Author Archives: Joost Jongerden

Seeds of Sovereignty: Urban Agriculture and Agroecology in Cuba

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Levin Dalpiaz*

I’m writing this from the campus of the Agrarian University of Havana (UNAH), surrounded by students and researchers who move through their work with the practiced resilience of those for whom scarcity is part of daily life. Sitting in the dim light after a blackout, I reflect on these first weeks of fieldwork for my master’s thesis in international development studies. My research deals with the transformation of Cuba’s food system, focusing on urban agriculture in Havana, and how farmers’ experiences of belonging, dignity, and political agency influence their attachments to land.

Getting to campus yesterday morning wasn’t easy. I was confronted with suspended bus lines due to fuel shortages. Without the incredibly kind and creative support of my Cuban supervisors, I would not have made it—like many other students and researchers who had to stay home. The most striking thing is not the absence of electricity and other basic needs (water, gas, and fuel), but the presence of a stubborn, collective conviction that life continues, that work matters, and that another world is possible even in the grip of engineered crisis. Tomorrow, electricity will likely return for a few hours. People will charge their devices, fill up their water tanks, do their work, and prepare for the next blackout. It is a rhythm learned and adapted to.

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Environmental Politics in North and East Syria/Rojava: A Scoping and Conceptual Literature Review

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The first article edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden  for the special issue “Rural Protest and Contentious Politics: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure in Kurdistan” is now online. The article, titled “Environmental Politics in North and East Syria/Rojava: A Scoping and Conceptual Literature Review,” is written by Pinar Dinc, Maria Andrea Nardi, and Mo Hamza. It offers a scoping and conceptual review of English-language academic research on environmental politics in North and East Syria/Rojava, synthesizing scholarship on the relationship between armed conflict and environmental change in the region. The review focuses in particular on the Kurdish-led socio-political model of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

The study is guided by two main questions: what knowledge has been produced about the role of the environment in AANES politics, and what theoretical advances have emerged within environmental politics in relation to this case. Using a scoping and conceptual review methodology, the authors identify key themes including ecological sustainability, gender equality, and direct democracy. They highlight both the challenges and the opportunities AANES faces in pursuing ecological policies amid ongoing conflict and broader geopolitical pressures.

Overall, the findings underscore the value of interdisciplinary approaches and point to the need for further research on ecological democracy, environmental justice, and peace ecology. The review concludes by emphasizing the importance of radical democratic commitments and ecological consciousness for advancing peace and justice in conflict-affected settings.

Read more:  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.70005?utm_source=researchgate.net&utm_medium=article

Why EU Policymakers Should Not Rely on the Farmers’ Horizon Ipsos Report

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Kees Jansen*

The Ipsos market study “Farmers’ Horizon: One Year After Farmers’ Protests” (2025) aims to capture “the pulse of the farmers population and address the current situation” following a period of farmers’ protest in different EU countries. The study seeks to determine whether farmers perceive any change in their financial situation one year after the protests, whether they are satisfied with the measures adopted by the European Union (EU) and national authorities, and what further actions might be undertaken to support EU farmers in coping with ongoing challenges. After a careful initial reading of the report, I conclude that the study is flawed in several fundamental aspects. Although it gives the impression of scientific rigor, methodological robustness, and representativeness, each of these aspects is, in fact, problematic.

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Agriculture in Rojava and the Making of a Decolonial Future

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How a grassroots revolution in northern Syria is redefining democracy, ecology, and decolonization from the ground up. An blog-post/article by Joost Jongerden and Necmettin Türk

When the Syrian civil war fractured the authority of the central state, a new kind of revolution took root in the country’s north. In the Kurdish-majority regions known as Rojava, communities seized the opportunity not to build a new state, but to build a new society based on self-administration. Much of the existing scholarship on Rojava has focused on this network of self-organized communes and regions, particularly in relation to questions of recognition, namely the development of a governance model that is inclusive of various cultural, ethnic, and religious communities. Yet far less attention has been paid to the decolonization of Rojava’s agrarian economy—a transformation that is equally fundamental to the region’s broader project of liberation.

read more here: https://theamargi.com/posts/agriculture-in-rojava-and-the-making-of-a-decolonial-future

Constructing Ties: How Security Narratives Led to the Defunding of UAWC in Occupied Palestinian Territories

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The thesis “Unpacking the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Decision to Stop Funding UAWC” examines how security narratives led the Netherlands to end its funding in 2022 for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). For many years, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had supported this Palestinian NGO, which worked to improve the livelihoods of Palestinian farmers, particularly in Area C — the part of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli military control. The research into the reasons behind the decision to defund UAWC is based on documents obtained through the Dutch Transparency Act (Wet Open Overheid, or WOO), comprising more than 1,100 pages of written communications.

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