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Myanmar is in a dangerous and uncertain moment following the military coup on 1 February 2021. The articles in this Special Forum provide timely contextual analysis. Written before the coup, the articles delve into the politics of agrarian transformation in the context of (what was then) an ongoing (but fragile) opening up of political space. This introduction outlines three themes that connect the articles and now also shed some light on what the future may hold: (1) the limited character of the 2010–2021 ‘democratic transition’; (2) the struggles around land and natural resources amidst a social reproduction crisis and (3) the responses of rural working peoples.

This paper explores how varying degrees of authoritarianism and populism, although not always coinciding, have been intrinsic to the imposition of agrarian policies in Mozambique. Taking the case of ProSAVANA, a highly controversial agrarian development program, we look at how its undemocratic imposition by the state has given rise to a vigorous resistance movement. By tracing a decade of electoral results in selected districts where ProSAVANA is intended to be implemented, we argue that due to its agrarian authoritarian policies which have had negative implications on rural livelihoods, the ruling party, FRELIMO, has recently been losing popularity to the strongest opposition party RENAMO.

Indicators of carbon storage in forests and other land uses have gained much prominence to evaluate and endorse land-based climate change mitigation policies. The outcomes of such assessments can have direct livelihood implications for dwellers living at the forest–agriculture frontier, such as shifting cultivators or subsistence farmers. This contribution critically discusses the methodological relevance of carbon stock indicators to assess long-term emission dynamics of land uses, and furthermore addresses the ‘politics of measurement’ that can be involved in policy practice. From a complex socio-ecological systems perspective, the paper argues that carbon stock indicators provide necessary but not sufficient information to endorse land use policies with mitigation aims. While they may indicate one-off sequestration gains through vegetation and land-use change, they cannot account for permanent hidden emissions that emerge as part of the broader agrarian transitions that accompany land-use change. Over the long term, this may render related mitigation interventions ineffective, if not counterproductive. Furthermore, carbon stock estimates for future land-use scenarios sometimes draw on biased assumptions, or are constructed within histories of discrimination, through which they may further marginalize subaltern groups such as shifting cultivators. A paradigm shift is needed that includes more integrative assessment approaches.

This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general ...

Sugarcane and oil palm agribusinesses are in the vanguard of an emergent project of agrarian capitalism in Guatemala, which is defined here as a financialized and flexible type of agrarian extractivism. Meanwhile, Maya-Q´eqchi´ residents of the northern lowlands believe that the changes in the labor regime, land relations and the agroecosystem that the expansion of these agribusinesses has brought threaten their subsistence in multiple and unfamiliar ways. Indeed, growing difficulties in dealing with (vital) grievances is leading many, even those who initially welcomed the corporate sugarcane and oil palm plantations, to transform their unrest into a practice of resistance. Elaborating on what is presented here as a multiple politics perspective, this contribution discusses the nature and character of such contemporary political dynamics of agrarian change. The forms, strategies and practices of the two main and most antagonistic repertoires of contention are explored here: the one in ‘defense of territory’ and the one in the promotion of the ‘agrarian extractivist project’. The tensions across and within multiple corporate, state and social actors who are pushing for, resisting, complying with or operating at the most violent margins of the agrarian extractivist project are also examined. By assessing continuities and ruptures between current and previous cycles of contention around the control of land, water and other natural resources, this paper stresses the often forgotten lesson about trajectories of agrarian change not being a story foretold, but the product of multiple and dynamic politics.

Visions of food sovereignty have been extremely important in helping to galvanize broad-based and diverse movements around the need for radical changes in agro-food systems. Yet while food sovereignty has thrived as a ‘dynamic process’, until recently there has been insufficient attention to many thorny questions, such as its origins, its connection to other food justice movements, its relation to rights discourses, the roles of markets and states and the challenges of implementation. This essay contributes to food sovereignty praxis by pushing the process of critical self-reflection forward and considering its relation to critical agrarian studies – and vice versa.

