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Across the peripheries of global South cities, projects to convert rural land for development purposes have brought dramatic impact on rural communities and environments. Many of these initiatives involve aggregating land, mobilizing investments, and resettling populations, with direct implications for villagers' land rights and livelihoods. In existing studies, rural land conversions have often been examined through frameworks of "land grabbing" and "dispossession". This paper argues for the need to go beyond these frameworks in conceptualizing the varied pathways and outcomes of rural land takings. It presents a comparative case study of two villages in China, whose land has been redeployed for tourism development. In one village, state-led expropriation led to the loss of land rights and the resettlement of villagers in new housing complexes. In another, villagers held onto land ownership and their property but saw intra-community inequalities amplified as residents were differentially incorporated into the tourism economy. By demonstrating how the nuanced mechanisms of land conversion could facilitate variegated livelihood and distributive outcomes between and within communities, this paper problematizes universalist conceptualizations of dispossession and calls for theorizing both "with" and "beyond" dispossession to account for the multifaceted dynamics of land development in global South contexts. • Theorizing with and beyond dispossession in rural land politics. • Comparative case study of two tourism villages in suburban China. • Shows how and why rural land conversion produces contrasting local outcomes. • Advances comparative research on land across North-South, rural-urban divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent oil palm expansion has resulted in significant land losses for rural communities globally, raising concerns about food security, poverty, and the loss of common resources. This study investigates whether community-based tenure regimes in Mexico, particularly ejidos, prevent land grabbing and land concentration in oil palm producing regions. By mapping oil palm plantation types (smallholdings, mid-sized and large-scale plantations) across major land tenure regimes (ejido, communal and private property) using high spatial resolution imagery from Google Earth and ESRI/Maxar, we explore the relationship between tenure forms and land concentration. Our findings suggest that ejido lands largely prevents land grabbing by oil palm, although neoliberal reforms have favored land concentration, especially under private tenured land (southern Campeche) but also in some ejidos facing illegal land-based investments (Lacandon rainforest). This research contributes to broader debates on oil palm, tenure regimes and land grabbing, highlighting the need for land tenure policies that protect rural communities from industrial plantation encroachments. • Mexico offers a unique opportunity to understand land grabbing by oil palm as community-based tenure is very common. • Our findings indicate oil palm smallholdings are prevalent but also production under private tenured land. • Ejidos, a form of community-based tenure in Mexico, were found to prevent land grabbing by oil palm. • Latest oil palm expansion in Mexico, occurring in Campeche, is taking the form of large industrial plantations. • This case shows that both land rights along and policy support are key to foster small-scale oil palm production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural China is experiencing rapid socioeconomic transformations, including suburbanisation and rural gentrification. In this paper, we argue that to understand these processes, we have to take into account the changes in rural land rights. Based on an analysis of a pilot case for China's rural collective commercial construction land (RCCCL) reform policy at the edge of Chengdu City, we demonstrate how state-led rural land reform paves the way for stealthy land dispossession and rural gentrification. Our argument in this paper is threefold. First, given the entrenched collective land use rights of rural villagers in China, state-led land commodification, is a necessary condition for rural gentrification in China. Secondly, the prospect of capital accumulation through rural gentrification motivates entrepreneurial public and private actors to promote such reforms in ways that dispossess rural peasants and peasant collectives of their land (use) rights. Thirdly, the particularities of dispossession through state-led land reform result in particular experiences of displacement and displacement pressure on the side of affected rural communities. Our findings contribute to the decentring of rural gentrification theory, in that they underline the necessity to include the particular histories of land commodification and dispossession in our understanding of rural gentrification in contexts where rural land is partly or wholly shielded from market influences. In the case of China, dynamics of rural gentrification are blurring the rural-urban boundary on three dimensions: political economy (land use governance), material infrastructure (landscape and residential architecture), and socio-cultural practices (rural livelihoods and identity). • Rural land regimes structure peri-urban development in China. • Land commodification is a precondition for rural gentrification in China. • Original villagers are dispossessed and displaced. • Rural gentrification blurs the rural-urban boundary in terms of land use (rights), landscape and social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Methodologically