Reframing Post‐Normal Accidents: Unpacking Variegated Neoliberalism in a Local Labor Regime

ABSTRACT This article reframes Post‐Normal Accident (Post‐NA) theory through the empirical case of Zonguldak by grounding it in labor‐regime analysis and extending its dialogue with variegated neoliberalism and cultural political economy. Drawing on comprehensive fieldwork and historical reconstruction, it argues that accidents are not aberrant events but historically embedded and continually reproduced outcomes of a variegated neoliberal labor regime that fuses externalization, financialization, and deregulation into a normalized logic of disposability. Empirical evidence shows how state‐owned, legal, and illegal mines articulate distinct modalities of neglect: from procedural formalism and subcontracted risk to fully unregulated extraction. Narratives of geology and standardization, alongside ambivalent idioms of fate, help render these failures intelligible and defensible, consolidating a “letting‐die” rationality that normalizes preventable harm as a routine feature of extraction. In doing so, the article extends Post‐NA theory toward a spatially grounded analysis of how systemic failures take shape within uneven labor regimes.