The critical in agrarian studies

The transformation and evolution of the field are noteworthy to understand today’s discussions and diversified questions of the field. The origin of critical agrarian studies drew upon peasant studies and emerged as a response to the unravelling of peasant studies’ general approaches. The political, social, and economic conditions/processes of the era, along with developments and the turns (particularly post-turns) in the social sciences, had a significant influence on the transformation of the field (Akram-Lodhi et al. Reference Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay2021; Borras Reference Borras2009, Reference Borras2023; Edelman and Wolford Reference Edelman and Wolford2017).

In the late nineteenth century, one of the most prominent political discussions was the “die Agrarfrage” (the agrarian question) (Kautsky Reference Kautsky1988), which can be broadly and roughly defined as the political implications of how the capitalist mode of production, along with capitalist processes and relations, penetrates rural areas. Through the 1950s, the peasantry had been treated largely as an economically based analytical category. Beginning in the 1960s, approaches to the peasantry and agriculture began to shift. The peasantry started to be analyzed in the historical contexts of resistance, power and production relations, capitalism, and colonialism (Scott Reference Scott1976; Shanin Reference Shanin1971; Wolf Reference Wolf1965). The revival of agrarian studies in the 1970s occurred alongside a renewed attention to the peasant question and agricultural issues. The Journal of Peasant Studies also began publication during this period, becoming a major platform for these debates. The transformation of peasant studies into agrarian studies, and particularly into critical agrarian studies, demonstrates the field’s ability to renew itself and develop dialogues with a multitude of disciplines and scholarly traditions (Akram-Lodhi and Kay Reference Akram-Lodhi and Kay2012; Borras Reference Borras2023; Edelman and Wolford Reference Edelman and Wolford2017). While critical scholars from various disciplines within the field address and challenge power structures and relations to understand “agrarian life, livelihoods, formations, and their processes of change” (Akram-Lodhi et al. Reference Akram-Lodhi, Dietz, Engels and McKay2021, 1), the field’s efforts to challenge dominant narratives and orthodoxies are what make it “critical,” thereby paving the way for the possibility of change.

The re-revival of the agrarian debates started with the twenty-first century. Through this second wave of revival, the classical debate/question and centerpiece of the field, the agrarian question, originally formulated to address the role of agriculture in capitalist development and the fate of the peasantry, has undergone significant renewal and diversification in recent decades. Within today’s complex and intertwined processes and conditions, and in light of recent theoretical developments in the social sciences, this question can be reconsidered, reformulated, and even multiplied or diversified to address contemporary realities such as (the end of) neoliberal globalization, climate change, land grabbing, and the loss of food sovereignty (Akram-Lodhi and Kay Reference Akram-Lodhi and Kay2012; Bernstein Reference Bernstein1996, Reference Bernstein2006; Edelman and Wolford Reference Edelman and Wolford2017; McMichael Reference McMichael2014).

The agrarian question no longer rests on merely orthodoxy political economy but is multi-relational, reflecting intersecting crises and shifting analytical lenses within critical agrarian studies. The agrarian question of labor examines the reorganization of rural labor under neoliberal globalization, migration, and proletarianization processes (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2010; Li Reference Li2014). The agrarian question of capital analyzes the deepening penetration of capital into agrarian sectors through financialization, corporate farming, and agro-industrial restructuring (Akram-Lodhi and Kay Reference Akram-Lodhi and Kay2012; Byres Reference Byres1996). The agrarian question of gender highlights how land tenure, labor burdens, and food production are gendered and how women disproportionately are affected by dispossession and marginalization (Agarwal Reference Agarwal1994; Tsikata and Golah Reference Tsikata and Golah2010). The agrarian question of dispossession/depeasantization focuses on the decline of smallholder farming and the transformation of peasants into wage laborers or precarious informal workers (Araghi Reference Araghi1995; Bryceson Reference Bryceson, Bryceson, Kay and Mooij2000; Moyo and Yeros Reference Moyo and Yeros2005; Van der Ploeg Reference Van der Ploeg2013). The agrarian question of food underlines the commoditization of food and agriculture within the global corporate food regime. It connects debates on food sovereignty and corporate control of agriculture to broader concerns over justice and sustainability (Holt Giménez and Shattuck Reference Holt Giménez and Shattuck2011; McMichael Reference McMichael2014; Patel Reference Patel2009; Weis Reference Weis2008). The agrarian question of land addresses the land rush/grabs, revealing the appropriation of land for industrial agriculture, extractivism, and speculation (Borras Jr et al. Reference Borras, Hall, Scoones, White and Wolford2011; Fairbairn Reference Fairbairn2020; White et al. Reference White, Borras, Hall, Scoones and Wolford2012; Wolford et al. Reference Wolford, White, Scoones, Hall, Edelman and Borras2025). The agrarian question of ecology investigates the ecological contradictions of capitalist agriculture, including soil depletion, deforestation, and climate change (Moore Reference Moore2015; Perfecto et al. Reference Perfecto, Vandermeer and Wright2009).

