Joost Jongerden

Exploring Possibilities to Enhance Food Sovereignty within the Cowpea Production-Consumption Network in Northern Ghana

Abstract Over the last years an important focus in the combat of hunger and malnutrition, particularly in Africa has been food security. This article explores possibilities for enhancing food sovereignty, as an alternative concept to food security and an alternative strategy for reversing hunger and malnutrition trends in developing countries. A combination of literature review, participatory appraisal and conventional survey methodologies are used to investigate the relevance of local cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) network regarding its importance vis-à-vis other crops, varietal choice, and consumption patterns in Northern Ghana from food sovereignty perspective. Findings reveal how people in poverty-stricken and hunger-hot-spot communities strive to conserve their bio-diversity and productionconsumption networks for posterity. Local cowpea varietal preferences are investigated for participatory breeding considerations to improve on seed access for sustainable production. Promotion of origin-based foods in the current fast growing globalised markets is recommended as a possibility to enhance food sovereignty for sustainable development in Africa

Resettlement and Reconstruction of Identity: The Case of the Kurds in Turkey

In the Republic of Turkey the government has been mired in an increasingly bitter war with the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK). The PKK, formally established in 1978, launched its first offensive military operation in 1984. The PKKs impact was enormous. In the 1990s, the PKK was able to mobilise mass support among the Kurds. The Republic of Turkey was caught unprepared. In an effort to root out the PKK, the government of Turkey used indiscriminate counter-insurgency methods, also targeting the civilian population (Mater 1999; Dicle 1997; Bruinessen 1997; Kaplan 1996; Olson 1996; Amnesty International 1996; Zurcher 1995). State forces hoped to eliminate networks of logistic support for the PKK, among others, by means of forced evacuation and village destruction in Kurdish-populated rural areas.

The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue: multiple and contradicting trajectories - introduction

Analysis of the Kurdish issue from a spatial perspective is not new, but spatial analyses are still relatively scarce. More often than not, Kurdish studies consist of time-centred work that represents the trajectory of Turkey’s Kurds either through modernist state discourses, that is, in terms of ‘backwardness’ and ‘lack’, or through narratives that trace the development of Kurdish resistance from its origins to the present. In this special issue, we would like to shift the attention to space-centred analyses. How this might inform research on the Kurdish question in Turkey and what is to be gained from this perspective, however, need to be explained. Today, the concept of socially produced or constructed space appears in publications with little apparent need for justification or explanation. Yet it was not so long ago that ‘space’ was generally ignored in social theory. It was generally accepted that sociology had a historical rationality. The ‘sociological imagination’ of which C. Wright Mills was speaking 2 was a time-centred imagination. Time was equated with becoming, space with being; time was equated with change, space with stasis; time was considered as active, space as reactive; time was equated with the agent and space with the object. Time was considered qualitatively and operationalized in terms of a transformation of society bringing forward new social relations. Space was looked upon as quantitative, to be measured in square metres, and as isotropic, essentially everywhere the same and conceptualized as a residual of time. Sociology was concerned with explaining (and forecasting) the making of the world, and this shaping of society was considered to take place along a time-axis and according to a pre-configured picture. Such a conceptualization of space was at the heart of modernization theories, in which the West was placed at the apex of an evolutionary scale of development, and a roadmap of becoming like the

Commodification and the Social Commons:Smallholder Autonomy and Rural–Urban Kinship Communalism in Turkey

This article focuses on two ways in which smallholders—rural families, the peasantry—are responding to the contemporary neoliberal environment in Turkey by resisting commodification. This resistance, which takes place both by definition, insofar as smallholders refuse to enter, or properly conform to, the logic of capital, and in terms of its characteristics, values and practices of autonomy and sharing, is located in the context of two sites or structures of social commons. These comprise the maintenance of non-commodity circuits, along with the development of what may be identified as a new, dual-circuit articulation, one that involves financial inputs, particularly through engagement in labour relations, in combination with the non-commodity circuits. The latter emerges through manifold, variegated, and informal linkages structured around kin and community and enabled by mobility and migration. Thus, superseding the rural–urban division of space and going beyond capitalistic relations, these comprise a contemporary form of ‘solidarity-network-based social commons’. Presented in this example from Turkey, therefore, are different ways in which smallholder farming operates as a locus of resilience for extended family and village/locality interconnectivity that offers a distance from markets, even as it utilizes them with novel forms of communally oriented autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the urban and goes beyond capital.

