Critical Agrarian Studies – serie

This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx’s 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century.This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

From a neo-liberal, neo-classical paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to fostering sustained development. Institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are thus forced to make new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq War not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labour, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the ‘Credibility Thesis’ – that is, once institutions persist, they fulfil a function. Third, the collection studies ‘development, broadly construed’, by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China and India, to Turkey, Mexico and Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights and privatization, mining and pastoralism, dam-building and irrigation, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries.This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

When the 2007-2008 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.

Southeast Asia has been portrayed as a key site in the global land grab. Featuring leading scholars in the field, this collection critically examines the nature and extent of land grabbing in Southeast Asia, and seeks to locate this phenomena in broader agrarian and environmental transitions (AET). The individual contributions suggest that there is little evidence of a global land grab in Southeast Asia, but that over the last ten years the surge of plantations and processes of land grabbing has been a key feature in the region. The collection considers how broader AET processes may be brought more clearly into focus by decentring land grabbing, including consideration of its absence as well presence. The diversity of cases in this collection coalesces around the productive tension in land grab studies between global capitalist processes on the one hand, and context-specificity and contingent motivations fuelling the expansion of large-scale plantations for oil palm, rubber, cassava and other cash crops, on the other hand. The contributors further broaden the entry points to consider cross-sectoral AET processes such as enclosures for mining, conservation and hydropower and explore the contingencies that help to maintain smallholder production.The chapters originally published as a special issue in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy. Gender, and especially generation, are relatively neglected dimensions in the literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia. Drawing on key concepts in gender studies, youth studies and agrarian studies, the chapters mark a significant step towards a gendered and ‘generationed’ analysis of capitalist expansion in rural Southeast Asia, in particular from a political ecology perspective. The collection highlights the importance of bringing gender and generation, in their interaction with class dynamics, more squarely into agrarian and environmental transformation studies. This is key to understanding the implications of capitalist expansion for social relations of power and justice, and the potential of these relations to shape the outcomes for different women and men, younger and older, in rural society.The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx’s 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century.This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show.The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show.The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Soy in South America constitutes one of the most spectacular booms of agro-industrial commodity production in the world. It is the pinnacle of modernist agro-industrial practices, serving as a key nexus in food–feed–fuel production that underpins the agribusiness–conservationist discourse of "land sparing" through intensification. Yet soy production is implicated in multiple problems beyond deforestation, ranging from pesticide drift and contamination to social exclusion and conflicts in frontier zones, to concentration of wealth and income among the largest landowners and corporations. This book explores in depth the complex dynamics of soy production from its diverse social settings to its transnational connections, examining the politics of commodity and knowledge production, the role of the state, and the reach of corporate power in everyday life across soy landscapes in South America. Ultimately, the collection encourages us to search and struggle for agroecological alternatives through which we may overcome the pitfalls of this massive transnational capitalist agro-industry. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control.The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time.This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control.The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time.This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of various crises – financial, food, energy and environmental – has put the nexus between ‘rural development’ and ‘development in general’ back onto the center stage of theoretical, policy and political agendas in the world today. Confronting these issues will require (re)engaging with critical theories, taking politics seriously, and utilizing rigorous and appropriate research methodologies. These are the common messages and implications of the various contributions to this collection in the context of a scholarship that is critical in two senses: questioning prescriptions from mainstream perspectives and interrogating popular conventions in radical thinking.This book focuses on key perspectives, frameworks and methodologies in agrarian change and peasant studies. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of rural development studies: Henry Bernstein, Terence J. Byres, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay, Benedict Kerkvliet, Philip McMichael, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones and Teodor Shanin.This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of various crises – financial, food, energy and environmental – has put the nexus between ‘rural development’ and ‘development in general’ back onto the center stage of theoretical, policy and political agendas in the world today. Confronting these issues will require (re)engaging with critical theories, taking politics seriously, and utilizing rigorous and appropriate research methodologies. These are the common messages and implications of the various contributions to this collection in the context of a scholarship that is critical in two senses: questioning prescriptions from mainstream perspectives and interrogating popular conventions in radical thinking.This book focuses on key perspectives, frameworks and methodologies in agrarian change and peasant studies. