Category Archives: Anniversary Program

The Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University will celebrate its 75th Anniversary on the 13th of May 2022. Join our event entitled “Rural Sociology: past, present and future” and reflect upon the past and present of rural sociology and discuss its future challenges.

75th Anniversary: 52) The Politics of Youth Activism in the Kurdish Movement: A research agenda

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Sardar Saadi*

In the 1990s, during the peak of the war between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Turkish army forcefully evacuated thousands of rural settlements in the Kurdish region of Turkey and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurdish villagers to the cities (Jongerden 2007). The influx of these displaced villagers dramatically increased the population of the Kurdish cities, which were already suffering from poverty, unemployment, and the lack of urban infrastructures, and brought scores of socioeconomic challenges with itself. The newly settled rural migrants found themselves as the “other” in the cities, and they were regarded as undesired subjects and an “inconvenience” for the cities (Jongerden 2022). Children of these families became youth in impoverished neighborhoods where they had resettled, and their subjectivity was shaped by both a history of violence that their displaced families had been through (Neyzi and Darici 2015) as well as their everyday struggle to survive in cities that were increasingly alien to them. Within such an environment they became politicized, but their presence particularly became visible after the 2015-2016 urban armed clashes. Starting in August 2015 and after the violent termination of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK, many neighborhoods and districts of cities in the Kurdish region of Turkey declared autonomy. The Kurdish youth, mostly from displaced rural migrant families, took up arms and built barricades in their neighborhoods. The Turkish state’s response against this move that was later called the “self-government resistance” was brutal and devastating. A massive wave of state violence caused destruction of cities in the Kurdish region, death of hundreds, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (OHCHR 2017).

I have a sustained interest in Kurdistan and the Kurdish self-determination movement. As a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, I have been excited to develop a postdoctoral project that builds on the insights of my doctoral dissertation. My postdoctoral research investigates the politics of youth in the Kurdish struggle for self-determination in Turkey by looking at dynamics of mobilization that include or may exclude young people in the spheres of civil society and legal political activism. My research explores how the terrain of civil society has been developed in the Kurdish region under the influence of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, and what the main actors in shaping this terrain are. In the last two decades, the Kurdish self-determination movement in Turkey has undergone a social and political transformation that shifted the geography of the struggle from rural areas to cities. This shift brought the struggle to urban spheres of civil society, municipal governance, and legal parliamentary politics (Akkaya and Jongerden 2012). I examine dynamics and contradictions in the Kurdish movement in the areas of legal and civic activism under the strong influence of the European Union’s reform politics in Turkey (Olson 2007). I focus on the ways in which the process of ‘NGOization’ (Choudry and Kapoor 2013) in the politics of civic engagement has created a certain culture of activism in Turkey and Kurdistan that is class-based, professionalized, and funded, and which relies on institutional politics against popular mobilization. As Rucht (1999) notes, the shift from radical challenger groups to pragmatically oriented pressure organizations can lead to re-radicalization at the fringes. The Kurdish youth from marginalized neighborhoods in the cities of Kurdistan and Turkey found themselves on the other side of the shift to civil society, municipal, and legal politics that had not prioritized their needs and problems. Similar to other parts of the wider Middle East region, it was in these urban enclaves of marginalization and poverty that collective identities among youth were forged (Bayat 2017).

Building on the anthropological scholarship of youth, politics, and violence, this project will contribute to social studies of youth activism especially in marginalized urban enclaves by showing how specific civil society politics and practices can include or exclude young people from social and political participation. Exploring the dynamics of youth activism, my research will have broader policy implications to better understand youth at-risk and their experiences in environment of war and violence, particularly in the aftermath of forced migration from rural areas to urban centers. This project will make a significant addition to the growing literature on Kurdish studies especially around the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. I intend to broaden the focus of this project in my future research endeavors to explore the dynamics of youth activism in other contexts where indigenous communities and/or ethnic minorities struggle for sovereignty and self-determination.

*Sardar Saadi is a Postdoc at the Rural Sociology Group

Bibliography:

  • Akkaya, Ahmet Hamdi and Joost Jongerden. (2012). Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the Project of Radical Democracy. European Journal of Turkish Studies. 14:1-16.
  • Bayat, Asef. (2017). Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Choudry, Aziz and Dip Kapoor, eds. (2013). NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects. London: Zed Books Ltd.
  • Jongerden, Joost. (2007). The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatial Policies. Boston: Brill.
  • Jongerden, Joost. (2022). Civilizing Space: Addressing Disorder inn Rural and Urban Landscapes. In The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Turkey. Edited by Joost Jongerden. 373-384. New York: Routledge.
  • Neyzi, Leyla, and Haydar Darıcı. (2015). Generation in Debt: Family, Politics, and Youth Subjectivities in Diyarbakır. New Perspectives on Turkey. 52: 55-75.
  • Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). (2017). Report on the Human Rights Situation in South-East Turkey.
  • Olson, Robert W. (2007). From the EU Project to the Iraq Project and Back Again? Kurds and Turks after the 22 July 2007 Elections. Mediterranean Quarterly.18 (4): 17-35.
  • Rucht, Dieter. (1999). The Transnationalization of Social Movements: Trends, Causes, Problems. In Social Movements in a Globalizing World. Edited by Donatella della Porta, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht. 206-222. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