contributes to legal geography and Indigenous rights. • Analyzes hydropower's legal geography of dispossession. • Explores cultural and more-than-human forms of dispossession. • Provides methodological insights on collaborative mapmaking with Mapuche Indigenous leaders. • Considers the political ontology of these legally plural systems. In this article, I examine how hydropower projects in Mapuche territory both form part of internationally recognized approaches to develop renewable energy and also anchor colonial relations in rivers. In pursuit of energy development, water and ancestral cultural practices of the Mapuche Pueblo are being seized by a nexus of state laws and informal practices of private sector actors. Concurrently, Mapuche people assert their jurisdictions and experience resurgence of Indigenous lifeways through defending their waterways. Drawing on collaborative research guided by the Alianza Territorial Puelwillimapu, a Mapuche-Williche alliance convoked by ancestral leaders, I provide a methodological contribution to legal geography's analysis of Indigenous rights. Bringing a legal geography approach to dispossession, I explain how collaborative mapmaking and systematizing the "layers of dispossession" provides a methodological approach to consider structural limitations to environmental justice on Indigenous lands. Overall, this case contributes to how we conceive of spatial justice in legal geography and in renewable energy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Agonistic approaches are difficult to transfer to developmentalist contexts. • Large-scale projects tend to invisibilize local realities and property regimes. • Displacement and precarization reinforce inferiorized citizenships and impede resistance. • Struggles against dispossession risk reproducing the norms that are fundamental to it. • Thus, resistance must challenge the symbolic order of the dominant property regime. This paper analyzes the struggle around dispossession in the context of the Belo Monte Dam in the Brazilian Amazon. The construction consortium dominated the process of dispossession with politics of non-recognition that assigned valuelessness to local ways of life and concepts of property. Aggravated by the prevalence of clientelistic relations that blocked formal negotiation opportunities, this induced a process of fragmentation and the precarization of many residents. However, some residents organized and offered resistance. Through performative acts of citizenship, they constituted themselves as political subjects and transformed the conflict into an agonistic struggle. Nevertheless, they continued to be dominated by the consortium and in their resistance forcedly legitimized its politics of displacement. This paper argues that consideration of the way politics, people and their struggle around dispossession and citizenship are entangled with the symbolic order is crucial for understanding and promoting political struggles and advancing agonistic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Bolsonaro administration and its class allies used the pandemic as a political opportunity and the state as a tool to advance dispossessions. • Dispossessions such as debt interest payments or privatizations simply redistribute surpluses or means of production, with no impact on capital expansion. • Dispossessions of peasants or indigenous people from lands and forests expand capital by turning their means of subsistence into means of capitalist production. • The transfer to for-profit companies of public services, facilities, or spaces turns means of subsistence into commodities and thus expands capital. • Capitalization, commodification, or the termination of contemporary commons reduce means of subsistence and thus increase the availability of exploitable labor-power. In 2020–2021 Brazil simultaneously experienced the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and the world's largest health crisis in a century. The Covid-19 pandemic struck the country deeply, killing about 690 thousand people by late 2022. They were also years of increased pressure by capital on peasants and indigenous people, targets of the violence with which capital, ever since its dawn, has wielded to advance over spaces that serve the subsistence of immediate producers. In this period, the Brazilian state continued to comply with decades-old demands from neoliberal ideology for privatizations and the dismantling of protections for workers and the poor in general. These phenomena, when articulated by theory inspired by the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, suggest that the Bolsonaro administration and its class allies used the pandemic as a political opportunity for dispossessing policies. The article discusses this based on concepts that distinguish dispossessions that serve capital expansion from those that do not. The first group includes processes that lead to proletarianization of immediate producers in addition to the capitalization or commodification of hitherto means of subsistence. Among dispossessions that do not expand capital are those that involve the simple redistribution of surpluses or means of production. The paper contributes to the literature on dispossession by analyzing concrete manifestations of it, drawing on a conceptual framework that distinguishes dispossession types that have been conflated in much current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of several months in 2018, more than 240 people were arrested in Burnaby, BC, Canada for disrupting the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. While those arrested shared a willingness to defy Canadian law