Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses representations of time in olive cultivation. The rupture of Afrin’s occupation by Turkish-led militias in 2018 is evaluated against earlier changes in cultivation, which are now partly remembered in terms of pre-war continuity.

Paper long abstract:

The occupation of Syria’s Afrin region by Islamist militias under Turkish control in 2018 has brought about far-reaching demographic change. Displacing a large part of the region’s Kurdish population, it brought an influx of settlers opposed to the Asad regime, many of whom have been forcibly displaced themselves.

Before this background, this paper asks how human-olive tree relations in Afrin before 2018 are accounted for today to mark continuity and change. Agriculture, notably olive cultivation, has long provided income and stood for local and even ethnic identities in this region. After 2018, farmers were violently dispossessed by the seizing or “taxing” of the olive harvest and other crops; orchards were damaged by grazing livestock, fruit trees were cut and sold for firewood, or uprooted and removed for infrastructural as well as military projects. Drawing from conversations with (former) residents of the region, visual and textual representations on social media, and observations in Afrin between 1998 and 2011, I ask how previous changes (e.g., agrarian reforms of the 1950s/60s, urbanisation of lifestyles since the 1970s, or export-oriented cultivation of saplings since the early 2000s) are incorporated into representations of pre-war continuity or evaluated as temporal turning points. I demonstrate that, as the short-term profits made by dispossession, looting, or construction in former olive groves are juxtaposed to decades of past care invested in fruit trees and agriculture, representations of the temporalities of olive cultivation in Afrin are deeply political.