Vacancy internship Boerengroep and Agroecology Network

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March/April – mid August 2022

The intern will help organize and coordinate the Farm Experience Internship (FEI) with Boerengroep. The FEI is four-week summer course on agroecology that offers a transformational learning experience where practice and theory are combined, and where we approach agroecology from different angles and educational methods. 

Next to this, the intern will help develop the project “Places of Hope and Resistance” with the national Agroecology Network. These are places – on farms – where different movements can find each other, where meetings and events can be hosted and where working days are regularly organized. This with the goal to strengthen the agroecological movement and connect farmers with activists, citizens and researchers. 

This internship allows you to submerge yourself in the agroecology movement, broaden your network with farmers, scientists and activists, and gain practical skills in organizing and coordinating a project. The exact time frame and time division of the internship can be discussed. Does this spark an interest? Don’t hesitate and send an email to st.boerengroep@wur.nl with a little introduction of yourself.

For more information, visit Vacancy Intern FEI + Agroecology Network – Boerengroep

75th Anniversary: 53) Research at the Rural Sociology Group: Agriculture, Decolonization and National-Popular Development

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Max Ajl

What has been the role of poor rural people in the periphery in changing the world? How can the world change so that poor rural people are no longer poor? How does putting the social inclusion or exclusion of poor rural people front-and-center change how we understand politics, planning, methodology, and epistemology? And what happens to these questions when we place them in the broader framework of ecology and the ecological crisis? These questions have been central to development theories over the last decades or even the last century, and have inflected discussion of the agrarian question, in its political, social, ecological, and national aspects. Yet there has remained a nagging gap between (1) work on decolonization, including contemporary epistemological inquiries; (2) work dealing with macro-economic planning; (3) work on agro-ecology, food sovereignty, pastoralism, and sustainable livelihoods.

Over the last decade, I have tried to address these questions in a variety of ways. Spatially, I have worked outwards from Tunisia to North Africa, the Arab region as a whole, and world ecological crisis. In terms of disciplines, I have worked outwards from rural sociology into historical ecology, the intellectual and social history of planning, and the intellectual history of heterodox post-colonial theories of development.

My dissertation research (Ajl 2019a) started with a puzzle: why and how did Tunisia come to be a poor country, and specifically how did state policies reproduce rural poverty? It tried to understand this through the phenomenon of state price engineering. Yet prices reflected social and political power balances, and the origins of those balances were unclear to me: why and how had poor rural Tunisians been excluded from development? This led to work on the political-historical sociology of anti-colonial revolt, decolonization, and post-colonial political management, especially focused on how the political mobilization of the peasantry/pastoralist population of Tunisia was sheared and blocked from becoming inclusion in Tunisian developmentalism.

In parallel, I worked on other cases in the Arab region, including Syria (Ajl 2019b; Ajl et al. 2020), Yemen (Ajl 2018a), and the Arab region more broadly (Ajl 2021a) tracing how different constellations of social forces, domestically and internationally, led to different agrarian trajectories: partially rural-incorporating as in Syria and Egypt, for example. Or, how the Green Revolution manifested in the Arab region (Ajl 2017; Ajl and Sharma Forthcoming). These studies showed the agrarian question was central to world geopolitics, with more rural-incorporating governments understood as antagonistic to the established order because of their partial endogenization of productive forces. In this way, they showed that national agrarian question were local expressions of a global process (McMichael 1997), wherein political shifts in some Arab nation-states changed the parameters of agrarian/developmental politics in others. In this way I was able to think about how to break from methodological nationalism not only at the level of capitalist accumulation (Wolf 1969) but also resistance to it.

Examining the politics of national liberation and post-colonial planning led me into critiques of those processes from heterodox planners, agronomists, and economists in the Arab region, extending to West Africa and especially Senegal, the home of Samir Amin. In a series of essays (Ajl 2021b, 2019c, 2018b, 2022) I have examined notions of self-reliant or auto-centered development. This idea is based on the diagnosis that countries’ insertion into global capitalism pushes them to pursue policies inimical to the well-being of their poorest sectors. It would follow that more auto-centered policies, focusing on fulfilling the basic needs of the poorest, would lead to superior development outcomes. I examined this idea theoretically through the work of Amin and at the level of intellectual history, as it emerged in planning proposals from Chinese-influenced Egyptian and Tunisian planners.

A third ‘track’ has been my concern with climate change, in particular how to connect the problems of Northern planning and social and ecological crisis with southern aspirations for national popular and ecological development planning. This has resulted in a book (Ajl, 2021c) and a series of articles and chapters (Ajl 2021d, Forthcoming; Ajl and Wallace 2021; Tilley and Ajl 2022) focusing on various aspects of this question: critiques of green modernization, green demographic management, intervention in pastoralist livelihoods, and above all a program for national development planning North and South: bringing what I have learned into Tunisia about popular planning, developmental needs, and appropriate technologies into the northern planning conversation, to think about how to make a world big enough for everyone, North and South.