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-a-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against the grain of political ecological studies, the essay reviews contemporary environmental issues including Payments for Ecosystem Services and other market-based approaches, the establishment of national parks and resettlement schemes justified through ecological rationales. The first section following the introduction focuses on two of the largest forest rehabilitation schemes in the world. Next, the paper reviews work on China's rapidly growing number of nature reserves, examining their role as enclosures and their entanglement with tourism income generation. This...

At the heart of this little book is the agrarian question, which asks ‘whether or not capital and capitalist relations of production are or are not transforming agriculture, and if so, how’ (1). At...

In this paper I use seeds in Malawi as both an analytical lens and an empirical focus of study to examine how food sovereignty is threatened or enhanced in a particular location and time. I argue that while food sovereignty was eroded for smallholders through neoliberal reforms to the agricultural system, community and kin practices help to maintain food sovereignty. The intersection of gender and class dynamics, combined with state policies, however, works to undermine food sovereignty for particular groups in northern Malawi. Historical processes of exclusion, dispossession and exploitation changed the division of labour and reduced time and land for diverse farming systems. State policies reduced knowledge and availability of preferred local varieties. While peasants, particularly women, have considerable knowledge of seed varieties, and seeds continue to be exchanged in agrarian communities, young women, tenant farmers, food insecure younger couples and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)-affect...

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresse...

Recent research on land deals reports gigantic quantities of hectares seized, with relatively little regard for the solidity of the evidence or for considerations of scale other than area. This commentary questions the usefulness of aggregating data of uneven quality and transforming it into ‘facts’. Making claims on the basis of problematic evidence does not serve agrarian and human rights activists well, since it may undercut their legitimacy and make it difficult for them to identify their adversaries. Studying land tenure and corporate ownership is inherently complicated, with intractable legibility problems. Social scientists must subject their sources to critical scrutiny and understand the contexts of their production, preservation and dissemination. An accelerated process of dispossession is clearly in motion, but countering it effectively requires precise and accurate data, which are difficult to obtain. Oversimplified claims may not only undermine efforts to counter specific cases of land grabbi...

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring on land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents. Against this background, I question acceptance of an inevitable agro-industrial future which makes millions of Africans ‘surplus’ to the needs of capitalist investment.

In the midst of neoliberal restructuring and a project of market-led agrarian reform (MLAR), Guatemalan rural communities and peasant organizations have fought to access, reclaim, or hold onto communal land through direct action. This essay explores the dynamics of organized agrarian struggle in contemporary Guatemala, arguing that three forms of organizing that have been labeled officially as ‘agrarian conflicts’ – historical land claims, rural labour disputes, and land occupations – together account for more peasant land access than has been delivered through the MLAR system. The difficulty of escaping the neoliberal model is also discussed, and the essay concludes that even the most successful grassroots campaigns for land have fed into the implementation of neoliberal restructuring.

Agrarian crisis in India, edited by D. Narasimha Reddy and Srijit Mishra, New Delhi, Oxford, 2009, xxix + 286 pp., US$45 (hardback), ISBN 0195695595-X This edited volume is a collection of importan...

The agrarian question in the neoliberal era: primitive accumulation and the peasantry, by Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo, Cape Town, Fahamu Books and Pambazuka Press, 2011, vi + 89 pp., £8.95 (paperback...

Important demands of contemporary rural social movements, such as the food sovereignty vision, have been increasingly framed as rights issues and by a rights discourse: Food sovereignty 1 is the ri...

The astonishing scale of internal migration in China since 1980s can be compared to only a few cases in world history. The migration gave birth to a vast number of peasant workers with their family members left behind in rural communities. Dominant studies on migration address mainly the following questions: why people migrate, what impacts migration has brought about, and how to cope with such positive or negative influences. This review paper builds on this rich body of literature and engages with critical agrarian studies. A better understanding of rural-urban migration in China from a critical agrarian studies perspective can be better achieved in the context of the historical emergence of a new (semi-) proletariat class and the biopolitics of their migration. Based on this and the aforementioned discussion, we will point to potential future studies as a conclusion.