Even though these questions can be reformulated and multiplied, the complex relationships between socio-ecology, land, nature, food, social divisions, and agrarian/rural settings make it difficult to address them separately. Instead, this intricacy pushes the field to adapt multi-analytical tools, like including multi-scalar, multi-actor, and, even at times, multi-temporal approaches. Today, critical agrarian studies encompass a wide range of concepts and debates, from agricultural production settings to food sovereignty, from financialization to commodification, from extractivism to land grabs, and from environmental change to biodiversity loss. This diversification stems from multiple, interrelated factors that influence one another simultaneously. The field is not only diversifying and expanding in terms of space, actors, and temporality; it is also undergoing an epistemological and ontological shift, as it increasingly seeks to encompass domains and entities beyond the human, such as land, nature, and ecology.

Critical agrarian studies in Turkey have also developed certain parallels with the broader field. The agrarian question has also been a highly debated issue (Boratav Reference Boratav1981; Köymen Reference Köymen2008; Öztürk Reference Öztürk2012; Pamuk and Toprak Reference Pamuk and Toprak1988). While the debate focus was on whether the structure of Turkish agriculture is capitalist or semi-feudal in the 1960s and 1970s, throughout the 1980s the debates in Turkey have changed in line with neoliberal globalization and neoliberalization of agriculture. The direction of the debates on the agrarian question changed to deagrarianization and the decline of the rural population through the withdrawal of the state from agricultural production and huge cuts in the agricultural sector, and to the effects of neoliberal policies on agricultural/rural transformation (Aydin Reference Aydin2010; Keyder and Yenal Reference Keyder and Yenal2011, Reference Keyder and Yenal2013).

Turkey is still among the countries where rural communities persist, more precisely, where diverse communities keep their ties to agricultural production, albeit in transformed and evolving forms. One of the recent debates is on (re)peasantization. Moreover, one of the key debates that has come to the fore in recent years is whether it is possible to speak of a “new/neo peasantry” (Öztürk et al. Reference Öztürk, Jongerden and Hilton2018; Türkkan Reference Türkkan2025), different than reversed migration. A growing body of literature focuses on middle-class, educated, and capital-and network-rich groups migrating from urban to rural areas for agricultural production, as well as on the alternative food networks they engage with, and on the “alternative” character of these networks. In contrast to the dominant depeasantization literature, the emerging repeasantization literature in Turkey may constitute one of the key pillars for understanding rural and agricultural transformation – namely, the agrarian question of repeasantization. However, contrary to neo-Chayanovian perspectives, as debated in the broader literature, there is also a significant attention to issues of seasonal agricultural labor, through migration, ethnicity, race, and gender (Dedeoğlu Reference Dedeoğlu2018; Duruiz Reference Duruiz, Gambetti and Jongerden2015; Kavak Reference Kavak2016; Küçükkırca Reference Küçükkırca2012; Pelek Reference Pelek2022), who compensate for the labor crisis in rural areas caused by depeasantization with their cheap labor through patriarchal and racial capitalism. These discussions reveal the complexity and heterogeneity of rural actors in Turkey. In recent decades, there has also been a notable rise in cooperatives, food initiatives, and agroecological movements emerging from both rural and urban contexts. This proliferation of actors from diverse socio-political, socio-economic, and cultural backgrounds and their intricate relationalities with each other call for a more nuanced and multifaceted analysis of the rural and the agrarian.