  • Ajl, M., 2022. Food Sovereignty, the National Question, and Post-colonial Development in Africa, in: Ben Gadha, M., Kaboub, F., Koddenbrock, K., Mahmoud, I., Samba Sylla, N. (Eds.), Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa. Pluto, London, pp. 238–258.
  • Ajl, M., 2021a. Does the Arab region have an agrarian question? The Journal of Peasant Studies 48, 955–983. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1753706
  • Ajl, M., 2021b. Delinking’s Ecological Turn: The hidden legacy of Samir Amin. Review of African Political Economy.
  • Ajl, M., 2021c. A People’s Green New Deal. Pluto Press, London.
  • Ajl, M., 2021d. A People’s Green New Deal: Obstacles and prospects. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 10, 371–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760211030864
  • Ajl, M., 2019a. Farmers, Fellaga, and Frenchmen (PhD). Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
  • Ajl, M., 2019b. The Political Economy of Thermidor in Syria: National and international dimensions, in: Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War. Springer, pp. 209–245.
  • Ajl, M., 2019c. Auto-Centered Development and Indigenous Technics: Slaheddine el-Amami and Tunisian delinking. Journal of Peasant Studies 46, 1240–1263.
  • Ajl, M., 2018a. Yemen’s Agricultural World: Crisis and prospects, in: Crisis and Conflict in Agriculture. CABI.
  • Ajl, M., 2018b. Delinking, Food Sovereignty, and Populist Agronomy: Notes on an intellectual history of the peasant path in the global South. Review of African Political Economy 45, 64–84.
  • Ajl, M., 2017. Field Notes on Tunisia’s Green Revolution. Viewpoint Magazine.
  • Ajl, M., Forthcoming. Everything Changes While Everything Stays the Same. Development and Change.
  • Ajl, M., Haddad, B., Abul-Magd, Z., 2020. State, Market, and Class: Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, in: A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, !!046316523!School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series. Stanford University Press, pp. 46–67.
  • Ajl, M., Sharma, D., Forthcoming. Transversal Countermovements: The afterlives of the Green Revolution in Tunisia and India. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement.
  • Ajl, M., Wallace, R., 2021. Red Vegans against Green Peasants [WWW Document]. New Socialist. URL http://newsocialist.org.uk/red-vegans-against-green-peasants/ (accessed 11.1.21).
  • McMichael, P., 1997. Rethinking Globalization: the agrarian question revisited. Review of International PoIiticaI Economy 4, 630–662.
  • Tilley, L., Ajl, M., 2022. Eco-socialism Will be Anti-eugenic or it Will Be Nothing: Towards equal exchange and the end of population. Politics 02633957221075323. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221075323
  • Wolf, E.R., 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press.

75th Anniversary: 52) The Politics of Youth Activism in the Kurdish Movement: A research agenda

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Sardar Saadi*

In the 1990s, during the peak of the war between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Turkish army forcefully evacuated thousands of rural settlements in the Kurdish region of Turkey and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurdish villagers to the cities (Jongerden 2007). The influx of these displaced villagers dramatically increased the population of the Kurdish cities, which were already suffering from poverty, unemployment, and the lack of urban infrastructures, and brought scores of socioeconomic challenges with itself. The newly settled rural migrants found themselves as the “other” in the cities, and they were regarded as undesired subjects and an “inconvenience” for the cities (Jongerden 2022). Children of these families became youth in impoverished neighborhoods where they had resettled, and their subjectivity was shaped by both a history of violence that their displaced families had been through (Neyzi and Darici 2015) as well as their everyday struggle to survive in cities that were increasingly alien to them. Within such an environment they became politicized, but their presence particularly became visible after the 2015-2016 urban armed clashes. Starting in August 2015 and after the violent termination of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the PKK, many neighborhoods and districts of cities in the Kurdish region of Turkey declared autonomy. The Kurdish youth, mostly from displaced rural migrant families, took up arms and built barricades in their neighborhoods. The Turkish state’s response against this move that was later called the “self-government resistance” was brutal and devastating. A massive wave of state violence caused destruction of cities in the Kurdish region, death of hundreds, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (OHCHR 2017).