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for ‘more efficient farming’ or ‘food security’, but also to ‘alleviate pressure on forests’. In other cases, however, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs – whether linked to biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services, ecotourism or ‘offsets’ related to any and all of these. In some cases these 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 – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. 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 – as pension funds and venture capitalists, commodity traders and consultants, GIS service providers and business entrepreneurs, ecotourism companies and the military, green activists and anxious consumers among others find once-unlikely common interests. This collection draws new theorisation together with cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings, and links critical studies of nature with critical agrarian studies, to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? How and when do circulations of green capital become manifest in actual appropriations on the ground – through what political and discursive dynamics? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? And who is gaining and who is losing – how are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests?

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’. My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens...

Class dynamics of agrarian change, by Henry Bernstein, Halifax, Fernwood Publishing, 2010, xii + 142 pp., CAD$17.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-55266-349-3 There are few people as well positioned to wr...

This essay examines the momentous transformations in the agrarian social order of contemporary Ethiopia. It argues that the contemporary world economic, food, and energy crisis is accelerating processes of commercialization and enclosures that are profoundly altering the social and physical landscape of smallholder farming. These dynamics have taken a spatially divergent pattern that maps onto older imperial socio-spatial and cultural hierarchies. In the historically core regions and their socio-cultural extensions, a vigorous process of smallholder commercialization is being promoted, while in the surrounding lowland peripheries an extensive process of enclosures is creating an archipelago of large-scale mechanized farming that is displacing the subsistence sector. The contrasting forms of displacement and dispossession generated by these processes, and the patterns of social-property relations they are engendering, can be understood as outcomes of the uneven and combined dynamics of state formation and ...

The agrarian vision: sustainability and environmental ethics, by Paul B. Thompson, Lexington, The University Press of Kentucky, 2010, xi + 323 pp., US$40, ISBN 978-0-8131-2587-9 Thompson's aim in t...

This article proposes an approach to the agrarian question that focuses on the establishment of absolute private property rights over land in Brazil and Mexico. The author argues that current land struggles are conditioned by the property regimes inherited from past struggles. The author examines the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and argues that the balance of class forces led to the slow establishment of absolute private property in Brazil, while in Mexico they triggered the Revolution of 1910-1917, which limited agrarian capitalism. The author then turns to the consequences of these different property regimes in the twentieth century and argues that capitalist social relations have been more dominant in the Brazilian than in the Mexican countryside. The conservative modernization of the 1960s and 1970s is identified as a turning point in the fully capitalist development of agriculture in Brazil. The shift toward food imports, the elimination of subsidies, and the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution signal the re-establishment of the conditions for capitalist development of agriculture in Mexico. The article ends with an assessment of the MST and EZLN's strategies to protect peasants' access to land and to influence the institutional setting determining access to land.

During the past two decades agrarian (‘land and farm’) reforms have been widespread in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), following earlier ones in Asia (China and Vietnam). However, independent family farms did not become the predominant sector in most of Eastern Europe. A new dual (or bi-modal) agrarian structure emerged, consisting of large farm enterprises (with much less social functions than they had before), and very small peasant farms or subsidiary plots. The paper compares five case studies, looking at agrarian actors, property rights, state influence, and rural poverty. These are Russia, Armenia, Moldova and Uzbekistan in the EECCA region, and China's Xinjiang province in Asia. The paper concludes that state influence is still substantial, property rights regimes are quite diverse and rural poverty remains medium to high. State-led agrarian reform, in particular where a redistributive (or restitution-based) land reform was implemented led in some ...

A significant number of farmers committing suicides in various parts of India are routinely attributed to agrarian crisis. The crisis is further related to the structural transformations induced by globalisation and liberalization and the resulting forms of scarcities or shortages, for example, prices, growth, and resources. I contend in this essay that the framework of economic rationality is insufficient to explain why a disturbingly high number of middle farmers are taking their lives. This essay is an attempt to provide an alternative explanation of the suicides by undertaking a study of the affective histories of scarcities. It argues that for the suicides whether scarcity actually exists is less relevant than how the idea of scarcity is articulated in affective responses. The affective histories explain the way in which suicides and the wider feelings of rural alienation relate to the fear of pauperization. This fear relates to the bounded imagination of the self and the other, glued by a long history of deeply ingrained ideologies of hierarchy. If farmers' suicides point to any crisis, it is the crisis of lack of alternative political and cultural imagination emerging from a rounded critique of all forms of social injustice and violence.