Throughout the revivals and turns, agrarian studies today paved the ways for analytically and critically deeper accounts. One way to further deepen the “critical” edge of the field in Turkey is decentering human exceptionalism within theoretical, analytical, and methodological frameworks and contexts. This does not entail removing humans from the analysis but rather involves challenging the assumption that only humans matter. By bringing attention to the inequalities among human actors alongside the agency of nonhuman entities, we can open up new analytical possibilities and foster a more nuanced understanding of agrarian dynamics, change, and contexts. In the following section, I adopt this approach through an analysis of the books listed above.

Thinking through (new) materiality

Agrarian studies have traditionally relied on anthropocentric analyses of agrarian settings, formation, and livelihoods through state policies, class dynamics and relations, and peasants’ resistances, whereas more-than-human actors, often grouped under terms like “nature,” the “environment,” or “ecologies,” have typically been treated as passive backdrops against which human agricultural activity unfolds. However, there has been a growing emphasis on the vital role of nonhuman actors (Holloway Reference Holloway2007; Li Reference Li2014; Tsing Reference Tsing2015) in shaping agrarian life. As various turns in the social sciences and global crises, including those of climate, food, land, finance, environment, labor, and migration, have intensified, agrarian studies have evolved beyond merely offering “critical” analyses that challenge power relations and expose inequalities among human actors. They have also increasingly engaged in deeper theoretical and analytical efforts to reconceptualize fundamental actors/elements such as land, water, weather, nature, food, and seeds. The four books on Turkey reviewed in this paper have potential to contribute to this emerging body of scholarship by expanding and deepening the ground for rethinking key questions through a more-than-human lens.

One of the common grounds or primary framework these books are rested on is that in one way or another they have a more-than-human approach. Deploying a deeper (new) material lens, Material Politics in Turkey and How to Make a Wetland directly address the formative role of materiality not only in politics but also in ecology through infrastructures, science, techniques, and expertise. As these two books are determined to leave no black box behind them, the questions and theoretical layers of The Political Ecology of Violence and Bulldozer Capitalism: Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey are slightly different but still grasp a more-than-human approach. Bulldozer Capitalism explains the decline of resistance and political responses against extractive and infrastructural projects, drawing upon not only simply religious and nationalist sentiments but also upon “the material relations, interests and needs woven around infrastructure, real estate, and resource extraction” (p. 15). The Political Ecology of Violence puts the analytical emphasis on the environmental perspective of historical violent processes by analyzing the complex and elusive effects of environmental crisis or disasters on agrarian and herding economies through which slow violence has been transformed into organized violence. One of the theoretical and analytical frameworks that draws upon a more-than-human lens is new materiality,Footnote ² which forms the ground of two of the books reviewed in this paper, Material Politics in Turkey and How to Make a Wetland. These works emphasizing the importance of materiality and material infrastructures offer significant insights into the concepts of state, politics, morality, land, water, nature, and ecology, as well as their relationalities and restructuring in rural areas.

As a remarkable edited collection pinpointing the integrity of material entities and processes, Material Politics in Turkey discusses the making processes of modern Turkish politics (like nation-building) by focusing on infrastructures like water pipes, power lines (Alkan), fountains (Uzmay), and mines (Az). Another substantial work revealing the constitutive role of the materiality of environmental infrastructures and expertise is Scaramelli’s book, How to Make a Wetland. The book depicts a broad and analytical account of the making process of Turkish wetlands by tracing the intricate relationalities of ecologies of shallow water and different human actors like scientists, state bureaucrats, non-governmental organization (NGO) experts, biologists, farmers, and residents from the middle and lower classes. This work of Scaramelli also analyzes how ecologies and infrastructures, as dynamic environments, are the ways of “moral claims about valuations of human and nonhuman livelihoods in their ecological entanglements” (p. 9). Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate how the moral ecologies of water, sediments, and infrastructures in the Gediz Delta are contested by different actors. In the following two chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), she focuses on the “scientists’ care for the Kızılırmak Delta and to the effects of wetland regulations on the livelihood of delta residents-farmers and fisher, and also including birds, fish and bovines” (p. 23). Her taking the infrastructure as an assemblage paves the way for embracing materials, technologies, ontologies, knowledge, and their complex relationalities simultaneously. The study emphasizes the “mutual constitution of ecologies and infrastructures” (p. 9).

