This paper examines the challenges and opportunities faced by critical agrarian scholars in and from the Global South. We argue that despite the historical and structural limitations, the critical juncture of convergence of crises and renewed interest in agrarian political economies offers an opportunity for fostering a diverse research agenda that opens space for critical perspectives about, from and by the Global South, which is mostly absent in mainstream scholarship dominated by the Global North. We also propose doing so by enhancing solidarity to transform injustices within academia and other spaces of knowledge production and dissemination. To develop the argument, first, we reflect on the multiplicity of crises in rural areas and the changing character of social struggles, as well as the interlinkages between environmental crises and the re-emergence of critical agrarian studies that are reshaping the agrarian question. Then, we discuss the implications and conditions of the political agenda carried out by a scholar-activist movement working on agrarian studies from the Global South. Drawing on our experience as the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS), we conclude by proposing three ways forward for enhancing solidarity through networks of scholar-activists: knowledge accessibility, cooperative organization, and co-production of knowledge.

During the early years of the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP), Turkey was seen as a burgeoning democratic power propped up by economic prosperity in line with the reforms for European Union (EU) accession and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. However, 20 years later, it is considered an emblematic case of democratic backsliding in line with rising poverty and inequalities that have been amplified as a result of sweeping neoliberal reforms and authoritarian consolidation in the country. The recent literature has identified these concomitant and complementary modes of authoritarian governance and neoliberal policies in Turkey as ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. In this chapter, we discuss the dynamics of consolidation of authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey as well as the acts of contention against it. Building mainly on the eight case studies presented in this volume, we put forward a framework that explains the consolidation of authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey through the mechanisms of executive centralisation, autocratic legalism, cronyism, violence-fuelled rentier accumulation, criminalisation and stigmatisation, and contestations against authoritarian neoliberalism through strikes, protests, demonstrations, network building, litigation, everyday struggles, and armed acts of contention.

This paper examines seasonal migrant farmworkers in Turkey, focusing on the intersection of relations of production and social reproduction under rapidly shifting land and labour regimes. The workers are predominantly Kurds and Arabs of Turkey and Syrian refugees, and experience the intersecting crises of neoliberalism, rural-urban migration and conflict/disaster displacement in amplified ways. With an interest in gendered and generational impacts on youth and women’s labour and bodies, we argue that an analysis of social reproduction should include both intra- and inter-household relations as well as kinship/community and ritual-based dynamics such as marriage and childbearing. We show that the intersecting forces of marketisation, family, kinship and the authoritarian state sustain and reproduce seasonal migrant agricultural labour, capitalising on the exploitation of women and youth.

By focusing on recent water struggles in rural Turkey against run‐of‐the‐river hydropower plants (SHPs), the research delves into the societal and economic factors that enable or inhibit the emergence of strong mobilizations through a comparison of four localities of the Eastern Black Sea region. The main aim of the cross comparison is to determine whether there is a relationship between the forms of rural livelihood (and class position) and political mobilization against SHP construction. The article offers a multilayered relational framework to analyse rural mobilizations. Through a comparative spatial analysis of material and immaterial territories, I argue that the spatio‐economic transformation of the localities that unevenly transform rural settings in terms of production and consumption activities have an impact on the patterns, discourses, and agency in contemporary “rural” mobilizations. This is especially observable with regard to upward mobility and the middle‐classization processes embedded in crop system and household accumulation opportunities. The children of upwardly mobile farmers who became city‐based middle‐class actors tend to present an estheticized and carnivalesque framing in their resistance strategies through the re‐invention of traditions and culture, whereas the lower‐class peasants voice their grievances based strictly on material concerns.

This article combines insights from two emerging literatures on transnational private regulation: the grounding perspective and politics and power in global value chains. Drawing on a case study conducted in Turkey, it examines political economy of voluntary sustainability standards in hazelnut production, a critical but overlooked part of the chocolate value chain with no shortage of human rights scandals. Focusing on smallholders and migrant workers, it problematizes the decent work programmes of transnational private governance systems. In Turkey, the agricultural labour market is ethnically segregated, and agricultural work is carried out by seasonal migrant workers belonging to the country’s Kurdish and Arab minorities and refugees, mainly from Syria. Decent work programmes focus on these workers. Through an analysis of the roles of actors (the state, corporations, exporters, local merchants, producers, workers, and third-party certifiers) in the financialized hazelnut market, I demonstrate that farmers and workers cannot sufficiently benefit from transnational private governance programmes due to political power dynamics, market structure, and price volatility at the nation-state level. I argue that any effort to assess the impact of private-led social justice schemes in food production must include a thorough analysis of country conditions, societal conflicts, power asymmetries, and the structure of the commodity market.