in opposition to this pipeline development, the police applied differing degrees of force and violence while making these arrests. Informed by interviews with land defenders and engagements on the frontlines of this conflict, this paper considers what these discrepancies in police tactics teach us about logics of settler colonial law, authority, and violence. We do so by engaging in a discussion of the foundational paradox of the state – that its constitutional law is unlawfully constituted – and by presenting the politics of recognition as a strategy employed by the settler colonial state in its attempts to reconcile the contradiction between the state's claims to legal authority and its own unlawful foundations. However, whereas recognition and reconciliation are often presented in contrast to earlier more violent eras of colonial governance, we argue that colonial recognition is a logic of state violence which determines how, and against whom, state violence is distributed. When assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction take unrecognized or deviant forms, the state ultimately resorts to violence to remove these competing claims to legal authority. Moreover, we argue that police violence against Indigenous peoples asserting "sovereignty on the ground" should not be understood as merely a matter of law enforcement – rather, this is a productive form of violence through which the legal authority of the state is actively established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Process of recognition in Cambodia disregarded indigenous peoples understandings and beliefs. • Land titling produced communities and territories incommensurable to Bunong notions. • Bunong refused strategic belonging to proposed geographical imaginaries. • Bunong rearticulated counterhegemonic meanings and practices of place and belonging. For years, the Cambodian state has signed away indigenous peoples' land to large-scale plantations. At the same time, the state has set up an intricate titling process that would allow indigenous peoples to officially register their land and protect it against dispossession. The Bunong ethnic minority from Bu Sra in Northeast Cambodia started to engage in such a land titling process around ten years ago. When they tried to register as an 'indigenous community' with the Ministry of Interior, it became apparent that defining the boundaries of a community is a highly political matter. Bunong villagers, non-profit organization staff and state bureaucrats all engaged in politics of 'community' and space-making in this ongoing struggle over territory. Arguing that the process of recognition of community and territory is strongly contested and involves contrasting ontologies of community, place and belonging, I focus on the incommensurability between Bunong notions of legitimate claimants/claims and actual titled communities and territories that legalization produced. I give ethnographic evidence of generational power dynamics, NGO involvement and fraught mapping processes by drawing on concepts of hegemony, consent and refusal. Problematizing the making of indigenous communities for the sake of titling, I discuss the practical and theoretical implications of this process of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government officials and representatives of corporations and international organisations promoting oil palm argue this crop brings development by creating numerous jobs for the rural poor, even through large-scale plantations. This study critically assesses this narrative as deployed in Mesoamerica and analyses oil palm labour regimes in two study regions in Mexico and one in Guatemala where both smallholders and private sector plantations are producing oil palm. Following a political ecology framework, we analyse labour practices as embodied and political, taking into account larger processes of agrarian change. Based on interviews and surveys of producers and field labourers, we found oil palm production was characterised by low employment rates (one job or less for every 10 hectares of land) and flexible labour regimes under which field labourers face uncertain, poorly paid and risky circumstances at work. The palm oil industry defines development narrowly, as access to income without social change, while it profits from contemporary and historical inequalities that have turned young men, many of them indigenous Maya, rural women, and Guatemalan peasants into cheap labour. However, in oil palm production, profit oriented neoliberal arrangements by the private sector clash with a peasant moral economy that emphasise the value of physical labour and smallholder-worker solidarity. Despite being highly profitable, the palm oil industry offers limited livelihood opportunities for field labourers. • Oil palm provides one job or less per year for every 10 hectares planted with this crop. • Labour for oil palm cultivation is provided by landless peasants (often young indigenous men and sometimes women). • Workers in oil palm production are often hired as casual day labourers. • Neoliberal arrangements by the private sector clash with a peasant moral economy shared by workers and smallholders. • The palm oil industry offers limited opportunities for field labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of the Honduran palm oil industry, through a case study of the Bajo Aguán region in the North Coast. This region went from being a supposedly "empty" space before the 1960s, to the home of a colonization project that became the centerpiece of the Honduran agrarian reform and the palm oil industry, during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s