What does it mean to bear witness to colonial violence without reproducing the very extractive logics one seeks to critique? In Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan, Eray Çaylı examines how landscapes, artistic practices, and academic work intersect with/intervene in histories of colonial violence, environmental destruction, and resistance. This review explores how the book challenges conventional approaches to testimony, memory, and scholarship, asking how we might relate differently to land, people, and the work of remembering.

Earthmoving: extractivism, war, and visuality in Nothern Kurdistan by Eray Çaylı, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2025, 199 pp., 65$ (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4773-3277-1

Read the full article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2026.2640451

In a new article, Dawn Cheong and Bettina Bock argue that farmers’ capabilities, a core component of social sustainability, have been largely neglected in sustainable agriculture discourse. Using a relational approach to capabilities and autonomy, this study explores how women farmers translate the opportunity of agricultural innovation into their valued outcomes, and which factors shape their capabilities, in the context of Terai, Nepal, based on micro-focus group discussions (FGDs) and a survey. Whilst women have experienced a rapid expansion of their capacities and status as producers, their fixed status as providers of social reproduction hinders this expansion from being fully translated into valued outcomes. Gendered and intersectional personal, social and environmental conversion factors independently and co-constitutively shape these capability spaces. In this process, women navigate the demands of sustaining productive roles whilst maintaining the quality of social reproduction, often compromising their bodily, mental and intellectual replenishment and enduring cumulative reproductive health risks across their life courses. This implies that even when provided with the same opportunities, not all women farmers are able to translate them into desired outcomes. The lack of social and institutional interventions to redistribute and reorganise reproductive labour not only functions as a structural barrier preventing women from fully leveraging their productive capabilities but also risks compounding the depletion of women’s labour sustainability, overall well-being, and ultimately, the sustainability of agrarian society.

Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sd.70817

Two new publications by by Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, addressing critical questions at the intersection of political ecology, agrarian change, and labour:

– Alonso-Fradejas, A. (2026). The third standpoint: the politics of accommodating to green agrarian extractivism. Third World Quarterly, 1–23.

– Tejada-Guzmán, P., & Alonso-Fradejas, A. (2026). Los pinares de Babel: sociología política de la incorporación de trabajadores migrantes a la bioeconomía resinera. Revista Española de Sociología, 35(1), 1–23.

Both publications offer timely insights into contemporary forms of green extractivism, bioeconomy transitions, and the politics of labour and accommodation.

Abstract The Third Standpoint
Extractivism is rife with multiple, dynamic politics. Beyond supporters and challengers, many – arguably most – act to accommodate to the extractivist order as best they can. Grounded in Guatemala’s green agrarian extractivism in the oil palm complex, I theorise this third standpoint and examine who accommodates, why and how. Using a ‘multi-dynamic politics framework’, I map actors, agendas, frames and repertoires. I distinguish accommodators by legal character (lawful/criminal) and by accommodative will (amenable/reluctant) across co-constituted class, gender and racialised–ethnic positions. Agendas diverge from a shared sense of inevitability: a dog-eat-dog criminal accommodation, to a lawful pursuit of inclusive, ethical, sustainable development. Lawful accommodators deploy contention strategies that broker fixes, fixes – raising wages and improving labour conditions, expanding land leases and contract farming and adopting climate-smart practices – to soften harms to working people and the environment. Yet these gains normalise green prosocial branding, keep commodity chains certifiable, and reproduce the green agro-extractivist order and its racialised class hegemony, even as criminal accommodation further entangles agro-extractive frontiers with violent, illicit economies. Naming and specifying accommodation clarifies how harm-reducing reforms can also stabilise extractivism. The analysis speaks beyond Guatemala to resource frontiers where pragmatic, accommodative reform both tempers and entrenches extractivism.


Abstract Los pinares de Babel
El artículo explora el nexo entre transición demográfica y transición verde en áreas rurales marginadas y envejecidas, analizando la sociología política de la incorporación de trabajadores migrantes a la bioeconomía resinera en Soria y Segovia. Indaga términos de inclusión, apoyos, acomodaciones y oposiciones, y sus efectos distributivos e identitarios. Metodológicamente combina 64 entrevistas, observación participante (campañas 2022, 2023 y 2025) y revisión documental. Los resultados distinguen dos modelos de incorporación de resineros migrantes: (1) uno institucional y ‘partidario’, liderado por propietarios y gestores de montes públicos —predominante en Soria—, que concibe la resinación como palanca de revitalización rural; y (2) otro modelo ‘acomodador’, liderado por actores públicos y privados orientados a maximizar rentas y beneficios —más común en Segovia—, con mayor selectividad en acceso a empleo, pinos y vivienda. Estos modelos estructuran los marcos y repertorios de contienda partidarios, acomodadores y opositores en tres ejes: trabajo-pinos-vivienda, gobernanza y reconocimiento y sociabilidades cotidianas. La incorporación exitosa de resineros migrantes requiere arreglos institucionales —sobre todo locales— e interacción entre actores partidarios, acomodadores y opositores; los términos de inclusión son desiguales dentro y entre pueblos resineros y cambiantes. En este campo de fuerzas, disputas identitarias y distributivas se entrelazan, y cooperación y conflicto coexisten, atravesados por clase, generación, país de origen y ciudadanía. Los ‘pinares de Babel’ de Soria y Segovia evidencian que la renovada bioeconomía resinera puede articular ambas transiciones en áreas rurales marginadas y envejecidas, aunque de modo contingente: depende de mediación pública comprometida, arreglos concertados de aprovisionamiento de resina y gobernanza de pinares, y redes inclusivas que reconozcan la diversidad sin convertirla en línea de fractura.