From Food Security to Food Sovereignty and the Politics of Care in Syria

Life Without Reproduction: Food, Security, and the Disruption of Autonomy in Southern Syria

It is spring 2026. Leaving Damascus, two Syrian Food Sovereignty activists and me, pass by the blossoming flower fields. On the way to Daraa, it becomes obvious that this is an agricultural area: dozens of people, especially women, are working in the fields. But after we pass the checkpoints toward Mazraʿa, in the neighboring Suwaida, this changes. The fields are still green, yet no one is working. The houses we pass are damaged: shattered windows, things thrown onto the street, graffiti on the walls reading “Al-Hajari is a Zionist”. 

Mazraʿa is one out of 35 villages that have been violently destroyed by what a report of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic frames as possible crimes against humanity1. Indeed, in July 2025, the South Syrian Province of Suwaida is attacked by Government forces accompanied by tribal fighters. Suwaida now witnessed a de facto division between areas controlled by local Druze factions allied with Hikmat al-Hajari and those under the influence of the new transitional government and pro-government forces, the so-called General Security.

Around thirty out of what people say used to be a population of 13,000, families have returned to Mazraʿa, located 12 km northwest of the city of Suwaida. In one courtyard, there is a fruit-laden lemon tree, a child’s plastic car, a small self-made goat stable, and a washing machine in the back. The village is no longer connected to electricity or water networks, everything was destroyed or stolen. The few people that have returned depend on electricity provided by the General Security – enough, they say, to run lights and charge mobile phones, and secretly also power the washing machine or refrigerator.

Every day, the families also receive food from the General Security, distributed according to the number of family members. People eat what the General Security eats, today it´s chicken with rice. They also receive drinking water in 1.5-liter bottles. There is one shop at the entrance of the village with fresh vegetables, but it is too expensive for most people. So many of them have just not eaten anything fresh since months. Still, they offer the three of us coffee, mate, tea, fresh green almonds, later even popcorn. They also say they survived the massacres and looting because they still had mouneh at home, a Syrian tradition of prepared and reserved food that can be stored for a long time.

What appears is not the absence of food. Food is being distributed. Water is being distributed. Electricity is being provided. But the infrastructures that would allow people to reproduce life on their own terms have been destroyed or made fragile. 

What has been destroyed almost entirely is the possibility of farming. Ironically the name of the village, Mazraʿa, means “field under cultivation” or “farm”.2 Our conversation had initially revolved around agroecological farming practices during the war. I had been telling them about a farm in Idlib, where the community experiments with composting and natural plant treatments and more importantly: seed saving of old Syrian varieties.  “Ah, here you have me”, now I got the interest of the member of the village’s agricultural committee who quickly came when he heard that we are visiting, sitting next to me, he opened his phone and showed us a video recorded in July 2025. It documented the aftermath of the attacks on Suwaida: the irrigation system running beneath his land had been torn out and stolen. Others say they could not collect their olives; some say “they” (the militias of both sides) harvested them instead. Tools, materials, irrigation systems, and savings were stolen or burned. 

What appears, then, is not the absence of food. Food is being distributed. Water is being distributed. Electricity is being provided. But the infrastructures that would allow people to reproduce life on their own terms — water networks, farming tools, irrigation systems, harvests, mobility, schools, clinics, communication — have been destroyed or made fragile.  

This is the limit of “food security” as a framework: it can register provision, but not the destruction of autonomy. It can count distributed food baskets, but not the loss of the conditions that allow people to farm, store, cook, repair, move, and collectively sustain life. In Mazraʿa, people are kept alive — but the means through which life reproduces itself have been violently interrupted.

Food security and food sovereignty- two fundamentally different approaches to life 

The situation in Mazraʿa suggests that the question is not simply whether people have food, but under what conditions life is governed and sustained in contexts of crisis, reconstruction and its aftermath. I want to engage here in the discussion of two dominant paradigms for thinking about contemporary food regimes: food security and food sovereignty. While these paradigms are often understood as technical approaches, they rather reflect fundamentally different understandings of life. 

Food insecurity appears primarily as a problem of access, supply, and system stabilization rather than of power, dispossession, or control over the conditions of production.