it came to be known as the "capital of the agrarian counter-reform," as a cycle of dispossession led to the concentration of most of the land distributed during the previous period by a handful of large private companies. From the 2000s onwards, a new consensus has arisen regarding the centrality of the crop in the country's rural development strategy. However, this apparent consensus has been contended in the Aguán by a set of peasant organizations who question the legality and legitimacy of the deals that led to the control of the industry by these companies. It argues that to better understand the current configuration of the Honduran palm oil industry and the relation between the different types of small-holding producers and the larger companies, it is necessary to take into account their particular histories and forms of articulation with the industry as a whole. • The current configuration of the Honduran palm oil industry was informed by the 1990s process of agrarian counter-reform. • The Honduran palm oil industry is formally diverse, but controlled by a limited set of large actors. • Not only technical and economic aspects define the position of smallholding positions within the palm oil industry. • Their political history and practices are also important to understand their actions and relations with other actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, following the discovery of huge coal reserves in the province of Tete, Mozambique, there has been an increasing rush of global capital into the province. This interest in the mining industry has resulted in the creation of enclaves and spaces of enclosure that entrench the existing class differences further by integrating small groups into global circuits of production whilst subjecting others to dispossession. These dynamics of contemporary capitalist expansion across Sub-Saharan Africa have been analysed in the literature on neoliberal enclaves as exclusionary spaces of extraction and capital accumulation. This paper contributes to this scholarship. It focuses on the resettlement site of Cateme that was built to accommodate the populations dispossessed by the neoliberal mining enclave in Tete, and highlights how the space of Cateme constituted through the dispossession from this enclave is characterised by extreme forms of socio-economic marginalisation. Through this discussion, the paper demonstrates how neoliberal enclaves, rather than just being exclusionary spaces of extraction as observed in the literature, ought to be analysed as interacting in complex ways with broader socio-economic landscapes of host countries, through which they create spaces of suffering and entrench the existing class differences beyond their own spaces of extraction and accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Illegal hunting of rhinoceros cannot be decoupled from conservation's slow violence. • Resettlement delays and divestments create conditions linked to rhino hunting. • Wealth derived from poaching is entangled in attempts to offset poverty amplified by conservation. • Communities found guilty of rhino poaching by mere association bear tremendous costs. • The criminalization of rhino poaching destabilizes other ethical options for those bearing the brunt of conservation. Over the past decade, South Africa's Kruger National Park has become embroiled in a rhino poaching crisis. In response, state authorities are applying military logics, personnel, training, and equipment to protect endangered black and threatened white rhinos. Many suspected poachers are Mozambicans, including those who are resident in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP). Based on a sequence of fieldwork conducted in the LNP between 2003 and 2016, we examine the relationship between this extremely tense and armed clash and the thousands of already socially and economically marginalized LNP residents targeted for resettlement as part of conserving rhino habitat. As they await relocation, the basic human security of residents has become deeply undermined by decreased access to services and environmental resources and the criminalization of their livelihoods. While much of the critical scholarship on anti-poaching focuses on the spectacular forms of violence that characterize rhino poaching, beneath this a more structural and "slower" form of violence persists. Seeking to develop an understanding of violence that extends beyond the spectacular, we argue that the cumulative losses and instability that have followed conservation created the conditions under which rhino poaching unfolded in the LNP. Communities found guilty of rhino poaching by mere association bear tremendous costs while the reduction of resettlement to an urgent need to control aberrant human behavior masks tremendous opportunity costs forgone. Better understandings of these costs and their links to violence need be taken seriously in any discussion of poaching response and poaching motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how, besides structural and direct modes of violence traditionally attributed to natural resource exploitation, extractive frontiers also unfold through material and affective registers of symbolic violence. This concerns the violence of capital that promises a "better life" whose actual realisation, directly implicated in circuits of "free" market economy, is constantly deferred to the future. Empirically grounded in experiences of dispossession and resettlement caused by coal extraction in Tete, Mozambique, the article employs symbolic violence as an analytic to understand subjectivation constituted by the failed promise of "development" of Tete's extractive