These two books are significant examples of works that address the importance of materiality and infrastructure in shaping politics and ecologies. They both raise key questions in light of recent debates in critical agrarian studies. New materiality has profound implications for the way we approach and conceptualize land, water, and property, which have traditionally been at the heart of the most important debates in critical agrarian studies, as well as nature and ecology, which have been increasingly studied in recent decades. While land is both the site of economic relations and the source of economic profit, material and ontological turns have led to a much more complex conceptualization. It matters to consider materiality (Keane Reference Keane and Miller2005; Miller Reference Miller and Miller2005) and material politics (Barad Reference Barad2003; Braun and Whatmore Reference Braun and Whatmore2010; Law and Mol Reference Law and Mol1995) because soil, water, climate, animals, trees, and other nonhuman actors each have their own rhythms, cycles, and agencies (Latour Reference Latour2005), even when they are not alive (Bennett Reference Bennett2010). For instance, Dinç treats gold’s materiality, alongside the “particular material processes of assembling gold” (p. 235), as one of the integral parts of making risk central to sociopolitical conflicts. Similarly, Scaramelli demonstrates how wetlands are co-produced through conflicts, negotiations, and the moralities that emerge precisely from their ambiguous materiality. Özkan likewise shows how forest mud contributes to an ambiguous materiality that “defines interactions between citizens and states” (p. 93). Building on this material turn, it is important to rethink how the particularities of soil, plants, trees, and agricultural products influence production relations and rural formation, especially amid changing agrarian structures. Crop switching, for example, is often portrayed as a purely strategic response to market demands and economic incentives. From a materiality perspective, however, the materiality of each crop can itself shape farmers’ adaptation strategies and forms of resistance under worsening ecological and economic conditions. However, the local and historical context, along with the specific material characteristics of a chosen crop, reveal more complex dynamics when examined through the human–environment entanglements (Tsing Reference Tsing2015). The type or variety of crop, which product is chosen and through which processes, carries its own rhythm, ecology, and constraints. Making this visible allows for a richer understanding of agrarian/rural settings and change (Li Reference Li2014).

Studying politics and (moral) ecologies as/through/of material infrastructures

The literature on infrastructure has expanded rapidly through the broadening of the concept from human-made systems to environmental infrastructure and even people as forms of infrastructure (Adalet Reference Adalet2018; Björkman Reference Björkman2015; Carse Reference Carse2014; Schwenkel Reference Schwenkel2015; Simone Reference Simone2004). The books reviewed here contribute to this growing body of literature by incorporating Turkey’s politics and ecologies into the analysis as/through/of material infrastructure. The editors of Material Politics in Turkey underline the appeal of analyzing Turkey through infrastructures, noting how the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s understanding of public service is predominantly rooted in constructing roads, airports, power plants, and similar projects. Therefore, the chapters of the first part of the book, The Politics of Infrastructure, analyze the material compositions of the infrastructures of Turkey like canals, pipes, grids, fountains, waters, and microbial communities, and how these compositions “accrete, change, or persist” (p. 8). This part explores the infrastructural politics of Turkey, as the studies concentrate on the material compositions of the infrastructures they examine. The chapters, moreover, offer an analysis of the roles of technoscientific experts, state actors, and ordinary people in designing, controlling, and governing the infrastructures’ materiality. Tracing the promises and practices of infrastructural buildup through the power lines and water pipes of GAP (the Southeastern Anatolian Project), Aybike Alkan indicates how energy projects – for the sake of national interests – have been prioritized over irrigation development – at the expense of regional development which exacerbated the existing intra-regional inequalities in Turkey. Following a similar thread but from a different scale, Asya Ece Uzmay offers an analysis of the entangled relationalities of the water infrastructures of İstanbul and the politics of urban modernization on the city scale. Irem Az investigates the formative role of thermal energy infrastructures “in shaping contemporary Turkey’s welfare and labor regimes” (p. 9).