75th Anniversary: 51) Family Farming Futures: A research agenda

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Henk Oostindie

Family-farms’ responsiveness to societal change plays a prominent role in my research interests. Initially, I focused on the societal significance of differentiating ‘farming styles’ in relation to a variety of topics, such as deteriorating farm incomes, agri-environmental problems and loss of rural amenities. Later, I studied agricultural diversification tendencies, guided by notions like resistance, resilience and redesign as integrating insights from various sociological strands. In this wider theorizing of the empirical material collected over previous decades on farmers’ individual and collective reactions to marginalisation tendencies, narratives of their struggles to regain a certain autonomy have been interwoven with active attempts to create alternative, more promising and independent relations through new forms of cooperation (networks, alliances, partnerships, etc.). 

I believe there are good reasons to continue to develop a strongly empirical and grounded approach to research on the resilience of family farming. Here, I will illustrate this with a consideration of ongoing agricultural dynamics in the Dutch setting, which has a particular value also given the relatively little attention afforded to our Rural Sociology Group ‘home situation’ in the other contributions to this anniversary book.

The Netherlands faces a period of serious tensions between its farming population and society at arising from struggles for space, both literally and in terms of agri-environmental pollution rights related to the persistence of agri-environmental climate change issues in a rather vulnerable delta setting. As part of the politically highly sensitive national Nitrogen Dossier, agriculture as an economic sector is increasingly in competition with others, especially transport and housing, with reference to compromises around reduction targets and the (re)allocation and distribution of emission rights. Dutch farmers differ rather fundamentally in their opinions about how to tackle this agri-environmental challenge.

For a significant part of the Dutch farming community, this represents less of a challenge than a fundamental threat to their professional interests and identity – as expressed, for example, in recent farmers’ demonstrations and their accompanying demands. However, as revealed by national surveys, around 40% of farmers are willing to accept cuts in their nitrogen emission rights provided there are accompanying compensation measures. These would include better targeted and more finely-tuned remuneration systems for their delivery of other, non-food ecosystem services ( contributions to biodiversity, landscape values, sustainable water management, etc.). These farmers’ openness to multifunctional, nature-inclusive and regenerative farming futures – or any other alternative to the primary mode of agricultural modernisation – reflect much more positive, constructive and hopeful attitudes to changing societal demands. As confirmed by research insights, something that can and should be at least partly explained by the peculiarities of family-farming logics.

In the Dutch setting, the wider societal benefits of the resilience of family-based farming remain under-recognised, I would argue. Thus, resilience understudied in relation to broader research topics involving the attractiveness of rural life-styles, vibrancy of rural communities, reproduction and preservation of rural distinctiveness, healthy and sustainable foodscapes and rural-urban interdependencies. Probably for the same reason, there is relatively little research attention devoted to topics such as how to deal with the particular vulnerabilities of family-based farming such as inter-generational succession.

Latter’s  increasingly high dependency on external financial resources as well as family-members willingness to accept non-market conform compensation levels, makes it often a critical moment, or break-point, in the continuity of family-farming. The current emergence of financially more accessible and socially more acceptable succession models reflects interesting responses in this context that deserve further research attention. For instance, splitting farms into multiple, smaller business units that continue to collaborate closely but that can be sold and purchased independently of one another might improve farm continuity and expand the social accessibility of farming, including better opportunities for new entrants without agricultural backgrounds.

My own special interest in the future of family-farming encompasses its accompanying policy-practice interfaces, with particular attention to novel forms of collective action. Again, limiting myself to the Dutch setting, this comprises initiatives as agri-environmental and territorial cooperatives, as well as a broad spectrum of other initiatives around the emergence of novel rural markets (green care, agri-tourism, leisure, alternative food qualities, etc.). In short, primarily, although certainly not exclusively, I investigate farmer-led collective responses to societal demands for more integrative agricultural development and more sustainable food systems. Associated social struggles against prevailing policy interventions and market dependencies and attempts to establish more place-based partnerships and alliances, along with the accompanying processes of negotiation, learning and boundary-crossing efforts all structure, motivate and orientate my interest in contemporary rural development practices and initiatives. This is theoretically underpinned by actor-network theory and relational approaches and insights from transition- and governance scholars.

Taken as a whole, these research interests are closely related to the research agenda of the Rural Sociology Group as outlined in this anniversary book. Contemporary family-farming dynamics are becoming particularly meaningful in relation to wider societal concerns as sustainable food-scapes and rural, or perhaps better, place-based well-being in a broader sense. This perspective draws on my three decades of participation in European projects addressing these type of interrelations in different ways, ranging from varying sustainable food network trajectories (e.g. within the EU-funded project SUS-CHAIN) to theorising rural competitiveness and quality of rural life through the rural web concept (e.g. EU-funded project ETUDE). I have certainly appreciated these attempts to integrate the research fields of the Rural Sociology Group within European projects, notwithstanding their limitations. One concern in this regard that I would like to address in this anniversary contribution is the absence of opportunities for more longitudinal research.