frontier. This, the article argues, results in specific scenes of subjection – exposure to the symbolic violence of extractivism, as well as potential contestations of it, through which those dispossessed by mining come into being as subjects of power. These scenes of subjection are temporal: they transform – expand, flutter, retreat – reflecting broader, inherently unstable economies of extraction. As such, subjection to violence is not final but remains susceptible to contestation, mediation, or escalation. Nevertheless, the article shows how, in spite of this potentiality of change, until recently, in Tete symbolic violence had justified, reproduced, and sustained the power of extractivism, as well as of capital more broadly, even within the lifeworlds dispossessed, or otherwise laid to waste, by extractive frontiers of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Explores spatial and temporal patterns of residential eviction and foreclosure in Lexington, KY. • Evictions are more widespread, consistent and spatially concentrated than are foreclosures. • Up to one in five renter households in Lexington are evicted in the average year. • Many of the same individuals appear among both the top evictors and top purchasers of foreclosures. • Argues for the need to analyze multiple forms of housing dispossession and displacement together. Abstract Housing is increasingly recognized as playing a crucial role in shaping any number of other social processes and domains. But fundamental inequalities in housing mean that the benefits of quality housing accrue unequally to different groups of people. In order to explore how housing works not only to reflect, but also produce, socio-spatial inequality, this paper explores the geographies and temporalities of housing dispossession in Lexington, Kentucky by drawing on an extensive dataset of all evictions and foreclosures in the city from 2005 to 2016. The paper demonstrates that while mortgage foreclosure has tended to dominate discussions of housing dispossession since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, residential evictions are both far more widespread and much more consistent over time. The paper also concludes that while foreclosure rates are much more strongly correlated with variables of racial and class segregation, evictions are more spatially concentrated across multiple scales. The paper demonstrates that many of those places experiencing the most acute forms of housing dispossession are not gentrifying inner-city neighborhoods, but rather persistently or increasingly impoverished inner-ring suburbs. Ultimately, this paper argues that these spatialities are the result not of individual failings, but rather of powerful actors in the local housing market acting in conjunction with broader forces of racialized capitalist urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on field research carried out on two struggles at auto parts factories in Gurgaon between 2014 and 2015. Drawing on workers' accounts from the two struggles, I am concerned with how we might think about the women workers struggle, following Roy (2017) as enacting a gendered politics of emplacement. In doing so, I conceptualise the struggles as instances of subaltern counter-urbanism. Borrowing from Roy's (2011) “subaltern urbanism” and Fraser's (1990) “subaltern counter-publics” the struggles are counter-urban as they emerge from and are mobilised against conditions of urban everyday life which render women fixed into labour systems defined through hypermobility and flexibility. The struggles are equally counter-Urban as they break from hegemonic understandings of urban politics within disciplinary Urban Studies which tie subaltern political subjectivities to the itineries of territory, dis/possession and collective consumption (Roy, 2011). It will be shown that the women's struggles evoke demands for emplacement in the city that are future-oriented, speculative and always tentatively under erasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical review examines the political economy of strategic partnerships between development agencies and the private sector as a process of shared value creation in agricultural production. In doing so, it critically reflects on the partnerships that introduce contract farming and examines the case of Sri Lanka. It concludes that such arrangements do not address the underlying causes of poverty that affect communities in the developing countries, although it may increase the income of the participating farmers. Partnerships formed to create shared value alternatively function as institutional frameworks for legitimising flexible accumulation and accumulation by dispossession that reproduce the root causes of poverty in the spaces of agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Bangladesh contributes little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Based on semi-structured research interviews as a conduit to a literature review, this paper shows how the processes of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment impede the vitality of its climate change adaptation efforts. Enclosure refers to when adaptation projects transfer public assets into private hands or expand the roles of private actors into the public sphere. Exclusion refers to when adaptation projects limit access to resources or marginalize particular stakeholders in decision-making activities. Encroachment refers to when adaptation projects intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation. Entrenchment refers to when adaptation projects aggravate the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsen concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community. In the case of Bangladeshi, climate change policies implemented under the country’s National Adaptation Program of Action have enabled elites to capture land through public servants, the military, and even gangs carrying bamboo sticks. Exclusionary forms of adaptation planning exist at both the national and local scales. Climate protection measures have encroached upon village property, char (public) land, forests, farms, and other public commons. Most egregiously, community coping strategies for climate change have entrenched class and ethnic hierarchies ultimately trapping the poor, powerless, and displaced into a predatory patronage system that can aggravate human insecurity and intensify violent conflict. Planners and practitioners of adaptation need to become more cognizant of the potential for projects to harm others, or admit complicity in the processes of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment, if they are ever to be eliminated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates of marine biodiversity conservation have intensified their calls for the rapid expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs) across the globe, while researchers continue to examine why some people in affected communities support MPAs and others oppose them. Drawing on an ethnographic study of dispossession and the micropolitics of marine conservation in southeastern Tanzania, this paper examines the local dynamics pertaining to the Mnazi Bay-Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park (MBREMP) in rural Mtwara on Tanzania's border with Mozambique. In-depth interviews with 160 individuals and eight focus group discussions with 48 participants were conducted in four sea-bordering villages. By analyzing the narratives of people living in the MBREMP's catchment area regarding their lived experiences with the MBREMP, the paper highlights inter-village and intra-village similarities and differences in the perceived significance and social impact of the MBREMP. Through narratives, people revealed their feelings of angst, disempowerment and vulnerability, emanating from their awareness of the state-directed dispossession they had experienced. The MBREMP's gendered impact was evident as women frequently blamed the park rangers for making their lives difficult through unreasonable and coercive restrictive practices. The paper argues that to achieve the laudable global goals of marine biodiversity conservation, it is imperative that the social complexities of the local context, livelihood concerns, gender relations, social hierarchies and the diverse perspectives of residents are ethnographically documented and integrated into policies leading to the practice of good governance of MPAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which has been informed by sustained engagement with an autonomous social movement and long-term participatory action research, offers a critical structural analysis of the Maya land struggle in Toledo District, Belize. We contend that state-sanctioned violations of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) reveal both the coloniality and misanthropic skepticism inherent in conventional 'development' agendas and the Westminster-modelled liberal state. More specifically, by drawing from revolutionary theories of race and decolonisation and placing the concepts of racial capitalism and slow violence into an integrated anticolonial frame, we explain how economic development projects and government sponsored FPIC violations are aiding and abetting land dispossession, ecosystem damage, heritage destruction, the criminalisation of environmental defenders, and disavowals of Indigenous governance. Ultimately, the piece illustrates how extractivist-driven refusals of good faith consultation with Indigenous communities in the Caribbean exacerbate environmental degradation, undermine Indigenous self-determination, and constitute contemporary manifestations of colonial power, racial-capitalist exploitation, and structural (slow) violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ideal model of Community Health Worker (CHW) selection has existed since long before Alma Ata catalysed the community health approach, dating to late colonial times. In this model, a willing, trusted, relatively well-educated and secure member of the community with proven aptitude is openly elected by their leadership, peers or relevant committee. Their participation is entirely voluntary and that voluntarism is symbolic of their community's participation as a whole. While this imagery is long-embedded in CHW storytelling, such practice is rare. While elements of this 'model pathway' exist, a myriad of structural and agential factors shape who becomes a CHW, how and why. Through life history interviews over twelve months 2022–2023 with 68 CHWs in Isiolo, northern Kenya (known as CHVs), we explore predominant pathways to community health labour as told through stories. We articulate five such pathways: model, handpicked, shadow, outsider and, most importantly, dispossession. Through telling five CHVs' stories, we present each 'ideal type' but also explore how each pathway is not singular, rather overlapping in complex, context-specific ways. These pathways confound Western-centric, Western-promoted notions of voluntarism and indeed community health, which cannot explain why such labour endures. We conclude that our findings provide a timely commentary on how voluntary labour within health continues to tax structural poverty and frustrated life chances in lieu of concrete and expansive investments in human resources for health