Under the guise of development, land is being commodified and
concentrated at the expense of the rural poor
In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have
rolled back ..."land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of
Cold War-era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land
concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at
the expense of smallholder farmers, exposes the convergence of
capitalist relations and state agendas that expand territorial
control within and across national borders. Turning Land into
Capital examines the contradictions produced by superimposing
twenty-first-century neoliberal projects onto diverse landscapes
etched by decades of war and state socialism.
Chapters in the book explore geopolitics, legacies of
colonialism, ideologies of development, and strategies to achieve
land justice in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The
resulting picture reveals the place-specific interactions of state
and market ideologies, regional geopolitics, and local elites in
concentrating control over land.
After the fall of the Porfirio Díaz regime, pueblo representatives sent hundreds of petitions to Pres. Francisco I. Madero, demanding that the executive branch of government assume the judiciary's ...control over their unresolved lawsuits against landowners, local bosses, and other villages. The Madero administration tried to use existing laws to settle land conflicts but always stopped short of invading judicial authority. In contrast, the two main agrarian reform programs undertaken in revolutionary Mexico-those implemented by Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza-subordinated the judiciary to the executive branch and thereby reshaped the postrevolutionary state with the support of villagers, who actively sided with one branch of government over another. In Matters of Justice Helga Baitenmann offers the first detailed account of the Zapatista and Carrancista agrarian reform programs as they were implemented in practice at the local level and then reconfigured in response to unanticipated inter- and intravillage conflicts. Ultimately, the Zapatista land reform, which sought to redistribute land throughout the country, remained an unfulfilled utopia. In contrast, Carrancista laws, intended to resolve quickly an urgent problem in a time of war, had lasting effects on the legal rights of millions of land beneficiaries and accidentally became the pillar of a program that redistributed about half the national territory.
Agrarian radicalism's challenge to capitalism played a central role
in working-class ideology while making third parties and protest
movements a potent force in politics. Thomas Alter II follows ...three
generations of German immigrants in Texas to examine the evolution
of agrarian radicalism and the American and transnational ideas
that influenced it. Otto Meitzen left Prussia for Texas in the wake
of the failed 1848 Revolution. His son and grandson took part in
decades-long activism with organizations from the Greenback Labor
Party and the Grange to the Populist movement and Texas Socialist
Party. As Alter tells their stories, he analyzes the southern wing
of the era's farmer-labor bloc and the parallel history of African
American political struggle in Texas. Alliances with Mexican
revolutionaries, Irish militants, and others shaped an
international legacy of working-class radicalism that moved U.S.
politics to the left. That legacy, in turn, pushed forward economic
reform during the Progressive and New Deal eras.
A rare look at the German roots of radicalism in Texas,
Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth illuminates the labor
movements and populist ideas that changed the nation's course at a
pivotal time in its history.
Design for Change in Higher Education Grabill, Jeffrey T; Gretter, Sarah; Skogsberg, Erik
Johns Hopkins University Press,
2022, 2022-03-01
eBook, Book
A playbook that grounds theory in practice, Design for Change in Higher Education is aimed at faculty, staff, and students engaged in the important work of imagining new forms of education.
How school reformers in the Progressive Era—who envisioned the public school as the quintessential American institution—laid the groundwork for contemporary battles over the structure and curriculum ...of public schools.Around the turn of the twentieth century, a generation of school reformers began touting public education's unique capacity to unite a diverse and diffuse citizenry while curing a broad swath of social and political ills. They claimed that investing in education would equalize social and economic relations, strengthen democracy, and create high-caliber citizens equipped for the twentieth century, all while preserving the nation's sacred traditions. More than anything, they pitched the public school as a quintessentially American institution, a patriotic symbol in its own right—and the key to perfecting the American experiment.In Making Schools American, Cody Dodge Ewert makes clear that nationalism was the leading argument for schooling during the Progressive Era. Bringing together case studies of school reform crusades in New York, Utah, and Texas, he explores what was gained—and lost—as efforts to transform American schools evolved across space and time. Offering fresh insight into the development and politicization of public schooling in America, Ewert also reveals how reformers' utopian visions and lofty promises laid the groundwork for contemporary battles over the mission and methods of American public schools. Despite their divergent political visions and the unique conditions of the states, cities, and individual districts they served, school reformers wielded nationalistic rhetoric that made education a rallying point for Americans across lines of race, class, religion, and region. But ultimately, Making Schools American argues, upholding education as a potential solution to virtually every societal problem has hamstrung broader attempts at social reform while overburdening schools.
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of
peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian
reform-arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia's
1952 revolution. ...Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped
ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants
embraced the nationalist slogan of "land for those who work it" and
rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities
proclaimed instead "land to its original owners" and sought to link
the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own
long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part,
embraced the principle of "land for those who improve it" to
protect at least portions of their former properties from
expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental
policies and national discourse with everyday local actors'
struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep
connections between land and people as a material reality and as
the object of political contention in the period surrounding the
revolution.
Breaking new ground in terms of both its subject matter and its format, Communicate for a Change is an accessible and engaging catalyst that will kick-start subsequent deliberations.
This volume contains an Open Access Chapter - This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability of health systems in Europe. Furthermore, it includes an introduction on how EU ...action in supporting health- care policies in the EU Member States, both looking at implemented actions and describing current priorities for the future.
