This new article by Francis O’ Connor,   Adnan Çelik, Ayhan Işık, and Joost Jongerden examines the Turkish state’s Village Guard system, revived in the 1980s as part of its counterinsurgency strategy against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). While often framed as a defensive militia, the Village Guards became central to the state’s exceptional governance in Kurdistan, both facilitating military control and enabling significant socio-economic and demographic transformation. Drawing on scholarship on paramilitarism and fieldwork in the village of İslamköy, the article offers a relational perspective that understands the Village Guards not merely as instruments of state violence, but as active political actors who reshaped local power dynamics, gained access to land and resources and reconfigured rural livelihoods. It argues that paramilitary mobilisation in Kurdistan reflects complex, locally embedded power relations rather than tribalism or state repression alone.

See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.70015

In 2018, I was researching the revitalization of agriculture in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The violence wrought by forced collectivization and urbanization under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime had left the agricultural sector in disarray since the 1980s. After winning de facto autonomy in 1991, the partyfamilies ruling Iraqi Kurdistan often spoke of the region’s fertile, water-rich land as a source of promise; in practice, the sector was largely neglected. In many seasons, farmers abandoned their produce to rot in the fields, unable to compete with cheap imports from Iran and Turkey flooding the local markets. Meanwhile, the ruling party-families showed little genuine interest in agricultural renewal. I vividly recall one meeting in 2018 when a senior official casually mentioned the possibility of making the land attractive for lease to investors interested in growing potatoes for export to markets in the Emirates. I was stunned. Only after reading Andrew Ofstehage’s Welcome to Soylandia did I begin to fully grasp the underlying logic: investors are drawn to farmland where they can grow their capital without forming long-term attachments to the land or the farmers who manage it.

Read more: https://authorservices.wiley.com/api/pdf/fullArticle/100356915