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour. At the same time, as in other cases of expansion of agrarian corporate commodity production, we can discern a familiar pattern of ambivalence between, on the one hand, the attractions of regular cash income and, on the other, the loss of resource tenure and autonomy, which helps to explain the community's gendered experience of coercion, exploitation, intimidation, consent and resistance.

The fast track land redistribution programme generated new agrarian labour relations altering the tying of labour on the large farms to tenancy, supplemented by casual labour from the communal areas. Job losses and displacement occurred, but this is not the whole story as new and diverse sources of rural employment have emerged, including high levels of self-employment on small farms (A1) supplemented by casual employment. Large farms dependent on wage labour experience labour shortages despite the mechanisation drive. However, communal areas and A1 farmers continue to provide labour to large farms, although labour supplies are negotiated on new terms.

This paper extends the analysis of Zimbabwe's Fast Track land reform to the district of Chipinge in Manicaland province in south eastern Zimbabwe, where particular agro-ecological, political and social dynamics are important. In the three A1 resettlement schemes studied, political loyalty and patronage largely explain how the new beneficiaries acquired land. Most scholarly work, media and advocacy reports acknowledge the role of political patronage in the acquisition of A2 farms but they underplay this on A1 resettlement schemes. Based on empirical data, I argue that some A1 land reform beneficiaries are clients of patronage networks. Even though the new A1 farmers have other legitimate claims to land they are being subordinated to a partisan state and authoritarian ruling party that is willing to exclude other ‘ordinary’ people with ‘wrong’ or weak political ties in a highly politicised landscape. Thus, the paper argues that in these cases the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)'s g...

Fast track land reform led to the restructuring of agrarian relations in Zimbabwe. This paper explores the emerging forms of local agency on selected A1 farms in Goromonzi and Zvimba. It analyses how A1 beneficiaries have formed local farmer groups (LFGs) and the extent to which these have contributed towards relieving farm production challenges that include the unavailability of productive assets, limited household labour and unavailability of inputs. Through case studies of local farmer groups this paper manages to examine the internal dynamics of local agency, the nature of participation and the extent to which these formations actually provide a relief to members and provide the first line of defence of the newly found land rights. The findings provide important clues regarding local agency in a context where lineage forms of organisation do not exist and in most cases ‘strangers’ from different places have been resettled next to each other.

Over the last decade, carbon forestry has grown in Chiapas, where small farmers are increasingly turning to planting carbon-sequestering trees and the carbon market as a new source of income. Using an agrarian political ecology approach, and based on empirical research in a rainforest community in the Lacandon Jungle, I argue that while carbon offset producers continue to have formal land rights, they lose some of the short-term benefits of land in part through the use of land for carbon-sequestering trees but mostly through the preoccupation of labor. The labor requirements for carbon production act as a type of enclosure mechanism that constrains more traditional land uses such as the production of subsistence and annual cash crops. Nevertheless, campesinos continue to participate in carbon forestry as a means to maintain a foothold on their land in the wake of neoliberal agrarian policies that threaten to displace them. Carbon forestry enables campesinos to maintain their land through productive activi...

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people's land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people's relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders' access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced. As a consequence, agovernment institution's control over land does not represent or reflect pre-existing sovereignty. It producesit.

Forests are important components of agrarian environments and household livelihoods, but as broad political economies and agrarian environments change, how important is land control? Forest villagers in Java during Indonesia's New Order (1966–1998) were highly dependent on access to state forests for their livelihoods. In the teak forests, long reserved and enclosed lands were guarded closely by foresters in the State Forestry Corporation. Most villagers' income was locally earned and both land and forest dependent. By 2010, this highly localized and forest and agricultural land-dependent situation had changed dramatically. In Singget, a hamlet I studied in the mid-1980s, I found that nearly all local families derived some income from urban and distant industrial or rural work sites by 2010. Most hamlet residents, however, do not move away permanently to work, but migrate for periods of several months to several years. As in other parts of rural Java, these other sources of income are transforming househo...

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this col...

