Cultivating consent: frontier-making and the politics of smallholder subordination in western Turkey’s sweet cherry frontier

Abstract The rise of neoliberal statism in Turkey, where the state acts as a developer in both urban and rural contexts, illuminates the multi-scalar, negotiated, and power-laden nature of frontier-making in the twenty-first century. The expansion of export-oriented sweet cherry production in western Turkey’s peri-urban landscapes exemplifies the uneven, non-linear, and contested trajectories of contemporary agrarian capitalism. This paper examines how a niche-commodity frontier is produced not only through shifts in political–economic and socio-ecological relations of production, but also through articulations of nationalism and moral authority grounded in religion. Among the various actors involved in this process, smallholders occupy a paradoxical position: structurally subordinated within export value chains yet discursively mobilized as key agents of frontier expansion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that the ideological hegemony underpinning the frontier hinders the formation of smallholder class consciousness. Instead, the articulation of agrarian capitalism with nationalist and developmental imaginaries, expressed through the party politics of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), secures widespread allegiance to Turkey’s current iteration of neoliberal development.