Food security approaches life as something to be secured through managed systems of production and distribution. The concept emerged in the 1970s in response to fears of global food shortages and initially focused on the stability and availability of food supplies. Over subsequent decades, it expanded to include questions of access, nutrition, vulnerability, food safety, and food preferences. The 2001 FAO definition describes food security as existing “when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Yet even as the concept broadened, it largely retained a managerial understanding of hunger: food insecurity appears primarily as a problem of access, supply, and system stabilization rather than of power, dispossession, or control over the conditions of production.3

In the late 1990s, another concept emerged from food producers themselves, namely small-scale farmers: food sovereignty. The biggest international farmers movement, La Via Campesina4, imagined it not simply as an alternative agricultural policy, but as a fundamentally different understanding of life, food, and social relations. First articulated at the 1996 World Food Summit, the concept insisted on the centrality of small-scale food producers, the accumulated knowledge of generations, ecological sustainability, and the right of communities to define their own food and agricultural systems. Against approaches that reduce hunger to questions of supply and access, food sovereignty foregrounds the political and material conditions through which food is produced: questions of land, labor, seeds, ecological relations, and collective autonomy. 

Food sovereignty foregrounds the political and material conditions through which food is produced: questions of land, labor, seeds, ecological relations, and collective autonomy.

In my discussions with people, and especially aid workers throughout the Syrian war and in post-Assad Syria, both approaches are often framed as different developmental stages: while food security approaches are deemed necessary as long as the agricultural sector is under pressure, food sovereignty could be activated once there is relief. However, this kind of discussion does not only fundamentally misunderstand the concept of security, but also the extent of care that makes agroecological farming as a main practice of food sovereignty possible. This becomes apparent when food sovereignty is appropriated as a goal of states, when it becomes a national matter of securitizing resources for the national body rather than self-determination of people. 

Rather than creating its conditions, the way security is commonly practices, conceived, devised in the hegemonic international discourse, often undermines food sovereignty. As food security and food sovereignty become mutually exclusionary practices, security appears less as a prerequisite for sovereignty than a force that limits it. Looking at food and agriculture, offers a lens through which to explore the relation between security and sovereignty.

A Critique of Security

Mark Neocleous has developed a theoretical framework to criticize the concept of security5. For the critical theorist, security is not a neutral condition of protection, but a political project tied to the preservation of bourgeois order, private property, and existing relations of domination. Security emerges historically through the policing and administration of society, especially through the management of poverty, disorder, and those considered threats to social stability. His critique is that securitization depoliticizes fundamentally political questions by reframing them as technical problems of management, risk, and control, thereby legitimizing expanded state power while obscuring structural inequalities and class relations. Rather than resolving insecurity, security discourse reproduces the very social order that generates insecurity in the first place. 

Security is not a neutral condition of protection, but a political project tied to the preservation of bourgeois order, private property, and existing relations of domination. Securitization depoliticizes fundamentally political questions and reproduces the very social order that generates insecurity in the first place.

Adopting Neocleous’ understanding of security, food security under Hafiz al-Assad – Syria´s absolute leader from 1970-2000 – appears not simply as a developmental or humanitarian project, but as a broader strategy of governing and stabilizing society through agriculture. The so-called Green Revolution under Hafiz Al-Assad in the 1970s supposedly modernized Syria´s “backward” agriculture and peasant system. By introducing what was believed to be economic farming technics, strengthened state bureaucracies, centralized systems of input distribution, and political control over rural populations, agricultural production became tied to questions of regime loyalty and social order. Through institutions such as International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), high-yielding hybrid and high-input needing seeds and technological modernization were introduced in the name of development and food security. Yet these interventions simultaneously marginalized local farming practices and deepened farmers’ dependence on state-controlled infrastructures and external agro-technical systems. Food security thus operated as a mechanism for securing political order, managing rural populations, and reproducing the regime’s control over land, labor, and agricultural life.