Scaramelli’s book does fascinating work to show how some types of birds and animals are valued as important and identified with the wetlands, and through which mechanisms and based on which techniques some other species have been excluded, and thus, so to speak, erased, through the contestations and negotiations between different groups. In other words, Scaramelli depicts a complex story of ecology-making, infrastructure-making, and morality-making in, through and of shallow waters, assembling different human actors and the material entanglements of this dynamic and complex environment. Through the conceptualization of moral ecology, the book makes the power relations and inequalities visible in the daily scale of “environmental politics, ethics, and practices” (p. 9). It shows that what is framed as “moral” can, in practice, legitimize deeply immoral and harmful actions. Pehlivan, keeping her more-than-human perspective, examines the integral role of the telegraph network, as an infrastructure and technology of power, within the late nineteenth century of Ottoman Kurdistan while depicting “the political and structure of Hamidian-era Ottoman state” (p. 232). The private telegraph line at Yıldız Palace allowed Sultan Abdülhamid II to bypass bureaucratic layers and directly reach provincial authorities – an infrastructural advantage which, as the author argues, facilitated the coordination of organized, state-led acts of violence. Evren’s book, Bulldozer Capitalism, investigates how negotiations, investments, and speculations unfold through the destruction and construction of both human and environmental infrastructures. Concentrating on the Çoruh Valley, the study offers a compelling example of how local communities accommodate their own dispossession and displacement along with the destruction and construction of infrastructures.

Thinking through material infrastructure provides a new analytical lens for unpacking the intricate relationalities of the state and the rural settings. In debates on the restructuring role(s) of the state, discussions often focus on how state functions have changed in the neoliberal era, particularly through agricultural support policies such as subsidies. However, some studies shift attention to the state’s increasingly “mediating” or “withdrawing” role in agriculture, and how this transformation affects rural communities. Yet the role of the state and capital in rural areas is far more complex and ambiguous. Thinking through material infrastructure opens up new ground to engage with this complexity and ambiguity. The roles of infrastructure in agrarian studies have traditionally and generally been analyzed from socio-economic perspectives. These studies show how the state restructures itself in rural areas not only through the construction and destruction of infrastructures such as dams, but also through their maintenance – reshaping ecologies and local regimes, including property and labor relations (Barnes Reference Barnes2017; Kurtiç Reference Kurtiç2023). Moreover, agriculture itself is taken as biopolitical infrastructure to understand agrarian development in terms of internal colonialism and racialized methods in state-building (Adalet Reference Adalet2022). In order to apprehend the agrarian settings and change within a certain spatio-temporal context, this body of literature contributes to a deeper analysis of the agrarian question by indicating the complex relationalities of racial landscapes, infrastructures, and state formation.

Infrastructure cannot be understood merely as an economic or political tool, but rather as a political–ecological transformation in itself. We witness diverse forms of state sovereignty and governance unfolding in rural areas through infrastructure-building, simultaneously entangled with processes of state-making, citizen-making, and nation-making. Moving beyond classical and one-dimensional approaches that emphasized the state’s withdrawal from rural areas or rural production, recent studies reveal how the state restructures both economic and political sovereignty, or engages in nation-building, through material infrastructures in rural contexts. The role of the state extends beyond regulation through policies and subsidies. It also involves reshaping landscapes, waterscapes, forests, nature, and labor through infrastructure-building or science or expertise. The following part of the paper will focus more on the integral role of science, knowledge, and expertise in the making of material worlds.

Science and different forms of knowledge

The intricate relationship between knowledge and power has long been a subject of study in the social sciences. However, STS scholarship (Jasanoff Reference Jasanoff2006; Latour Reference Latour1987; Li Reference Li2007; Mol Reference Mol2002) moves beyond this classical framework, offering a more nuanced analysis by illustrating how scientific knowledge is produced through everyday practices of conflict, negotiation, and compromise. Drawing upon this body of scholarship, Material Politics in Turkey and How to Make a Wetland bring together compelling essays that explore the constitutive roles and intricate relationalities between scientists, knowledge, and expertise. Material Politics in Turkey demonstrates the role of science in making material worlds scientific by delving into the forest (Özkan), food production (Tatari), wetlands (Scaramelli), and “subterranean resources” (Oğuz). Moreover, the third part of the book explores the translation of techniques and expertise, on a transnational scale, in military bases (Şen), sports (Evren), and mineral “resources” (Dinç).