by governments and health agencies both North and South. In understanding voluntary labour as a form of structural violence, we can better elucidate the historical dependency on this work in impoverished regions and how the undervaluing of such work persists over time. • We use a structural lens to show how community health labour remains undervalued. • We explore life stories of volunteers in Kenya to understand pathways to labour. • We identify five pathways: model, outsider, handpicked, shadow and dispossession. • Such pathways elucidate labour as a tax on structural poverty in marginalized areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on findings from a study of Indigenous housing in a regional Western Australian city, this paper examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples as a particular set of ‘right bearers’ within the right-to-the-city discourse. In settler-states, colonial discourses of absence, threat, and authenticity have informed policy frameworks that have militated against various Indigenous claims of belonging, rights, and aspiration in relation to urban places. Housing has been a representative domain of struggle in this respect. Consequently, today, Indigenous peoples have disproportionately high rates of dependence on more volatile and discriminatory forms of tenure than their non-Indigenous counterparts. The paper examines the incongruence between State aspirations to move (Indigenous) people along a housing continuum in urban environments, and the actual experiences of Indigenous urban residents, which fix discursively on barriers to such movements. It also traces the deleterious, displacing impacts for urban Indigenous households of the retreat of the State in its role as a landlord for the socio-economically disadvantaged, and in responding to market signals and particular sociological theses regarding poverty, with specific spatial logics. In so doing, we advance two interwoven arguments. First, we assert that Indigenous people face a unique precarity in the Australian urban housing system, which is a result of both colonial and racially discriminatory forces, and economically discriminating processes such as capital concentration and the commodification of land. Second, we contend that this precarity sets many Indigenous people on housing career trajectories that are antithetical to policy intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the politics, experiences and dynamics of state formation in a particular context of climate crisis. Through the study of the implementation of state-led adaptation and mitigation projects in two rural localities of northern Colombia, we interrogate the ways in which these interventions shape the everyday lives of those who happen to be located in the targeted areas. We found that, in spite of the different goals and particular configurations of the adaptation and mitigation interventions, these climate projects engendered the same contradiction. They promised a resilient and environmentally sound future, but the path towards that future has not been available to everyone. Furthermore, we show that the subjects of climate interventions do not embrace state promises in the same way. Local expectations, desires and engagement with the state are ambivalent and heterogeneous, and cannot be taken as a given. This paper develops these ideas by way of three arguments. First, we argue that exclusion, dispossession and marginality are inherent to the promises of climate mitigation and adaptation in the cases we study in the Colombian Caribbean. Secondly, the goals of state-led adaptation and mitigation programs we study are at odds with the material and social conditions of the areas of implementation. And thirdly, paying attention to the dynamics of state formation in the Colombian Caribbean in relation to climate change challenges common binaries opposing state absence/presence, failure/success, and retreat/return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While academic literature and media attention has rightly focused on the numerous instances of land grabbing taking place in various corners of the world, far less attention is paid to the enclosure, appropriation and dispossession taking place in the guise of marine conservation – or the recently developed concept of “blue grabbing”. Blue grabbing articulates how marine conservation results in the appropriation of marine resources and coastal land from previous custodians by more powerful actors, such as state and tourist operators. Blue grabbing can be considered a form of primitive accumulation, yet dispossession via marine conservation does not take the conventional form of privatising land, as the spaces involved are still formally state-owned areas. Rather, it is the benefits from natural resources that contribute to capital accumulation of tourist operators and indirectly the state. Restrictions on local resource use are justified using degradation narratives of “overfishing”, while financial benefits from tourism are drained from local communities within a system lacking transparency. This intervention draws on fieldwork research to reveal how blue grabbing plays out in Redang Island Marine Park, Malaysia, yet given that blue grabbing is a recently developed concept, argues there is a pressing need for research to build a more informed picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• On-demand recycling startups have proliferated in urban India over the past decade. • A host of seemingly disparate policies have together enabled this rise. • Startups rely primarily on aggregation of materials to make a profit in this sector. • Traditional informal