Defining mobilization as a powerful tactic and social process enables a critical analysis of state power as well as its spatial configurations and legitimation practices. Mobilization in the site of Đin Bien Ph first appeared during military confrontation (1952–54) and reappeared during land reform (1953–57) and collectivization (1959–60), all of which transformed agrarian community forms, political relations, and economic production – although not always as intended. Analyzing its use, meaning, and contingent effects on a frontier of an emerging Vietnam underlines how mobilization drew on and produced power to regulate relations of rule and production within an emerging nation-state. Drawing on historical sources and in dialog with literatures on social movements and comparative politics, this paper considers a series of mobilizations to represent distinct but inter-related stages in a process of statemaking.

The social relations and agricultural lands that rural peoples in Southeast Asia hold in common are being commodified through the converging pressures of agrarian change, conservation and capitalist development. This paper examines how broader and local processes driving agrarian differentiation have been accelerated through the revaluing of people and nature in market terms to ostensibly finance conservation through development at the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park – the flagship protected area of Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on the notions of ‘first’ and ‘third nature’, I show how the pace and scale of agrarian change between rural peoples has gone ‘fast forward’ with the onset of resource partitioning, objectification, commodification and, ultimately, revaluing through translocal ‘capitalist conservation’, the rise of conservation as capitalist production. I examine how the national park's valuing as a ‘common’ World Heritage has drawn major private sector investments that...

Resumen Este artículo analiza los múltiples aportes de Willem Assies a las ciencias sociales y los estudios latinoamericanos. Se centra en sus escritos sobre estudios agrarios y campesinos, movimientos sociales y pueblos indígenas. En particular, hizo importantes contribuciones a nuestra concepción de la ciudadanía multicultural, el Estado multiétnico y la democracia plurinacional. Sus escritos tuvieron un gran impacto en quienes trabajan en temas de comunidades rurales e indígenas, aunque la academia neerlandesa en su gran mayoría no supo apreciar sus talentos excepcionales. Se afirma en este artículo que él nunca dudó de su temprano reconocimiento de la importancia de la clase social en el análisis social, aun cuando reconoció sus limitaciones. En su opinión, uno de los problemas centrales que enfrentan los movimientos sociales de las comunidades indígenas era cómo enlazar los problemas indígenas con los problemas nacionales generales. ¿Hasta qué punto habían respondido a este desafío? Su prematura muerte le impidió ahondar más en este punto clave, pero esperamos que otros académicos asuman la tarea y sigan debatiendo sus ideas. Abstract This article discusses the manifold contributions of Willem Assies to the social sciences and Latin American studies. It focuses on his writings on agrarian and peasant studies, social movements, and indigenous peoples. In particular, he made important contributions to our understanding of multicultural citizenship, the multiethnic state, and plurinational democracy. His writings had a major impact on those working on rural and indigenous peoples’ issues, although the Dutch academic establishment largely failed to appreciate his exceptional talents. It is argued in this article that he never wavered from his early recognition of the importance of class in social analysis, while acknowledging its limitations. In his view, one of the central challenges facing the indigenous peoples’ social movements was how to link indigenous issues to general national problems. To what extent had they met this challenge? His premature death prevented him from exploring this key issue further, but hopefully other scholars will take up the baton and continue to debate his ideas. Resumo O presente artigo analisa as múltiplas contribuições de Willem Assies para as Ciências Sociais e para os Estudos Latino-americanos. Centra-se em seus escritos sobre estudos agrários e camponeses, movimentos sociais e povos indígenas. Forneceu especiais contribuições para nossa concepção de cidadania multicultural, Estado multiétnico e democracia plurinacional. Seus escritos tiveram um grande impacto nas pessoas que estudam comunidades rurais e indígenas, embora a academia holandesa, em sua larga maioria, não soubesse apreciar seus excepcionais talentos. Afirma-se no artigo que ele nunca duvidou de seu precoce reconhecimento da importância da classe social na análise social, ainda que reconhecesse suas limitações. Em sua opinião, um dos problemas centrais que enfrentam os movimentos sociais das comunidades indígenas é como vincular os problemas indígenas com os problemas nacionais gerais: até que ponto tinham respondido a esse desafio? Sua morte prematura impediu de aprofundar nesse ponto chave, mas almejamos que outros acadêmicos assumam a tarefa e continuem debatendo suas ideias.