Post-Assad institution approaches to agriculture

The official side of agriculture politics in post-Assad Syria doesn´t go into a much different direction. ICARDA formulates its vision for the future of the agricultural sector in a corner stone document from October 2025 entitled “Reconstruction of the Agricultural Sector in Syria”. It speaks the language of stabilization of communities, the restoration of production chains, the reduction of aid dependency, and the reintegration of demobilized combatants. From this perspective, reconstruction is not only about feeding people, but about restoring social and economic order after war. Read through Neocleous’ critique of security, food security appears here less as the protection of life itself than as a technique for managing and stabilizing populations through agricultural systems, technical expertise, and institutional coordination in a post-war situation from above.

This becomes particularly visible with regards to seeds. ICARDA proposes certified seeds, centralized seed hubs, breeding programs, and regulated systems of seed circulation connected to regional research infrastructures in places such as Morocco and Lebanon. While these interventions respond to very real material destruction caused by war, they also reconstruct agriculture through systems of standardization, regulation, and centralized control. The rebuilding of seed systems is therefore simultaneously a rebuilding of power relations. Farmers are incorporated into managed production chains in which access to seeds, knowledge, and agricultural reproduction increasingly depends on external institutions and technical regimes. Rather than restoring autonomous agrarian life, such approaches risk deepening dependency and subordinating agricultural reproduction to broader logics of stabilization and governance.

Against this stands the grassroots politics of Syrian farming communities seeking reconstruction from below through the politics of care and relations. One of the most important aspects is the renewed interest in Syrian heirloom seeds by activists and farmers from all over the country. It is precisely seeds that expose the logic and limits of security-centered approaches to agriculture. While food security frameworks tend to approach food as a resource to be stabilized, managed, and secured, seeds cannot simply be “secured.” Seeds must be continuously reproduced, cultivated, exchanged, adapted, stored, and replanted across generations. Their survival depends not on control alone, but on ongoing practices of care. 

What enables food sovereignty is the material practices of care that make collective autonomy possible in the first place.

This points toward a fundamentally different political logic. Seed saving, composting, irrigation, food preparation, the sharing of seedlings, and the transmission of agricultural knowledge are not marginal or apolitical activities. They are forms of reproductive labor through which agrarian life is sustained. In this sense, what enables food sovereignty is the material practices of care that make collective autonomy possible in the first place. Against the abstraction of food into calories, supply chains, and managed populations, these practices foreground the labor of maintaining soil fertility, preserving biodiversity, sustaining communities, and reproducing life under conditions of destruction and displacement.

Seeds reveal this contradiction particularly sharply. Centralized seed banks may preserve genetic material, but preservation alone does not sustain living agricultural systems. Hybrid seeds deepen dependency on external markets and thus expose farmers to the market´s vulnerability and annual repurchase cycles, while war and displacement sever the social relations through which seeds are reproduced and circulated locally. As the dominant Security logic asks how resources can be secured and controlled, practices centered on seeds ask how life can be collectively reproduced over time? Heirloom (baladi) seeds persist not through enclosure but through ongoing practices of cultivation, exchange, and care. The politics emerging around these seeds in Syria therefore challenge not only industrial agriculture, but also the underlying ontology of security itself. 

The Politics of Care 

Zaher is distributing vegetable seedlings in his home villages in the countryside of Saraqeb (Idlib province). The village was looted and occupied by Iranian forces allied with the Assad regime in 2019, until people could return after the fall of the regime. Zaher uses the distributions not only to strengthen families´ abilities to live and survive the difficult times after return. For him, this is also about forging relations – old and new ones because the displacement of the farming communities also destroyed the bonds of trust that need to be re-established. 

Care is neither apolitical nor reducible to charity. It is expressed through irrigation timing, compost preparation, pest observation, training, transparency, follow-up, and collective responsibility toward the village and farming community. 

Saad from Salamiya – located in the middle of Syria – a 29-year-old farmer who is very active in his village community and loves to experiment, describes farming as “care”. Care, in his descriptions, is neither apolitical nor reducible to charity. It is expressed through irrigation timing, compost preparation, pest observation, training, transparency, follow-up, and collective responsibility toward the village and farming community. Even though Saad’s village was not affected by the destruction of the war, the fear of the Assad-regime who detained his brother, paralyzed him and restricted his activities still persists. Saad is now part of the agricultural committee of his village, a democratically elected body that serves the community, just took a training in removing war remnants from agricultural land, and loves to participate in the civil society activities such as dialogue rounds happening currently in his home town. For him, agriculture is not a technical sector separated from social life, but an ecology of interdependence in which sustaining soil fertility, supporting farmers, maintaining trust, and protecting coexistence are deeply intertwined. In this sense, care becomes a mode of agrarian governance from below — one grounded in maintenance, situated knowledge, and the collective reproduction of life rather than in the securitized management of populations. 

