Abstract This article explains the social and economic changes that transpired in Turkey’s rural areas by focusing on a vigneron village in the country’s northwest. My goal is to show that the neo-liberalization of Turkey’s economy in the 1980s and the privatization of state-owned production facilities in the 2000s exacerbated the devaluation of farmers’ products […]

Abstract After decades of community mobilizing and a protracted legal battle, Maya villages in southern Belize won a watershed Indigenous land rights victory in the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2015. Since then, the state has criminalized environmental defenders, violated communal land rights, and is argued by Maya activists and alcaldes (village leaders) to be […]

Abstract Throughout a semester-long introduction to the field of political ecology, our class turned to Paul Robbins’ notion of the “hatchet” and the “seed” to categorize the goals of the field. Exploring this metaphor, we felt compelled to consider its potential within an expanded view of how racial capitalism structures socio-environmental relations. The hatchet points […]

Abstract Studies of participatory mapping consider it to be a grassroots activity that secures customary rights, the sovereignty of marginalized communities, and as a tool for conservation and sustainable resource management. Political ecology sees such grassroots struggles as sites where multiple (human) groups/actors articulate and contest their knowledge of, and control over, entities called ‘resources.’ […]