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
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
New Publication | On Babushkas and Postcapitalism: Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East
Sovová, L., Cima, O., Jehlička, P., Pungas, L., Sattler, M., Smith, T.S.J., Decker, A., Johanisova, N., Kovanen, S., and North, P., writing as Polička Collective (2025), On Babushkas and Postcapitalism: Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70034
As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.
Best paper award Jan Douwe van der Ploeg: Rural studies: A new paradigm that integrates previously separated disciplines
The International Scientific Committee of the REA – Italian Review of Agricultural Economics has awarded the REA Best Paper Award 2024 to Jan Douwe van der Ploeg for his article “Rural Studies: A New Paradigm that Integrates Previously Separated Disciplines”, published in Volume 79 (2024). In this article, Van der Ploeg argues that in reaction to a neo-classical approach, neo-institutional economics (NIE) and rural sociology (RS) equips rural studies with powerful tools to identify and analyse the institutions shaping farming communities.
The abstract of the article writes: “Rural studies are the theoretically informed and empirically grounded integration of disciplines that, until recently, were widely separated. This separation came with different grammars, mutually contrasting problem definitions and different methodological instruments that together resulted in a scattered understanding of countryside, farming, and the processing and distribution of food. The article discusses the main features of rural studies and especially explores the theoretical, institutional and historical backgrounds of these features. It argues that the specificity of agriculture strongly impacts its study and theoretical representation – as much as the resulting theories contribute to shaping the unfolding of agricultural activities over time.”
The full article is available here: https://edepot.wur.nl/687357
New publication: Contesting an exclusive citizenship regime: the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its electoral mobilisation in Batman in the late 1970’s
Joost Jongerden and Francis O’Connor have been working on spatial (rural) dimensions of political mobilisation and violence. In this article, they look into the politics of the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) through its engagement in municipal politics in the late 1970s in Batman, then a rural town in the Kurdistan region in Turkey, which rapidly industrialised after the local discovery of oil. Using a citizenship analytical lens, this article makes two substantial contributions. The article challenges overly simplistic, linear narratives regarding the PKK’s origins and its eventual embrace of violence. By analysing the PKK’s electoral and representational politics in the late 1970s, it emphasises the political dynamics of that period rather than reinterpreting its emergence solely through the later insurgency. Empirically, the article illustrates how the Kurdish political movement’s pursuit of representation directly challenged the ethnically exclusionary citizenship regime of the Turkish state.
The article is published open access in Third World Quarterly.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2025.2518501?src=exp-la#abstract
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 