Category Archives: Research

Research

The Netherlands and the prosecution and trial of Islamic State suspects in Rojava

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After the liberation of Kobani from the Islamic State (IS) in January 2015, the Dutch government repeatedly informed Parliament about assistance to the Northern Syria region, which is also known as Rojava, subsequently renamed as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). This agricultural region is Syria’s breadbasket, but it endured significant suffering and destruction during the war with IS.

After the defeat of IS, a democratic and decentralized governance system was developed, and agriculture diversified, in which the Kurdish movement played a prominent role. Ministers Ploumen (2016), Koenders (2016), and Blok (2019) made commitments to provide support to the region.  However, given Turkey’s hostility, delivering aid has been a matter of political sensitivity

The government of the Netherlands made references to various forms of aid – emergency aid, humanitarian aid, reconstruction aid, assistance in political processes –  yet what support has been given to whom remains unclear. In pursuit of this information, a Freedom of Information Act (WOB-WOO) request about this aid was submitted in January 2022. Recognizing that prosecution and justice were pivotal areas of focus during this period, a question regarding these matters was incorporated in this request.

In April 2022, documents were released, but disappointingly, they contained minimal information about assistance to the region. The documents primarily revolved around endeavors to prosecute and try IS suspects. Based on the data received, this  article  delves  into  the Netherlands’  efforts   to   explore   potential collaborations with the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria for prosecuting  and  trying IS suspects.

Read more here: https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/3130

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

Navigating a scoping review

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Dozens of hours selecting and organizing literature like a robot. Going back and forth to check decisions I made to include or exclude papers, because I need to confess: I am a human being with mood swings and doubts – not a robot.

Being confronted with essential, but difficult questions concerning the content, goal and scope of my research. How to define the kind of food aid initiatives I focus on? How does the national and cultural context shape my research? Which other national contexts could be relevant, why those and others not?

Cursing the choice I made to take dignity as the main concept in my PhD research. A concept that is studied in many fields without one clear definition, that doesn´t have a general meaning applicable to various situations, and which reveals contradictions in itself (as an objective and subjective phenomenon, public and private or inalienable and something that can be destroyed).

These are just a few of the challenges I faced while conducting my scoping review. As part of my PhD project about the dignity of recipients in divers food aid contexts in Europe, I investigated what is known in scientific literature about ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated and protected in diverse contexts of third sector food aid in high-income countries.

Don’t worry! This blogpost will not be an elegy about my journey of conducting a literature review. On the contrary, conducting a scoping review as part of my PhD research was a very rewarding experience for me, sparking new energy for my research. Join me as I share how the challenges described above actually gave me joy and rewarded me.

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Oil, Resource Frontiers, and Unruly Spaces in Northern Kurdistan

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Zeynep Oguz*

Turkish and Kurdish studies have been moving in important directions in the past decade. Studies of the importance of space and placemaking in Kurdish issue (Gambetti and Jongerden 2015) have been complemented by sustained engagements with material culture, nature, and environments in Kurdistan, as well as how they are central to colonial practices, state violence, and resistance. Today, from the study of ruins and ruination in burial sites and ghosts and, therefore, the interaction between the material and the symbolic, one can learn from anthropological and historical studies of how forests and forest fires, water and rivers, mountains, and animals have been entangled with power and resistance in Kurdistan (See Adalet 2022, Bozcali 2020, Biner 2019, Çaylı 2021, Oguz 2021, Suni 2023).

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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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