Category Archives: General

General issues.

The control of transboundary plant diseases and the problem of the public good: Lessons from Fusarium wilt in banana

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Kees Jansen and Jaye de la Cruz.

The paper “The control of transboundary plant diseases and the problem of the public good” in NJAS (open access; https://doi.org/10.1080/27685241.2023.2261402) reviews the debate on the public good and builds on the sociological and political critiques of economistic positions in this debate. It discusses public good elements in transboundary disease control taking Fusarium wilt as an instructive case.

Abstract
Many plant diseases and pests cannot be controlled on-farm as they spread from one field or region to another. This opens up a series of interconnected social, political, and economic questions besides the common technical questions about the spread, impact and management of the disease or pest. A new genotype of the soil-born fungus Fusarium, called Tropical Race 4, is extremely virulent, widely destroying banana crops destined for domestic and international markets, and spreading rapidly in Southeast Asia and recently to other countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. It threatens both staple food production and the export of bananas. The international research and policy-making communities on bananas have been alarmed and are calling for concerted action to control this disease. This paper supports the idea that Fusarium wilt control has to be regarded as a public good but also finds that the public good is being conceptualized in divergent ways. It raises the question as to what gaps exist in the current understanding of providing that public good. The paper identifies a set of key problems, including the problem of anticipation by governments, a neglect of histories of political economic oppositions in the banana sector, the strictures of sovereignty-thinking in multilateral responses, and the aversion that neo-liberal models of governance develop to the public good.

Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/27685241.2023.2261402

Politics of Difference and Land the late Ottoman Empire and French-Syria (1860-1925)

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Seda Altuğ*

The scholarly debates in Ottoman /Kurdish studies regarding the Armenian and Kurdish issues from late 19th century onwards, reveals that the national question is usually viewed as a product of competing nationalisms— that is, political ideologies built around conceptions of communal belonging and statehood. The scholarship on sectarianism in the Arab Middle East, too, despite critical work in the last decade, has been dominated by rather ahistorical and primordial assumptions concerning the relationship between religion, modernity and politics in the Ottoman imperial and (post-Ottoman) colonial contexts.

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New publication by Francis O’Connor on rebel governance and urban-rural ties

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Insurgent movements have commonly re-located to isolated rural areas with weak state presence where their security was guaranteed by a hostile environment to launch insurgencies. The more recent field of rebel governance also draws on predominantly rural cases. Yet, some groups have chosen to predominantly base their armed mobilisations in cities with much higher security risks where they are obliged to mobilise clandestinely. Clandestinity is often seen as an impediment to insurgent consolidation. This article explores the forms of rebel governance adopted by the M-19 in Colombia to construct networks of social ties needed to embed itself in urban environments. It highlights a case of urban rebel governance without territorial control, thus extending the scope of the rebel governance literature. It addresses the spatial variation of the M-19’s insurgency by analysing its diverging experiences of its clandestine mobilisation in Bogota and Cali, as well as a brief window where it conducted more public urban mobilisation. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with former militants and an extensive qualitative, coding of M-19 primary archival sources, the findings show that M-19 could maintain its urban campaigns because of its parallel rural infrastructures. When the conditions for urban mobilisation deteriorated, its militants could flee to the relative safety of the rural fronts. The article’s findings hint at potential avenues for further research, notably more detailed assessment of the ties between urban and rural units and support networks, and a more explicit comparison between patterns of social tie creation in urban and rural environments.

“Clandestinity and insurgent consolidation: The M-19’s rebel governance in urban Colombia” is a new publication by Francis O’Connor, a Marie Curie Skłodowska Post-Doctoral Fellow in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102930

Beyond farming women: queering gender, work and family farms

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The issue of gender and agriculture has been on the research agendas of civil society organisations, governments, and academia since the 1970s. Starting from the role of women in agriculture, research has mainly focused on the gendered division of work and the normative constitution of the farm as masculine. Although the gendered division of work has been questioned, the idea of binary gender has mostly been taken as a given. This explorative research shifts the attention from the production of (traditional) gender roles to the making and unmaking of binary gender. An ethnographic study of four farms in Switzerland is drawn on to explore queer farming practices and investigate how queer farmers navigate gender normativity and what this tells us about gender in agriculture more broadly. After considering the mechanisms through which queer farmers are discouraged from farming as a livelihood on the basis of their sex, gender or sexuality, this article argues that queer farmers de- and re-construct gender and farming identities differently, which has research and policy implications for a more diverse and resilient rurality.

Keywords Performativity · Agricultural practices · Swiss faming · Ethnographic research · Gender · Queer farmers

Read the full article by Prisca Pfammatter and Joost Jongerden here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10449-z

Workshop on Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure

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Hosted by the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University and Research, September 1, 2023

In Kurdistan occupations and demonstrations by landless workers and peasants demanding land reform have taken place on a large scale since the middle of the 20th century. In more recent years, this contestation over land has overlapped with the rise of environmental activism. The workshop Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure addresses a number of theoretical debates and questions related to land.

Affiliations of the participants

Kamuran Akin is an independent researcher who recently defended his PhD at the Institut für Europäische Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Seda Altuğ is a lecturer at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.

Aysegul Aslan is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Fırat University, Turkey, and a visiting fellow at the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands

Eray Çaylı is a professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene, Hamburg University, Germany

Pinar Dinc  is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University.

Ayhan Işık is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Centre de Recherche Mondes Modernes et Contemporains, Université libre de Bruxelles.

Adnan Mirhanoğlu is a researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Zeynep Oguz is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Murat Öztürk is associate professor at the  Department of Economics at Kırklareli University in Turkey. 

Marcin Skupiński is a Ph.D. candidate at Warsaw University, Poland.

Necmettin Türk is a PhD Candidate in the Working Group “Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities” at the Institute of Geography, Hamburg University, Germany.

Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography (NTUA & Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach is professor of Economics, Cracow University, Poland.

Organizers

Joost Jongerden – Associate professor at the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands joost.jongerden@wur.nl

Francis O’Connor – is a Marie Curie Skłodowska Post-Doctoral Fellow in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Francis.oconnor@wur.nl