Looking beyond the state : transitional justice and the Kurdish issue in Turkey

ABSTRACT Transitional justice has been promoted as an approach to peace through a strengthening of the democratic rule of law, including a recognition of the rights of victims and the promotion of trust in legal mechanisms, to deal with legacies of violence and repression. A main critique of the transitional justice approach is that it leaves untouched the injustices underlying conflict and the structural causes of abuse. This article looks at ways in which the state in Turkey applied a transitional justice approach to the Kurdish issue, focusing on how it handled the legacy of forced migration and village evacuations from the 1990s. These state remedies to deal with forced migration ignored political dimensions and continued injustices. Against this context, it is argued that the concept of self-administration as it emerged in the course of the struggle of the Kurdish movement may be considered as a form of “do-it-yourself” transitional justice.

Repossession through sharing of and access to seeds: different cases and practices

ABSTRACT Seeds are both the means and product of agricultural production. The corporate appropriation of seeds affects farmers’ autonomy and has been contested and resisted by farmers worldwide through practices of repossession. This article investigates different practices of the repossession of seeds emphasising the micro-structure and recent developments in agricultural practices that lead to a commonisation of seeds. Various practices of seed repossession present in India are analysed and compared with open-source initiatives to present examples of the diversity of singular initiatives aimed at the commonisation of seeds in the Global South. The article shows that each initiative applies a multitude of concrete practices to counter what we will refer to as metabolic rift, but without a single generic strategy, each seeking in its own way to repossess seeds and (re)locate them in a social space of commons.

A State of the Art of Self Help Groups in India

Abstract This paper considers the strategies of self help group for micro-enterprise development in rural areas. It seeks to answer the question of whether and under which conditions self help groups are an effective vehicle for organizing and representing local people in the development of community based micro-enterprises. Focusing particularly on examples from India in the context of food as a local resource, special attention is paid to success and failure factors of self help groups. While self help group strategies have been applied in the past as a blind replication of success models without considering the intricacies involved in group formation, success of self help groups is based on a thorough understanding of local conditions and possibilities to intervene.

Conquering the state and subordinating society under AKP rule: a Kurdish perspective on the development of a new autocracy in Turkey

ABSTRACT The 2016 post-coup attempt measures in Turkey have been evaluated as a process of backsliding on civic rights and freedoms. This contribution takes a slightly different approach. The so-called ‘democratic breakdown’ or ‘backsliding’ in rights and the rule of law should not be regarded as a (mere) attribute of the post-coup aftermath. The idea that a process of democratization in Turkey derailed or became disrupted after the coup only feeds the myth that there had been such a process of pre-coup democratization. In this article, it is argued that the reforms often held up as a ‘democratization’ were rather instruments opportunistically employed in the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) struggle to conquer the state, to take it from a Kemalist elite and to roll back and contain a Kurdish movement that made pleas for a pluralistic citizenship and the strengthening of civil rights. These have now morphed into an overt authoritarianism, in which a regime of exceptions, not unknown to the Kurds and the Kurdistan region in Turkey, has become the norm, the particular generalized. This is what is referred to here as an ‘organizational coup’.

Rural‒Urban Mobilities in Turkey: Socio-spatial Perspectives on Migration and Return Movements

Abstract Based on original data, this article discusses rural‒urban mobilities and the contemporary employment‒migration relationship. Starting with the observation of reduced rural population but maintained family-farm numbers, it engages with multiple issues, including rural employment, the process of urban migration, settlement in the city, the relation of migrants to the rurality and (return) counter-migration. It supports the thesis that migration is not so much about a ‘movement from one place to another’, the classical migration definition, and more about a coupling of practices (related to mobilities, residence, employment, etc.) with places over time. Thus, migration and counter-migration are conceptualized as socio-spatial strategies, conceptualized as ‘multi-place living’ or ‘dual life’, which are based on variable engagements with rural farming, urban wage labour and return movements (for retirement, refuge, etc.). The newly emergent and growing dual/multi-place structures that result from this are re-shaping village life in particular, expressed in various ways, such as in a changing village demography and function.

Fitomejoramiento y racionalidad social: los efectos no intencionales de la liberación de una semilla de lupino (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet) en Ecuador

Este articulo argumenta que los resultados no intencionales de la generacion de un cultivar de lupino (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet) se forjaron en el mismo momento en que se concibio y organizo el proy...