These studies pave the way for offering analytical tools to apprehend science, expertise, and materiality in (re)shaping rural environments, agricultural knowledge, and practices. To provide an account of nature-making, state-building, and subject formation, Hande Özkan traces the liminality of the forest – situated between terrestrial and aquatic domains – and focuses on how its ambiguous materiality is negotiated through the discourse of scientific forestry. Through the complex relationship between state-appointed forest engineers, forest guards, and forest villagers, the chapter reveals a negotiated reality in forestry practices and policies (p. 113). Fatih Tatari also offers another substantial account of the negotiations between scientific experts and local actors while tracing the cheesemaking processes in Kars’s pasturelands. Furthermore, this study shows how scientific knowledge is produced through these negotiations and encounters between these groups on a local scale. In a similar vein, Caterina Scaramelli’s chapter analyzes how different groups of experts like environmental advocates, bureaucrats, and scientists use claims and practices of scientific expertise to develop “varied sociopolitical claims and visions of livelihoods of the wetlands” (p. 144). In parallel with Scaramelli, Zeynep Oğuz’s account of oil exploration in Turkey brings out not only the role of scientific knowledge but also the indeterminate materiality of oil in Turkey as another analysis of material politics in Turkey. All these pieces, in one way or another, demonstrate that “material life has an agency that is not autonomous from, but integral to, the construction of political processes” (p. 96). They unpack the diverse ways in which material life is rendered scientific by bringing into focus the complex relationships between human and nonhuman actors.

Studies of scientific knowledge that uncover how power–knowledge and nature–culture relations are produced in everyday settings, such as laboratories, forests, pastures, farms, and wetlands, are valuable for revealing these entanglements. However, in fields like critical agrarian studies, which are grounded in activist and solidarity-based traditions, it becomes significant to democratize knowledge for both human and nonhuman actors. At this point, questions concerning who participates in the production of knowledge, which groups are included, to what extent, and the nature of that participation emerge as key concerns (Fricker Reference Fricker2007; Harding Reference Harding1991; Santos Reference Santos2015).

The case of Tatari can serve as a constructive example of collaboration between scientists and local actors in the co-production of knowledge. It shows how more just and democratic forms of knowledge can be generated in response to current and impending global crises, such as climate change. The rapidly growing body of literature on agroecology, both globally and in Turkey, has conceptualized it not only as a production system but also as a site of resistance (Desmarais Reference Desmarais2007; Rosset and Altieri Reference Rosset and Altieri2017). One way to further strengthen this space is to expand its conceptualization to include forms of epistemic resistance (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2015; Rosset and Altieri Reference Rosset and Altieri2017). Establishing, empowering, and sustaining such spaces of epistemic resistance may offer a meaningful contribution to the agroecology literature in Turkey. Furthermore, when considering alternative forms of agricultural production, how can we think about fairness – not only toward different groups of people, such as small communities, seasonal workers, child workers, and women – but also toward nonhuman actors like soil, rivers, forests, and diverse ecologies? Asking this question pushes us to seek deeper and more serious answers to how agricultural production can be reimagined beyond humans. It invites us to reconsider relational ethics and justice that encompass both human and more-than-human worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017; Schlosberg Reference Schlosberg2007).

Scaramelli’s study contributes to the expanding body of green grabbing literature (Fairhead et al. Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012) that investigates the evolving forms of dispossession in recent decades. The concept of green grabbing refers to the appropriation of land, water, and other natural “resources” not only by states or private cooperations, but also by NGOs, often under the guise of environmental protection, conservation, ecological restoration, or sustainability. The author demonstrates how wetland restoration has led to the exclusion of local people, farmers, and peasants from access to and control over waterscapes, even as nature is being “restored” through its most “attractive” species, such as birds. Wetland engineering, in this context, is not merely a technical process but a means of asserting the state’s sovereignty over nature. Through expert knowledge transformed into policies and the scientific classification of nature, the state reshapes and even recreates rural settings and regimes. In the process of materially reconstructing nature in the name of rehabilitation, a hierarchy emerges between the priorities of state authorities and experts, and the everyday practices of local communities. Drawing on the green grabbing literature, for instance, rehabilitation in uplands to protect dams (Kurtiç Reference Kurtiç2023) and ecological restoration (Büscher and Fletcher Reference Büscher and Fletcher2015) are here revealed as new forms of dispossession. Such environmental interventions, in turn, produce new property regimes and reconfigure access to and (re)shape nature in rural areas, often excluding local communities in the process.

Violence making landscapes

Another substantial factor shaping the local communities, geographies, landscapes, and waterscapes is violence which, one way or another, is embedded in various processes of -making, -shaping, and -building. While Zozan conceptualizes violence as silent, manifested through long-term ecological transformation and organized forms of state control, Evren approaches violence through the process of ruination, and as reverberations of the history of violence (re)shaping contemporary landscapes. In addition to the valuable insights discussed above, these two books also contribute to critical agrarian studies by foregrounding violence as an integral force in the making of landscapes, through the destruction of ecologies and the displacement (or destruction) of local communities of the rural areas.

