Author Archives: Joost Jongerden

Best paper award Jan Douwe van der Ploeg: Rural studies: A new paradigm that integrates previously separated disciplines

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The International Scientific Committee of the REA – Italian Review of Agricultural Economics has awarded the REA Best Paper Award 2024 to Jan Douwe van der Ploeg for his article “Rural Studies: A New Paradigm that Integrates Previously Separated Disciplines”, published in Volume 79 (2024). In this article, Van der Ploeg argues that in reaction to a neo-classical approach, neo-institutional economics (NIE) and rural sociology (RS) equips rural studies with powerful tools to identify and analyse the institutions shaping farming communities.

The abstract of the article writes: “Rural studies are the theoretically informed and empirically grounded integration of disciplines that, until recently, were widely separated. This separation came with different grammars, mutually contrasting problem definitions and different methodological instruments that together resulted in a scattered understanding of countryside, farming, and the processing and distribution of food. The article discusses the main features of rural studies and especially explores the theoretical, institutional and historical backgrounds of these features. It argues that the specificity of agriculture strongly impacts its study and theoretical representation – as much as the resulting theories contribute to shaping the unfolding of agricultural activities over time.”

The full article is available here: https://edepot.wur.nl/687357

Field Notes: On the way

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Today, I’m on my way with a friend to visit an agroecological farm started a few years ago by a group of purged academics—scholars dismissed from their university positions during Turkey’s 2016 political crackdown. Once part of the local university, they turned to cultivating a few acres of land just outside the city. The farm still survives, though not without struggle.

As we bumped along the road toward the fields, our conversation drifted across dozens of topics—including the use of pesticides. Then suddenly, my friend turned to me and asked, “Have you heard of the ‘Black Wounds’—Birîna Reş?”

I hadn’t.

It was the early years of the Cold War. Turkey had been included in the U.S. Marshall Aid plan—not for post-war reconstruction, but for building a strategic alignment near the border with the Soviet Union. Alongside shipments of powdered milk and food came military bases. And toward the end of the 1950s, a shipment of wheat seeds treated with pesticide arrived in Turkey. The government distributed these seeds for free to landowners affiliated with the ruling party. But instead of planting them, many landowners sold the wheat cheaply on the open market. Easy money.

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New publication: Contesting an exclusive citizenship regime: the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its electoral mobilisation in Batman in the late 1970’s

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Joost Jongerden and Francis O’Connor have been working on spatial (rural) dimensions of political mobilisation and violence. In this article, they look into the politics of the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) through its engagement in municipal politics in the late 1970s in Batman, then a rural town in the Kurdistan region in Turkey, which rapidly industrialised after the local discovery of oil. Using a citizenship analytical lens, this article makes two substantial contributions. The article challenges overly simplistic, linear narratives regarding the PKK’s origins and its eventual embrace of violence. By analysing the PKK’s electoral and representational politics in the late 1970s, it emphasises the political dynamics of that period rather than reinterpreting its emergence solely through the later insurgency. Empirically, the article illustrates how the Kurdish political movement’s pursuit of representation directly challenged the ethnically exclusionary citizenship regime of the Turkish state.

The article is published open access in Third World Quarterly.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2025.2518501?src=exp-la#abstract

Opinie: Universiteiten, jullie beperken ook zelf de academische vrijheid

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De academische vrijheid staat onder grote druk in Nederland. Een recent KNAW-rapport is niet mild: Nederland zit op een glijdende schaal en doet het steeds slechter in Europa. Omdat academische vrijheid het fundament is van een goed functionerende academische sector, is het belangrijk dat universiteitsrectoren aangeven zich zorgen te maken over de bedreiging van de academische vrijheid in Nederland en een dialoog willen starten.

Als onderdeel van deze dialoog is het echter cruciaal dat rectoren en universiteiten ook naar hun eigen praktijken kijken die academische vrijheid steeds meer beperken. Dat dit niet naar voren komt in de verklaring is meer dan een gemiste kans.

Lees het volledige artikel hier: https://www.trouw.nl/opinie/opinie-universiteiten-jullie-beperken-ook-zelf-de-academische-vrijheid~b5cbf3d5/

A Place to Transit: The seasonal migrant workers of Huelva’s strawberry industry

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A new article by Merissa Gavin and Joost Jongerden explores the lived experiences of seasonal migrant workers in Lepe, who play an essential yet precarious role in the agri-food industry of southern Spain. By examining their experiences and actions through a temporal lens, this research offers deeper insights into the dynamics that sustain migrant vulnerability and the individualized strategies they employ to navigate these challenges.

Embodying the paradox of being essential yet unprotected, undocumented migrant agri-workers navigate a terrain of precarious in-betweenness. Policy-making affords little urgency to addressing their routine exploitation or facilitating dignified solutions for their working and living conditions. Focusing on seasonal migrant workers in the strawberry fields of Lepe (Huelva, Spain), this article examines how temporality structures endurance, agency, and vulnerability.

Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews—this study reveals how workers endure exploitation in expectation of future documentation through arraigo policies. However, the temporal horizon of arraigo not only sustains individual endurance but also dampens collective resistance, rendering precarity a structured condition rather than a momentary hardship. Because arraigo systematically encourages endurance over resistance, precarity becomes a long-term structural reality, with temporality actively shaping workers’ vulnerabilities. This process individualises what is essentially a shared struggle, further sedating collective action and reinforcing exploitation. While migrants in Lepe internalise temporality as a survival strategy, disruptions—such as withheld contracts—demonstrate the limits of endurance and trigger resistance.

This study advances scholarship on migrant precarity by shifting the focus from spatial or economic dimensions to the performative construction of sequential time as a mechanism that both sustains and constrains migrant agency. In highlighting how European agricultural policies prioritise productivity while obscuring labour exploitation, these findings underscore the need for interventions addressing both the legal limbo of undocumented workers and the temporal structures that sustain their vulnerability.

Read the full article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718525000661