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of rural development studies: Henry Bernstein, Terence J. Byres, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay, Benedict Kerkvliet, Philip McMichael, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones and Teodor Shanin.This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This book addresses key questions on biofuels within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. Contributions are based on fresh empirical materials from different parts of the world. The book starts with four key questions in agrarian political economy: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth? It also addresses the emergent social and political relations in the biofuel complex and, given the impacts on natural resources and sustainability, engages with questions about people-environment interactions. At the same time, the book is concerned with the politics of representation, that is, what are the discursive frames through which biofuels are promoted and/or opposed?The book analyses the institutional structures, and cultures of energy consumption on which a biofuels complex depends, and the alternative political and ecological visions emerging that call the biofuels complex into question. Across sixteen chapters presenting material from five regions across the North-South divide and focusing on fourteen countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India, USA and Germany, these topics are addressed within the following themes: global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The struggle over land has been the central issue in Zimbabwe ever since white settlers began to carve out large farms over a century ago. Their monopolisation of the better-watered half of the land was the focus of the African war of liberation war, and was partially modified following Independence in 1980. A dramatic further episode in this history was launched at the start of the last decade with the occupation of many farms by groups of African veterans of the liberation struggle and their supporters, which was then institutionalised by legislation to take over most of the large commercial farms for sub-division.Sustained fieldwork over the intervening years, by teams of scholars and experts, and by individual researchers is now generating an array of evidence-based findings of the outcomes: how land was acquired and disposed of; how it has been used; how far new farmers have carved out new livelihoods and viable new communities; the major political and economic problems they and other stakeholders such as former farm-workers, commercial farmers, and the overall rural society now face.This book will be an essential starting place for analysts, policy-makers, historians and activists seeking to understand what has happened and to spotlight the key issues for the next decade.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. ‘Green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. A vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel. Yet in other cases, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs. Green grabs may be drivn by biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services or ecotourism, for example. In some cases theyse agendas involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects.Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. This book draws together seventeen original cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? What political and discursive dynamics underpin ‘green grabs’? How and when do appropriations on the ground emerge out of circulations of green capital? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? Who is gaining and who is losing? How are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This collection explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals from a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. This involves looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated into global commodity chains. It goes further than the descriptive ‘what’ and ‘who’ questions, in order to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these patterns. It is empirically solid and theoretically sophisticated, making it a robust and boundary-changing work. Contributors come from various scholarly disciplines. Covering nearly all regions of the world, the collection will be of interest to researchers from various disciplines, policymakers and activists.This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This book addresses key questions on biofuels within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. Contributions are based on fresh empirical materials from different parts of the world. The book starts with four key questions in agrarian political economy: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth? It also addresses the emergent social and political relations in the biofuel complex and, given the impacts on natural resources and sustainability, engages with questions about people-environment interactions. At the same time, the book is concerned with the politics of representation, that is, what are the discursive frames through which biofuels are promoted and/or opposed?The book analyses the institutional structures, and cultures of energy consumption on which a biofuels complex depends, and the alternative political and ecological visions emerging that call the biofuels complex into question. Across sixteen chapters presenting material from five regions across the North-South divide and focusing on fourteen countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India, USA and Germany, these topics are addressed within the following themes: global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Southeast Asia has been portrayed as a key site in the global land grab. Featuring leading scholars in the field, this collection critically examines the nature and extent of land grabbing in Southeast Asia, and seeks to locate this phenomena in broader agrarian and environmental transitions (AET). The individual contributions suggest that there is little evidence of a global land grab in Southeast Asia, but that over the last ten years the surge of plantations and processes of land grabbing has been a key feature in the region. The collection considers how broader AET processes may be brought more clearly into focus by decentring land grabbing, including consideration of its absence as well presence. The diversity of cases in this collection coalesces around the productive tension in land grab studies between global capitalist processes on the one hand, and context-specificity and contingent motivations fuelling the expansion of large-scale plantations for oil palm, rubber, cassava and other cash crops, on the other hand. The contributors further broaden the entry points to consider cross-sectoral AET processes such as enclosures for mining, conservation and hydropower and explore the contingencies that help to maintain smallholder production.The chapters originally published as a special issue in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants.The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world.The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial.The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003467960/climate-change-critical-agrarian-studies-ian-scoones-saturnino-borras-jr-amita-baviskar-marc-edelman-nancy-lee-peluso-wendy-wolford, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. A version of the open access title is also available on the OAPEN platform https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85297 .