A mixture of short project time frames and commissioner-led agenda setting makes it difficult to get deeper insights in continuity and change over longer time periods. How did regional farming styles develop in time, or particular sustainable food networks? What happened to hopeful farmer-led collective initiatives, or promising and less promising rural web dynamics? I guess I will keep struggling with, and dreaming about, how to create space for more longitudinal research approaches to further unravel and underpin societal relevance, impact and promises of aforementioned research fields and interests.

75th Anniversary: 49) Hofstee has left his mark on Wageningen studies on extension communication

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Cees Leeuwis*

Prof. Anne van den Ban is generally regarded as the founding father of the Wageningen communication sciences. He was appointed as Professor of extension communication (‘Voorlichtingskunde’) in 1964,  which became the cradle for a rich and influential array of academic endavours at the intersection between communication, innovation and change in the sphere of health, environment and agriculture. These activities have continued until today and now take place across several chairgroups and sections at Wageningen University.

Hofstee and Van der Ban

While Prof. Van den Ban certainly deserves a lot of credit for developing the new discipline and building an internationally recognized group, it is important to acknowledge the contribution of Prof. E.W. Hofstee in getting Van den Ban started. Hofstee was promotor of Van den Ban’s 1963 PhD dissertation on the communication of new farm practices in the Netherlands, and he no doubt inspired Van den Ban in choosing his topic. In fact, already in 1953 Hofstee wrote about the importance of studying ‘sociological aspects of agricultural extension’ in the first (!)  ‘Bulletin’ that was published by his group (Hofstee, 1953).  He was also in touch with the public extension services that had been established by the Ministry of Agriculture a few decades earlier, and gave lectures to Ministry staff on the significance of group-based agricultural extension approaches (e.g. Hofstee, 1960). Reading these early works by Hofstee made me -as one of the successors of Van den Ban- realize how much we still owe to Hofstee today.

In essence, Hofstee criticizes the then prevailing extension services and practices for assuming that farmers take decisions according to an individualistic economic rationale. He points to the importance of social, collective and cultural dynamics in shaping what farmers do or do not, and also to the importance of social differentiation and regional ‘farming styles’ in explaining farmers’ economic activity. In order to be effective, extension organisations and professionals should -according to Hofstee- understand the importance of such ‘sociological aspects’ and anticipate these in their work (Hofstee, 1953). This implies that extension workers should look at extension and knowledge transfer as an inherently social process rather than as a series of communicative ‘tricks’  and also be reflective about their own social positions (Hofstee, 1960) The concern with the ‘effectivess of extension’ (or better: the lack of it) demonstrates Hofstee’s commitment to the post second world war modernisation project and his own normativity in this regard. Despite his sensitivity for social and normative issues, he continued to talk in terms of ‘good, progressive’ and ‘bad, backward’ farmers (Hofstee, 1953), thereby (re)producing the paternalistic connotations of the Dutch word for extension communication: ‘Voorlichting’. This term literally means something like ‘holding a light in front of someone to lead the way’ assuming apparently that people are ‘in the dark’ and need to be ‘enlightened’ by those with scientific training.

While today’s studies on communication, innovation and change have arguably left this ‘enlightenment’  and ‘deficit’ thinking behind, we also see traces of Hofstee coming back in our current work. We still criticize simplistic individualist conceptualizations of change, as is reflected in today’ attention for ‘social-technical configurations’, ‘system transformation’ and ‘responsible innovation and scaling’. Similarly, Wageningen trained communication scientists are known for their interactional and socio-political conceptualization of both professional and everyday communication and meaning making, and for their interest in the social challenges to facilitating dialogue among different interpretative communities. These sociological perspectives on communication and change have now spread to other Universities in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The continued prevalence of sociological connotations is not surprising if one considers that most of Van den Ban’s successors indeed had a sociological training as well. Clearly, that is not accidental but part and parcel of Hofstee’s legacy.

*Cees Leeuwis is Personal Professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group, Section Communication, Philosophy and Technology

References

Hofstee .E.W.  (1953) , Sociologische aspecten van de landbouwvoorlichting. Bulletin 1, Afdeling Sociale en Economische Geografie, Landbouwhogeschool, Wageningen.

Hofstee .E.W.  (1960) Inleidende opmerkingen over de voorlichting: Groepsbenadering in de voorlichting. Voordracht gehouden op de Tuinbouwdagen 1960. Mededelingen van de Directeur van de Tuinbouw, 23, 10,  pp 621-624

Van den Ban, A.W. (1963) Boer en landbouwvoorlichting: De communicatie van nieuwe landbouwmethoden. Pudoc, Wageningen.