Agriculture-oriented village conflicts: The case of Arıköy, Mazıdağı, Mardin

In Turkey, since the 2000s, conflicts over dominance in agricultural lands have been escalating, resulting in mass casualties. Analyses of news reports indicate that these conflicts have increased both in frequency and in the extent of damage as we approach the present day, with a notable concentration during the spring-summer periods and in the Southeastern Anatolia Region. The region holds significant importance due to its historical role as a vital food center since preNeolithic times and as an area of continuous settled life since the discovery of agriculture. Furthermore, being at the crossroads of Iranian-Anatolian civilizations, the region has witnessed power-sharing dynamics between central states such as the Ottoman and Safavid Empires and local feudal powers for dominance, which has institutionalized the influence of feudal and religious leaders in resolving regional issues. This has perpetuated landless peasant labor, feudal governance, and cultural norms in the region. Despite the establishment of the Republic of Turkey with its bourgeois democratic values and unitary state structure, these power dynamics have managed to persist. Although land reforms have not been effectively implemented, the decline in agricultural prices and the rise of Kurdish nationalist movements in the region have significantly contributed to the erosion of feudal power. Due to technological deficiencies, farmers in the region, who previously sustained themselves through subsistence farming on small plots, have shifted towards crop-specific patterns and direct income support with the implementation of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). Accelerated in the 1980s under the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies in Turkey, GAP was promoted by politicians of the era as a project to boost agricultural production, which had been declining compared to urban populations due to low prices and reduced support mechanisms. This study investigates the connection between neoliberal policies in Turkey, land conflicts in the region—selected as a laboratory for agricultural production—and the approaches to conflict resolution within the context of economic-political transformations. To this end, the study aims to describe the historical and contemporary events in Arıköy, a settlement where similar conflicts have persisted over the past 21 years, within the regional context, and to reveal parallels between these events through an analysis of existing literature, newspaper articles, and court records.