and responded adequately.
In parts of Syria, the problem is that years of war have destroyed or fragmented many of the institutions required for preparation and response in the first place.
This is what conflict does to resilience.
War does not only kill people directly.
It destroys hospitals that would treat future earthquake victims.
It damages roads needed by future rescue teams.
It displaces engineers and doctors.
It weakens local administration.
It makes tomorrow’s unrelated disaster deadlier.
The costs of war therefore persist through institutional degradation long after individual battles end.
International politics complicates Syrian relief further. Bashar al-Assad’s government remains under extensive Western sanctions because of its conduct during the civil war. Humanitarian exemptions exist, but sanctions, political isolation and the division of territory can complicate financial transfers, logistics and aid coordination.
Opposition-held areas face their own access problems.
This creates a moral dilemma familiar from Afghanistan.
How do outside governments provide assistance to civilians without strengthening political authorities whose behaviour they oppose?
Humanitarian crises make political isolation difficult because governments control territory containing people who need help.
Refusing cooperation can punish civilians.
Unconditional cooperation can strengthen regimes.
There is rarely a clean solution.
Humanitarian policy therefore requires separating people from governments as much as practical conditions permit.
Syrian civilians should not receive less earthquake assistance because of who controls the territory where their home happened to collapse.
The earthquake did not ask which side of the civil war they supported.
Disasters reveal the artificiality of some political boundaries because physical systems ignore them.
Fault lines do not stop at borders.
Floodwaters do not check passports.
Viruses do not recognise sovereignty.
Climate change does not respect national emissions inventories.
Governments remain nationally organised while many of the threats they manage are transnational.
That mismatch creates recurring coordination problems.
Turkey and Syria need international rescue assistance this week not because sovereignty has failed as a principle, but because catastrophe can exceed the capacity of any one state.
International cooperation acts as capacity insurance.
Countries maintain their own emergency systems for ordinary shocks and rely on outside assistance when the shock exceeds domestic capacity.
This is another reason diplomatic relationships matter before crises.
A government cannot construct international trust overnight after the earthquake happens.
Networks of cooperation, aid agencies and logistical agreements need to exist already.
Again, resilience is built during periods when nothing dramatic is happening.
The Turkish case also complicates the relationship between authoritarian tendencies and state capacity. Erdoğan has centralised political authority significantly over his two decades in power, particularly after Turkey moved from a parliamentary to presidential system.
Centralisation can increase decisiveness.
A government with fewer veto points can mobilise resources rapidly.
It can also weaken independent oversight and local autonomy.
Whether centralisation improves disaster response therefore depends on what problem dominates.
If the problem is coordination, centralisation may help.
If the problem is information, accountability or local adaptation, excessive centralisation may hurt.
This is the same trade-off visible in China’s COVID response.
Strong central authority can implement enormous programmes quickly.
The system can struggle when local officials fear reporting failure or when national policy becomes too rigid for different local conditions.
State capacity and democracy therefore should not be treated as simple opposites.
Authoritarian governments can possess enormous administrative capacity.
Democracies can possess weak states.
The stronger relationship may run through accountability and learning.
Can institutions identify failures?
Can experts contradict political leaders?
Can local officials report bad news?
Can citizens expose corruption?
Can governments update policy?
These mechanisms determine whether capacity improves over time.
Turkey’s earthquake will test all of them.
The government can arrest contractors responsible for unsafe buildings, and there may be strong grounds for doing so where evidence establishes criminal negligence.
But accountability should not stop with the lowest visible actor.
A contractor operates inside a regulatory system.
Who approved the building?
Who inspected it?
Were regulations enforced?
Were political pressures applied?
Did amnesties legalise violations?
Were local authorities adequately resourced?
Systemic failures require systemic investigation.
Otherwise individual prosecutions can become a way of protecting institutions from scrutiny.
This is another recurring political pattern.
After catastrophe, governments search for identifiable villains because individuals are easier to punish than structures are to reform.
Sometimes individuals genuinely deserve punishment.
The question is whether removing them changes the incentives that produced the failure.
If not, accountability becomes symbolic.
The next contractor faces the same system.
The next building faces the same earthquake.
This is why disaster inquiries matter.
They convert tragedy into institutional memory.
A society that investigates failure can change building codes, procurement rules, emergency plans and enforcement structures.
A society that treats the disaster as exceptional fate returns to the same vulnerability.
Turkey already experienced a catastrophic warning in 1999.
That makes the coming investigation particularly important.
If the country implemented the lessons successfully, the scale of Monday’s earthquakes may simply have exceeded reasonable preparation.
If known weaknesses persisted for twenty-four years, the political judgement becomes much harsher.
As of tonight, it is too early to know the complete answer.
That uncertainty should remain.
Thousands of buildings need engineering assessment.
The rescue operation continues.
The death toll continues rising.
Evidence about construction and enforcement will emerge slowly.
What can already be rejected is the idea that because governments cannot prevent earthquakes, government policy is irrelevant to earthquake deaths.
The same reasoning would make governments irrelevant to pandemics because they cannot prevent viruses from existing.
Public institutions exist partly to manage risks citizens cannot manage individually.
Earthquake resilience is a collective-action problem.
One apartment owner cannot inspect the structural integrity of every building they enter.
One family cannot maintain a national emergency-response system.
One municipality cannot coordinate international rescue teams.
The state exists because some risks require collective capacity.
That creates responsibility.
Not responsibility for moving the tectonic plates.
Responsibility for everything society reasonably knew should happen before they moved.
This may be the most useful way to distinguish tragedy from governance.
Some suffering is genuinely unavoidable.
Political accountability concerns the distance between the suffering that occurred and the suffering that had to occur.
Turkey cannot eliminate earthquakes.
It can enforce building standards.
It can regulate construction.
It can train rescuers.
It can maintain emergency infrastructure.
It can investigate corruption.
It can learn.
Those actions will never stop the ground from moving.
Their success is measured by how much less moves with it.