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants.The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world.The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial.The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003467960/climate-change-critical-agrarian-studies-ian-scoones-saturnino-borras-jr-amita-baviskar-marc-edelman-nancy-lee-peluso-wendy-wolford, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. A version of the open access title is also available on the OAPEN platform https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85297 .

This collection explores the complex dynamics of corporate land deals from a broad agrarian political economy perspective, with a special focus on the implications for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. This involves looking at ways in which existing patterns of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and generation – are being shaped by changes in land use and property relations, as well as by the re-organization of production and exchange as rural communities and resources are incorporated into global commodity chains. It goes further than the descriptive ‘what’ and ‘who’ questions, in order to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of these patterns. It is empirically solid and theoretically sophisticated, making it a robust and boundary-changing work. Contributors come from various scholarly disciplines. Covering nearly all regions of the world, the collection will be of interest to researchers from various disciplines, policymakers and activists.This book was originally published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

From a neo-liberal, neo-classical paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to fostering sustained development. Institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are thus forced to make new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq War not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labour, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the ‘Credibility Thesis’ – that is, once institutions persist, they fulfil a function. Third, the collection studies ‘development, broadly construed’, by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China and India, to Turkey, Mexico and Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights and privatization, mining and pastoralism, dam-building and irrigation, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries.This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

When the 2007-2008 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.

The struggle over land has been the central issue in Zimbabwe ever since white settlers began to carve out large farms over a century ago. Their monopolisation of the better-watered half of the land was the focus of the African war of liberation war, and was partially modified following Independence in 1980. A dramatic further episode in this history was launched at the start of the last decade with the occupation of many farms by groups of African veterans of the liberation struggle and their supporters, which was then institutionalised by legislation to take over most of the large commercial farms for sub-division.Sustained fieldwork over the intervening years, by teams of scholars and experts, and by individual researchers is now generating an array of evidence-based findings of the outcomes: how land was acquired and disposed of; how it has been used; how far new farmers have carved out new livelihoods and viable new communities; the major political and economic problems they and other stakeholders such as former farm-workers, commercial farmers, and the overall rural society now face.This book will be an essential starting place for analysts, policy-makers, historians and activists seeking to understand what has happened and to spotlight the key issues for the next decade.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This volume is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations flying under its broad banner. Despite its large and growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. This collection brings together both longstanding scholars in critical agrarian studies, such as Philip McMichael, Bina Agarwal, Henry Bernstein, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Marc Edelman, as well as a dynamic roster of early- and mid-career researchers. The ultimate aim is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future.This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

How relevant are the classic theories of agrarian change in the contemporary context? This volume explores this question by focusing upon the defining features of agrarian transformation in the 21st century: the financialization of food and agriculture, the blurring of rural and urban livelihoods through migration and other economic activities, forest transition, climate change, rural indebtedness, the co-evolution of social policy and moral economies, and changing property relations. Combined, the eleven contributions to this collection provide a broad overview of agrarian studies over the past four decades and identify the contemporary frontiers of agrarian political economy. In this path-breaking collection, the authors show how new iterations of long evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Soy in South America constitutes one of the most spectacular booms of agro-industrial commodity production in the world. It is the pinnacle of modernist agro-industrial practices, serving as a key nexus in food–feed–fuel production that underpins the agribusiness–conservationist discourse of "land sparing" through intensification. Yet soy production is implicated in multiple problems beyond deforestation, ranging from pesticide drift and contamination to social exclusion and conflicts in frontier zones, to concentration of wealth and income among the largest landowners and corporations. This book explores in depth the complex dynamics of soy production from its diverse social settings to its transnational connections, examining the politics of commodity and knowledge production, the role of the state, and the reach of corporate power in everyday life across soy landscapes in South America. Ultimately, the collection encourages us to search and struggle for agroecological alternatives through which we may overcome the pitfalls of this massive transnational capitalist agro-industry. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy. Gender, and especially generation, are relatively neglected dimensions in the literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia. Drawing on key concepts in gender studies, youth studies and agrarian studies, the chapters mark a significant step towards a gendered and ‘generationed’ analysis of capitalist expansion in rural Southeast Asia, in particular from a political ecology perspective. The collection highlights the importance of bringing gender and generation, in their interaction with class dynamics, more squarely into agrarian and environmental transformation studies. This is key to understanding the implications of capitalist expansion for social relations of power and justice, and the potential of these relations to shape the outcomes for different women and men, younger and older, in rural society.The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.