In the case of Evren’s Bulldozer Capitalism, the author has been washed away by the histories of geography through reverberations. The book shows us how the violence of history reverberates in the contemporary landscapes and infrastructure of Yusufeli. The author traces the answer to the question of “how the disappearance of Armenian lives, and the destruction and plundering of their property more than a century ago continues to reverberate in the present” (p. 107). According to the author, the role of this violence history rendered “the local community susceptible to the ruins that history has accumulated in the past hundred years, opening transitory cracks in its official narratives of triumph and victory to which its members are invariably interpellated” (p. 108). The ethnographic research and the archive records that Evren serendipitously runs across in the basement archive brought the author to “echoes of past violence in the contemporary moment” (p. 108). The author, by tracing the reverberations of the originary violence across time and space, claims that “the bulldozer variant of capitalist development” produces the originary accumulation once again (p. 108). According to him, no matter in which form, whether taking advantage of the properties grabbed in the past or looting the properties of the previous residents, the efforts to be rich within the ongoing destructions lead to the reverberation of violence and originary accumulation in the present.

As an environmental account of violence history, Pehlivan’s book The Political Ecology of Violence provides a pathbreaking ground to apprehend the violent history of Ottoman Kurdistan by tracing the environmental disruptions and their variable uneven and destructive impacts on different economies of the region in the late nineteenth century. The study, deploying substantial archive research with data from different sciences, traces the dynamics that escalated the tension between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian farmers step-by-step. As the environmental crisis, whose impacts are conceptualized as slow violence by the author, unfolded, Pehlivan depicts how different ecologies and economic communities of the region have been asymmetrically affected in varied ways. For example, while the peasants had a chance to keep their herd and draft animals sheltered, the pastoralists’ herds and the community itself, due to their mobile lifestyle, were adversely affected by climatic anomalies. Moreover, in case of disasters derived from diseases, the grain-crop farmers were more resilient than the pastoralists since the herds’ recovery process took much longer than the crop’s recovery. Furthermore, the agrarian communities had more survival strategies than the herding communities in these cases. At this point, the role of the state is also analyzed in detail. The Ottoman state, with its discriminatory policies based on prioritizing some economic and political concerns over others, responded to local ecological crises by providing relief aid or financial assistance to the peasants to keep the agricultural production and basic food supplies during the episodes of drought and severe cold. This “hierarchy of concern” induced an escalation of tension between these two economically different groups. Moreover, the book analyzes how the state took advantage of the conditions that slow violence led to in order “to incorporate Kurdish tribes into the state apparatus through militia recruitment and then used this force as an instrument of violence against the Armenian peasantry” (p. 271).

While Pehlivan’s study historically traces how environmental disasters and crises have shaped the region’s ecological, socio-economic, and violent histories during late Ottoman times, the reverberations of violence in Turkey manifest in Evren’s work through the destruction and reconstruction of built and environmental infrastructures, and in Scaramelli’s analysis through the reshaping of ecologies and landscapes in the service of making Turkish ecology in the deltas.

In the human geography of Turkey, violence has played a pivotal role in shaping landscapes, forging the nation and the state, and ultimately constructing modern Turkey. Often deployed as a means of transferring property, land, and capital, this violence disproportionately targeted ethnic groups excluded from the national identity – groups that nonetheless held significant land and resources. Understanding the reverberations of this history is essential for unpacking the power relations, patterns of land distribution, and ownership structures among different human actors. A critical analysis of the power relations over landscapes and land ownership in the modern history of Turkey supplies clues for understanding and interpreting today’s inequalities and power relations. Alkan, in “Water pipes versus power lines,” highlights the shifting power relations within different human actors, shaped by the geographical distribution of the irrigation channels in southeastern Turkey. Her analysis reveals how the state strategically prioritized its political concerns by directing irrigation infrastructure toward agricultural landscapes that were not perceived as threats to national unity. Similarly, in her chapter “The Empire of Priorities,” Pehlivan illustrates how the state, by privileging certain concerns over others, implemented discriminatory relief policies in the late nineteenth century in almost the same region. These reverberations across the landscapes of Turkey connect past and present, offering a critical lens through which to understand the entangled dynamics of state-making, landscape, knowledge, power, and materiality.