This article by Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is written for the special issue Rural Protest and Contentious Politics edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden. It explores the meanings of refugeeness among Kurdish residents of the self-managed Lavrio refugee camp in Greece in the aftermath of the 2015 reception crisis. Focusing on how Kurdish camp residents make sense of their political identities and on how they distinguish themselves from those they call ‘non-political refugees’, the article (a) shows how the 2015 reception crisis triggered a broader ideological shift from a ‘refugee’ to a ‘migrant’ crisis, producing the figure of the undeserving migrant; and (b) argues that Kurdish camp residents reclaim their refugeeness as a permanent political condition rooted in collective memory and the Cold War archetype of the persecuted political refugee. Doing so, they mobilize refugeeness as a political resource to distinguish themselves from the depoliticized ‘2015 refugee’, secure the legitimacy of their presence and assert their right to remain amid the threat of eviction from the Lavrio camp.

Read more here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.70050 

The article by Ayşegül Aslan for the special issue ‘Rural Protest and Contentious Politics: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure in Kurdistan’ edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden has been published.

The article examines the kinopolitical dimensions of Kurdish seasonal agricultural labour mobility in South-eastern Turkey and extends across various agricultural areas. Focusing on rural transformation and climate change. Using Nail’s (2015) kinopolitical framework, the article argues that labour mobility represents a structural circulation within an unstable agrarian regime rather than mere economic migration. For Kurdish workers, this motion functions as an enforced flow, driven by structural shifts that limit agency and reinforce precarious conditions. The study synthesises extensive secondary data sources, reinterpreting existing reporting through a kinopolitical lens to reveal systemic displacement patterns within traditional migration statistics. This approach identifies these workers as mobile subjects within broader struggles, clarifying their socio-environmental vulnerabilities. In Turkish regions with chronic infrastructural neglect, climatic pressures act as structural multipliers of vulnerability. Movement emerges through the convergence of ecological instability and institutionalised dispossession, making labour circulation a functional necessity for agrarian accumulation. The research emphasises vulnerabilities resulting from the intersection of environmental crises and systemic socio-political forces, including restrictive labour policies. Focusing on kinopolitical dynamics, this study highlights the ecological and structural factors contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers. Consequently, labour circulation serves as a stabilised circuit for cheap labour supply, driven by the inescapable intersection of environmental crises and structural inequality in Turkey’s destabilised agrarian environment.

See https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.70045Digital Object Identifier (DOI)