Agroecological practices of agriculture, especially in times of reconstruction when land and soil have to be regenerated, demand care. They depend on continuous acts of observation, training, experimentation, and collective responsibility. This stands in tension with dominant security-centered approaches to agriculture, which often frame life primarily as something to be stabilized and managed. As Mark Neocleous notes, the concept of security etymologically derives from the Latin sine cura — “without care” — referring to a condition free from uncertainty and disturbance. Yet the situations encountered in places such as Mazraʿa or in conversations with farmers like Zaher and Saad suggest that agricultural life cannot be sustained through stabilization alone. What appears as “security” often means not the flourishing of life, but its controlled survival. 

Beyond `Ajz: Mazraʿa and the Limits of Humanitarian approaches

In Mazraʿa, people receive aid, but remain cut off from the infrastructures necessary to rebuild autonomous agricultural life: water systems, functioning markets, seeds, electricity, tools, and stable access to land. Life continues, but under conditions of fragility and dependency. What the community would need more urgently after the severe shock of the massacres during the war that took more than 1500 lives are practices of care. As “security” generally denotes the management of minimal survival and social order, it neither implies nor targets the restoration of collective capacities to sustain life. In this sense, food security risks becoming less the opposite of violence than a way of administering its aftermath. 

While these practices are not always articulated through an explicitly feminist language, they nevertheless resonate strongly with feminist concerns around care, social reproduction, and interdependence. 

Reading these dynamics through Neocleous’ framework also reveals how food security can operate as a form of policing life. Food baskets, beneficiary lists, and distributions organized according to household size are not merely humanitarian tools, but also techniques of legibility and administration through which populations become governable. Centralized provisioning – here through the government in Damascus – replaces local production, while communities are gradually transformed from producers into managed recipients of aid. Rather than strengthening the autonomous reproduction of life, such systems risk deepening dependency on external institutions, logistical infrastructures, and bureaucratic forms of control. Food security therefore risks depoliticizing fundamentally political struggles over land, labor, infrastructure, and ecological reproduction. In conversation with the agricultural committee in Mazra´a, one farmer finally says he will make his tools himself and work the soil by hand rather than remaining in the situation of “´ajz” – the inability to produce food themselves.

Against this logic, practices such as those articulated by Zaher, Saad, or the people in Mazraʿa point toward a different understanding of agriculture: not as the administration of survival, but as the collective and caring reproduction of life. While these practices are not always articulated through an explicitly feminist language, they nevertheless resonate strongly with feminist concerns around care, social reproduction, and interdependence. In the Syrian context, discussions around food sovereignty often emerge not primarily within formal feminist circles, but through the everyday practices of those engaged in sustaining agricultural life. Journalists and activists such as the feminist Rula Asad have begun documenting these experiences6, bringing questions of seeds, care, and social reproduction into broader political conversations. At the same time, food sovereignty and agroecology are increasingly becoming spaces through which many leftist and feminist activists’ experiment with alternative forms of political organizing. Rather than building politics around ideological affiliation or party structures, these initiatives create relationships through shared practices of cultivation, knowledge exchange, and mutual support.  

Through relationships of trust, agricultural hospitality, knowledge-sharing, and collective responsibility, they cultivate forms of collective flourishing that stand in sharp contrast to the managerial logics of security

In a context where many progressive political bodies have struggled to articulate cross-sectarian and socially rooted emancipatory projects after the fall of the Assad regime, agricultural initiatives have become unexpected sites of encounter. Their significance lies not in whether those involved identify themselves as feminist, but in the forms of social and political life they make possible. Through relationships of trust, agricultural hospitality, knowledge-sharing, and collective responsibility, they cultivate forms of collective flourishing that stand in sharp contrast to the managerial logics of security. Rather than centering control and protection, these practices foreground local sovereignty and the collective reproduction of life.