Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below
When the 20072008 food and financial crises triggered a global wave of land grabbing, scholars, activists and policy practitioners assumed that this would be met with massive peasant resistance. As empirical evidence accumulated, however, it became clear that political reactions from below to land grabbing were quite varied and complex. Violent resistance, outright expulsions, everyday weapons of the weak and demands for better terms of incorporation into land deals were among the outcomes that emerged. Readers of this collection will encounter a multinational group of scholars who use the tools of social movements theory and critical agrarian studies to examine cases from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Uganda, Mali, Ukraine, India, and Laos, as well as the Rio +20 Sustainable Development Conference. Initiatives from below in response to land deals have involved local and transnational alliances and the use of legal and extra-legal methods, and have brought victories and defeats. This book was first published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College, USA, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. His books include The logic of the latifundio (1992), Peasants against globalization (1999), The anthropology of development and globalization (co-edited 2005), Social democracy in the global periphery (co-authored 2007), Transnational agrarian movements confronting globalization (co-edited 2008), Global land grabs: history, theory and method (co-edited 2015), and Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements (co-authored 2016).
Ruth Hall is an associate professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and holds a DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on land and agrarian reform in South Africa, and she also does research on land rights, agricultural commercialization and land grabbing in Africa. She is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative and the BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies, and is the coordinator of the Future Agricultures Consortiums work on land in Africa and coordinator of its regional hub for Southern Africa.
Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is a professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands, an adjunct professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing, and a fellow of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) and of the California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First). He is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.
Ian Scoones is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK, and Director of the ESRC STEPS Centre, UK. He works on land, agricultural and agrarian and environmental change in Africa. He is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative.
Ben White is an emeritus professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. His research has focused mainly on processes of agrarian change and the anthropology and history of childhood and youth. He has been engaged in research on these issues in Indonesia since the early 1970s.
Wendy Wolford is Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, USA. Her research interests include the political economy of development, social movements, land distribution, agricultural knowledge and the politics of land management. She is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative and a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Critical Agrarian Studies
Series Editor: Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
Critical Agrarian Studies is the new accompanying book series to The Journal of Peasant Studies. It publishes selected special issues of the journal and, occasionally, books that offer major contributions in the field of critical agrarian studies. The book series builds on the long and rich history of the journal and its former accompanying book series, the Library of Peasant Studies (19732008) which had published several important monographs and special-issues-as-books.
For a full list of books in this series please visit https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Agrarian-Studies/book-series/CAG.
Recent titles in this series include:
An Endogenous Theory of Property Rights
Edited by Peter Ho
Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below
Edited by Marc Edelman, Ruth Hall, by Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Ian Scoones and Wendy Wolford
Critical Perspectives in Rural Development Studies
Edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr.
The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change
Edited by Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Philip McMichael and Ian Scoones
New Frontiers of Land Control
Edited by Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund
Outcomes of Post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe
Edited by Lionel Cliffe, Jocelyn Alexander, Ben Cousins and Rudo Gaidzanwa
Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature
Edited by James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones
The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals
Edited by Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jnr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Wendy Wolford
Rural Politics in Contemporary China
Edited by Emily T. Yeh, Kevin OBrien and Jingzhong Ye
Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions from Below
Edited by
Marc Edelman, Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White and Wendy Wolford
First published 2018
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