The most important achievements of the Communist governments in Kerala, India were the implementation of the land reforms and the legislation of the Agricultural Workers' Act. Using ethnographic and archival research based on these events and the processes through which they became a reality, this paper will question some of the fundamental assumptions of the influential Subaltern Studies project and postcolonial theory like the positing of governmentality and passive revolution as the general characteristics of ‘Third World’ societies' experience with modernity. It will argue that, more importantly, their culturalist framework, with its gross ignorance of class and material concerns, is hardly adequate to understand the fusing of the aspirations of recognition and redistribution or the material and cultural that characterizes the struggles by the peasantry and agrarian labor, and their synthesis by the Communist Party. Despite their professed aim of inaugurating a democratic project with the peasant as c...

Agroecology has played a key role in helping Cuba survive the crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe and the tightening of the US trade embargo. Cuban peasants have been able to boost food production without scarce and expensive imported agricultural chemicals by first substituting more ecological inputs for the no longer available imports, and then by making a transition to more agroecologically integrated and diverse farming systems. This was possible not so much because appropriate alternatives were made available, but rather because of the Campesino-a-Campesino (CAC) social process methodology that the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) used to build a grassroots agroecology movement. This paper was produced in a 'self-study' process spearheaded by ANAP and La Via Campesina, the international agrarian movement of which ANAP is a member. In it we document and analyze the history of the Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement (MACAC), and the significantly increased contribution of peasants to national food production in Cuba that was brought about, at least in part, due to this movement. Our key findings are (i) the spread of agroecology was rapid and successful largely due to the social process methodology and social movement dynamics, (ii) farming practices evolved over time and contributed to significantly increased relative and absolute production by the peasant sector, and (iii) those practices resulted in additional benefits including resilience to climate change.

Given current interest in the agrarian cooperative as an egalitarian institutional form to counter the economic effects of neoliberalism, considered here is how class divisions/distinctions operated inside one such unit in the 1970s. Of particular interest is the way idioms and forms of struggle used by bureaucrats, peasants and agricultural labourers in a Peruvian agrarian cooperative during that decade challenge one of the enduring myths of development theory. The latter invokes a familiar dichotomy to explain the failure of rural cooperatives: a powerful state bureaucracy imposing inappropriate policy on an undifferentiated and uniformly powerless peasantry. The case study presented here suggests that, on a number of crucial issues (privatization of co-owned means of production, the employment of labour-power that was unfree), it was much rather better-off peasants who overruled bureaucrats and imposed their own accumulation project.

Although the output of high-value crops in Peru has increased during the era of ‘globalization’, producers still tend to contextualize this development in relation to the 1969 agrarian reform. Considered here is how large and small farmers in the Canete region perceive the changes that have occurred in agriculture since a generation ago, with particular reference to market competition and the implications of the new economic conditions for environmental sustainability. Despite the fact that farmers located at each end of the rural hierarchy experience the economic impact of globalization differently, small cultivators exporting their produce to the international market being particularly vulnerable to its laissez faire regime, they nevertheless share a common belief in the importance of agriculture for the well-being of the nation. The latter, it is suggested, is a discourse that reproduces much of the ideology associated historically with the agrarian and foundation myths.

Discussed here are the interpretations of agrarian transformation in Greece during the post-war period. These are divided roughly into developmentalist, populist and ethnographic arguments. Emphasis is placed on the necessity of an interdisciplinary method in order to understand patterns of rural change, without attributing a determining role either to a political economy perspective or to an a-historical concept of community. Using the example of ethnohistory, this survey argues for an effective comparative ethnography of rural change, thereby overcoming the usual distinction between macro and micro-analysis.

Over the past half century the theory, practice and politics informing development studies have followed contrasting trajectories, a tangled epistemological pattern displayed inadvertently by some of the contributions to three of the four books reviewed here. This inconsistency has resulted in confusion, not least where current Marxist approaches to the agrarian question are concerned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, misinterpretations of unfree labour plus the jettisoning of class analysis have led to the abandonment of socialism, and its replacement with nationalism and bourgeois democracy as desirable political objectives. By locating rural class formation and agrarian struggle in a global capitalist context, however, one of the four books demonstrates the continuing importance of socialist politics to the study of development.

