The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on ...the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.
Parallels, resemblances, and interconnections between contemporary right‐wing populism and the populism of agrarian movements are examined in this essay. The two are partly linked through their ...social base in the countryside. This paper explores an agenda for political conversation and research on possible contributions to the twin efforts of splitting the ranks of right‐wing populists while expanding the united front of democratic challengers. The challenge is how to transform the identified interconnections into a left‐wing political project that can erode right‐wing populism. This requires a reclaiming of populism. In exploring this agenda, the paper revisits the ideas and practices of right‐wing populism and agrarian populism and the awkward overlaps and fundamental differences between them. It concludes with a discussion on the challenge of forging a reformulated class‐conscious left‐wing populism as a countercurrent to right‐wing populism, and as a possible political force against capitalism and towards a socialist future.
Contemporary large-scale land deals are widely understood as involving the expulsion of people who, in turn, struggle instinctively to resist dispossession This is certainly true in many instances. ...Yet this chain of events evidently does not always occur: large-scale land deals do not always result in people losing the land, and many of those who face expulsion do not necessarily respond with the kind of resistance often expected of them. Indeed, much evidence shows that the nature of and responses to big land deals can (and do) vary across and within 'local communities'. Taking off analytically from a relatively narrow selection of cases, the expulsion-resistance scenario is too often assumed rather than demonstrated, thereby leaving many inconvenient facts undetected and unexplained. This suggests a need to step back and problematise the variable and uneven responses 'from below' to land grabbing, both within and between communities. This paper offers an initial exploration into why poor people affected by contemporary land deals (re)act the way they do, noting how issues and processes unite and divide them. This helps explain variation in political trajectories in the context of land grabbing today.
A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of ...authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on 'Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World', we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI,
www.iss.nl/erpi
). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.
Critical Agrarian Studies has three actual and aspirational interlocking features which together connect the worlds of academic research and practical politics: it is politically engaged, pluralist ...and internationalist. These features also defined the older generation of agrarian studies that gave birth to the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) 50 years ago, in 1973.
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Within a decade or so of the journal's inauguration, the agrarian world had been transformed radically amid neoliberal globalization. An altered world did not render agrarian studies less relevant; on the contrary, it has become even more so, but within a different context in which political engagement, pluralism and internationalism develop new meanings and manifest in new ways.
Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes ...are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de‐valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti‐capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian‐centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement‐building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.
Introduction to journal issue that addresses global land grabbing, a phrase that has become a catch-all to describe and analyze the current explosion of large scale (trans)national commercial land ...transactions. Around the world, there have been strong reactions from states, corporations, and civil society groups. Some see land grabs as a major threat to the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor, and so oppose such commercial land deals. Others see economic opportunity for the rural poor, although they are wary of corruption and negative consequences, and so call for improving land market governance. Adapted from the source document.
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on 'climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary ...capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.
Scholars, practitioners and activists generally agree that investor interest in land has climbed sharply, although they differ about what to call this phenomenon and how to analyse it. This ...introduction discusses several contested definitional, conceptual, methodological and political issues in the land grab debate. The initial 'making sense' period drew sweeping conclusions from large databases, rapid-appraisal fieldwork and local case studies. Today research examines financialisation of land, 'water grabbing', 'green grabbing' and grabbing for industrial and urbanisation projects, and a substantial literature challenges key assumptions of the early discussion (the emphasis on foreign actors in Africa and on food and biofuels production, the claim that local populations are inevitably displaced or negatively affected). The authors in this collection, representing a diversity of approaches and backgrounds, argue the need to move beyond the basic questions of the 'making sense' period of the debate and share a common commitment to connecting analyses of contemporary land grabbing to its historical antecedents and legal contexts and to longstanding agrarian political economy questions concerning forms of dispossession and accumulation, the role of labour and the impediments to the development of capitalism in agriculture. They call for more rigorous grounding of claims about impacts, for scrutiny of failed projects and for (re)examination of the longue durée, social differentiation, the agency of contending social classes and forms of grassroots resistance as key elements shaping agrarian outcomes.
Political reactions 'from below' to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed. This essay introduces a collection of ground-breaking studies that discuss ...responses that range from various types of organized and everyday resistance to demands for incorporation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals. 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. The relevance of political reactions to land grabbing is discussed in light of theories of social movements and critical agrarian studies. Future research on reactions 'from below' to land grabbing must include greater attention to gender and generational differences in both impacts and political agency.
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