I have a sustained interest in Kurdistan and the Kurdish self-determination movement. As a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, I have been excited to develop a postdoctoral project that builds on the insights of my doctoral dissertation. My postdoctoral research investigates the politics of youth in the Kurdish struggle for self-determination in Turkey by looking at dynamics of mobilization that include or may exclude young people in the spheres of civil society and legal political activism. My research explores how the terrain of civil society has been developed in the Kurdish region under the influence of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, and what the main actors in shaping this terrain are. In the last two decades, the Kurdish self-determination movement in Turkey has undergone a social and political transformation that shifted the geography of the struggle from rural areas to cities. This shift brought the struggle to urban spheres of civil society, municipal governance, and legal parliamentary politics (Akkaya and Jongerden 2012). I examine dynamics and contradictions in the Kurdish movement in the areas of legal and civic activism under the strong influence of the European Union’s reform politics in Turkey (Olson 2007). I focus on the ways in which the process of ‘NGOization’ (Choudry and Kapoor 2013) in the politics of civic engagement has created a certain culture of activism in Turkey and Kurdistan that is class-based, professionalized, and funded, and which relies on institutional politics against popular mobilization. As Rucht (1999) notes, the shift from radical challenger groups to pragmatically oriented pressure organizations can lead to re-radicalization at the fringes. The Kurdish youth from marginalized neighborhoods in the cities of Kurdistan and Turkey found themselves on the other side of the shift to civil society, municipal, and legal politics that had not prioritized their needs and problems. Similar to other parts of the wider Middle East region, it was in these urban enclaves of marginalization and poverty that collective identities among youth were forged (Bayat 2017).

Building on the anthropological scholarship of youth, politics, and violence, this project will contribute to social studies of youth activism especially in marginalized urban enclaves by showing how specific civil society politics and practices can include or exclude young people from social and political participation. Exploring the dynamics of youth activism, my research will have broader policy implications to better understand youth at-risk and their experiences in environment of war and violence, particularly in the aftermath of forced migration from rural areas to urban centers. This project will make a significant addition to the growing literature on Kurdish studies especially around the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. I intend to broaden the focus of this project in my future research endeavors to explore the dynamics of youth activism in other contexts where indigenous communities and/or ethnic minorities struggle for sovereignty and self-determination.

*Sardar Saadi is a Postdoc at the Rural Sociology Group

Bibliography:

  • Akkaya, Ahmet Hamdi and Joost Jongerden. (2012). Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the Project of Radical Democracy. European Journal of Turkish Studies. 14:1-16.
  • Bayat, Asef. (2017). Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Choudry, Aziz and Dip Kapoor, eds. (2013). NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects. London: Zed Books Ltd.
  • Jongerden, Joost. (2007). The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatial Policies. Boston: Brill.
  • Jongerden, Joost. (2022). Civilizing Space: Addressing Disorder inn Rural and Urban Landscapes. In The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Turkey. Edited by Joost Jongerden. 373-384. New York: Routledge.
  • Neyzi, Leyla, and Haydar Darıcı. (2015). Generation in Debt: Family, Politics, and Youth Subjectivities in Diyarbakır. New Perspectives on Turkey. 52: 55-75.
  • Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). (2017). Report on the Human Rights Situation in South-East Turkey.
  • Olson, Robert W. (2007). From the EU Project to the Iraq Project and Back Again? Kurds and Turks after the 22 July 2007 Elections. Mediterranean Quarterly.18 (4): 17-35.
  • Rucht, Dieter. (1999). The Transnationalization of Social Movements: Trends, Causes, Problems. In Social Movements in a Globalizing World. Edited by Donatella della Porta, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht. 206-222. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thesis / Research Internship Opportunity: Understanding the role of geographical indications for rural development in Ireland

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Duration: 6 months

Languages: English

Start Date: As soon as possible

Are you looking for a fascinating thesis or research internship topic that cuts across multiple challenges at the heart of food system transformation, with the possibility to do funded fieldwork in Ireland?!?


The Rural Sociology (RSO), Environmental Policy (ENP) and Strategic Communications (COM) chair groups have vacancies for one to two students to join a project investigating the social, environmental and political dynamics of geographical indication (GI) food products in Ireland. GIs certify the connection between a unique food product and its place of origin. This phenomenon cuts across multiple food system issues, including sustainability, governance, rural development, consumption and food cultures.


GIs are now a key pillar of the European Commission’s (EC) rural development strategy, Farm to Fork. Evidence from European countries where GI products are numerous suggests they can enhance territorial development outcomes (e.g. through tourism). Yet, uptake of GI registrations has been particularly slow in Ireland, with only 13 registered food products (compared to, for example, over 300 in Italy). Given this difference, this project aims to understand the perceptions of GIs from the perspective of different food system actors in Ireland, including the role GI foods can play in farmer livelihood strategies, the potential linkages between GI foods and sustainable consumption, and the role of new technologies in fostering and communicating the links between food products and their place of origin.

The student(s) will have the opportunity to shape their research project around their particular food system interests and those of the supervisors. There will also be the possibility to undertake (partially) funded fieldwork in Ireland.


Requirements:

  • Interest in the sociology of food system transformation (for example, rural development, food systems governance, sustainability, science & technology studies and/or sustainable consumption)
  • Interest in geographical indications and delicious food!
  • Basic knowledge of sociological concepts, and basic knowledge of and interest in qualitative methodologies
  • You meet the program requirements for a thesis / internship in either RSO, COM or ENP

Supervision team:
Dr Mark Vicol (RSO), Dr Katharine Legun (COM), Dr Mary Greene (ENP)
More information? Contact Mark Vicol (mark.vicol@wur.nl)