This article explores landscape as an expression of political change. It focuses on the radical transformations in landholding after 1959 and post-1989. Given that landscape is understood as a socio-cultural and political process rather than – as geographers commonly treat it – a cultural image fixed in place [Hirsch, 1995, this analysis examines how the political changes in Cuba are made manifest in Havana's rural landscape. It also looks at the ontological relationship to landownership particularly during the Special Period, and focuses on how property is conceptualised by smallholding peasants who belong to agrarian co-operatives.

Examined here is the phenomenon of the‘centre-left’ regime that has emerged recently in Latin America, and the reasons why such palpably neo-liberal governments attract the uncritical support of leftist intellectuals worldwide. The‘centre-left’ governments of Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Toledo in Peru, and Gutierrez in Ecuador are measured against a set of criteria designating espousal of leftist politics, a test failed by them all. It is argued here that, in order to develop authentically leftist views about future patterns of agrarian policy and transformation, and to support these once developed, it is necessary first to sweep away the rhetoric that these days is taken for‘leftist’ views.

This article will attempt to explain why England's system of poor relief was not replicated in Scotland and Ireland until well into the nineteenth century. The difference rests on the development of a nation of wage-labourers in England, the result of agrarian capitalism, a process that was complete by the 1790s, at a time when the population of other European countries was overwhelmingly dominated by peasants. The unique class structure in England led from the 1530s onward to the creation of a poor relief system, state-provided welfare funded from taxation, a type of social assistance that was absent elsewhere.

Many scholars regard segregation in the US South as part of urbanization and modernization. Yet few have examined race relations in the countryside. The Rural Face of White Supremacy shows that absolute separation based on race proved poorly adapted to rural life. Inspired by the sociological studies of the rural South done in the 1930s and the 1940s, this book uses oral history to show that interracial social life in mid-twentieth century rural Georgia was ‘marked by intimacy as well as white supremacy.’ Race relations reflected the paternalism and dependence of an agrarian labour system that reduced black workers to the status of a peasantry.

Ever since its inception during the 1960s, the Naxalite movement in India has been the focus of scholarly interest and political analysis. In spite of internal splits and external repression by the state, this agrarian mobilization continues to gain ground in Bihar and elsewhere. Both achievements and contradictions of such Maoist-inspired agency and ideology are examined via the life story of a Naxalite – an organic intellectual – from the Dalit community. Of particular interest are the difficulties of having to protect family members, as well as positive developments, such as shifts in the language of struggle (from caste to class), and negative ones at the level of political consciousness (the persistence of traditional beliefs, receipt of pro-poor funding from the state).

This analysis places the causes and objectives of the Zapatista uprising in relation both to those of other agrarian movements, and to debates about them. Longstanding disagreements on the political left about indigenous autonomy and micro-level nationalist aspirations are examined with particular reference to ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ variants of indigenista discourse in Mexico. Of particular interest is the way in which the discourse about indigenous peasant ‘otherness’ necessarily generates a disempowering intra-class conflict, an issue linked in turn to the broader political economy of indigenismo. It is argued that, in many respects, the true precursors of the 1990s Zapatistas are the 1920s Cristeros and 1930s Sinarquistas, each of which constitutes a traditionalist form of anti-capitalist peasant movement belonging to the same agrarian populist lineage. The political efficacy of a Zapatista programme (cultural autonomy, human rights, systemically non-specific democracy) that leaves the wider cla...

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.

This article explores the transitional decade of the 1970s in the history of the southwestern state of Kerala, India, through the films and novels of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, arguably the most important litterateur in Kerala today. After the historic election of a Communist ministry to power in 1957, Kerala then stepped gingerly back from a radical politics and moved towards a restitution of an older masculine, agrarian order. By looking at the shifts in politics and the social order simultaneously with the progression of Vasudevan Nair's own filmic sensibility, the article raises the question of whether historical time and filmic time can be easily mapped on to each other.