The Fabric of Convergence: Reflections from the Nyéléni Global Forum

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Christianne

by Priscilla Claeys, Sylvia Kay and Jessica Duncan

In what ways can food sovereignty or agroecology act as a viable joint framing for systemic convergence? The third Nyéléni Global Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka, brought together over 700 activists with the aim of weaving convergence and strengthening alliances between food sovereignty and social justice movements. The authors reflect on their experience at the Forum, highlighting successes in cross-movement collaboration as well as frictions in organising, representation, and frameworks. Looking ahead, the Kandy Declaration calls for actions to deepen dialogue, transform governance, and build collective capacity to advance systemic transformation.

Read the article here.

Environmental Politics in North and East Syria/Rojava: A Scoping and Conceptual Literature Review

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Joost Jongerden

The first article edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden for the special issue “Rural Protest and Contentious Politics: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure in Kurdistan” is now online. The article, titled “Environmental Politics in North and East Syria/Rojava: A Scoping and Conceptual Literature Review,” is written by Pinar Dinc, Maria Andrea Nardi, and Mo Hamza. It offers a scoping and conceptual review of English-language academic research on environmental politics in North and East Syria/Rojava, synthesizing scholarship on the relationship between armed conflict and environmental change in the region. The review focuses in particular on the Kurdish-led socio-political model of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

The study is guided by two main questions: what knowledge has been produced about the role of the environment in AANES politics, and what theoretical advances have emerged within environmental politics in relation to this case. Using a scoping and conceptual review methodology, the authors identify key themes including ecological sustainability, gender equality, and direct democracy. They highlight both the challenges and the opportunities AANES faces in pursuing ecological policies amid ongoing conflict and broader geopolitical pressures.

Overall, the findings underscore the value of interdisciplinary approaches and point to the need for further research on ecological democracy, environmental justice, and peace ecology. The review concludes by emphasizing the importance of radical democratic commitments and ecological consciousness for advancing peace and justice in conflict-affected settings.

Agriculture in Rojava and the Making of a Decolonial Future

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Joost Jongerden

How a grassroots revolution in northern Syria is redefining democracy, ecology, and decolonization from the ground up. An blog-post/article by Joost Jongerden and Necmettin Türk

When the Syrian civil war fractured the authority of the central state, a new kind of revolution took root in the country’s north. In the Kurdish-majority regions known as Rojava, communities seized the opportunity not to build a new state, but to build a new society based on self-administration. Much of the existing scholarship on Rojava has focused on this network of self-organized communes and regions, particularly in relation to questions of recognition, namely the development of a governance model that is inclusive of various cultural, ethnic, and religious communities. Yet far less attention has been paid to the decolonization of Rojava’s agrarian economy—a transformation that is equally fundamental to the region’s broader project of liberation.

Constructing Ties: How Security Narratives Led to the Defunding of UAWC in Occupied Palestinian Territories

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Joost Jongerden

The thesis “Unpacking the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Decision to Stop Funding UAWC” examines how security narratives led the Netherlands to end its funding in 2022 for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). For many years, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had supported this Palestinian NGO, which worked to improve the livelihoods of Palestinian farmers, particularly in Area C — the part of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli military control. The research into the reasons behind the decision to defund UAWC is based on documents obtained through the Dutch Transparency Act (Wet Open Overheid, or WOO), comprising more than 1,100 pages of written communications.

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Book review: Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Joost Jongerden

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.

Rural Sociology Wageningen University

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