actors (kabadiwalas) are likely to be displaced as a result. • To protect livelihoods, collective organizing and state intervention are needed. Over the past decade, urban India has seen the emergence and proliferation of startups that are offering on-demand recycling services using web- and mobile-based platforms. These firms replicate the services of informal workers known as kabadiwalas who have historically made their livelihoods through trade in recyclable materials. Existing analyses of platformization in developed world contexts fail to explain the rise of platformization in India because of the particularity of the relationship between platform firms and the informal economy. This paper contextualizes the rise of platform recycling startups within a generally conducive policy environment focused on improving sanitation, encouraging entrepreneurship, and expanding the use of information technology in India. An examination of business models deployed by these firms reveals how and why the structure of recycling markets does not allow for a 'lean' model typically adopted by platform firms in other sectors. Rather than merely connecting service providers to consumers, these startups rely on aggregating recyclable materials and dispossessing intermediaries such as kabadiwalas in order to generate surplus value in an otherwise saturated market. Relying on an analysis of online content about these new firms, this paper examines the strategies that firms use to legitimize themselves and delegitimize kabadiwalas in an attempt to displace and dispossess them from the market space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commodification of land is at the forefront of the re-casting of rural China by the spread of capitalism. This study examines a market-based program of land development rights trading in Chengdu, China. The program was made possible by a change in the central government's land-use regulation that shifted the policy goal from 'no net loss' of farmland to 'no net gain' of construction land. We detail how local governments at multiple levels work together to construct land development rights as a commodity and build market institutions to foster its trading, illustrating land commodification as an inherently political process. A unique combination of innovative local policies and central political concessions created an outcome of 'commodification without dispossession' in Chengdu. Land commodification was used to finance rural reconstruction and brought profound changes to rural space, including re-configuring land-use patterns, transforming physical conditions in residential communities, and changing the representation of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the post-emancipation contests over agricultural land in the South Carolina Lowcountry – the coastal region surrounding the port city of Charleston – in the context of recent theorizations of plantation geographies and the racial politics of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). In the aftermath of slavery, freedpeople in the Lowcountry were remarkably successful in securing control over their labor and access to land. The measure of relative autonomy that came with these gains spurred enormous anxiety for white elites, however, who realized that black control over land and labor threatened to upend the region’s racial hierarchy. I argue that plantation geographies persist through the white monopolization of land, and suggest that successfully challenging this historical trajectory depends on challenging liberal modes of improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I articulate a notion of ‘social dispossession,’ an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women’s social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of neoliberal conservation and ecotourism development, the Honduran state has prioritized the desires of foreign tourists and private investors over the needs of indigenous and black coastal inhabitants, and increasingly this is leading to state-sanctioned violence against marginalized groups. I use Peluso’s analytic of coercive conservation (1993) to show how conservation practice furthers the expansionist policies of the state and elite investors while simultaneously dehumanizing the indigenous peoples that depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. While Garífuna culture is central to Honduras’s ecotourism ambitions, their livelihoods, in the eyes of many developers and conservation NGOs, are a potential threat to the viability of the emerging tourism imaginary. Black and indigenous coastal inhabitants are valued for the cultural cache they add to regional tourism plans, yet denigrated for their inherent “backwardness” and presumed inability to respect the delicate ecosystems they inhabit. This imaginary authorizes material practices of racialized dispossession, which were set in motion by neoliberal conservation regimes designed to exploit the natural and cultural resources upon which tourism development is premised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the relationship between violence and conservation has gained increasing attention in both academic and activist circles, official and public discourses often portray their entanglements as (unlucky) overlapping phenomena. In this article, we show how, under specific practices of state territorialization, conservation becomes both the means and reasons for violence. Based on ethnographic research in Colombia’s emblematic Tayrona National Natural Park, we detail how both the war on drugs and tourism promotion shape these state practices, and how they have translated into everyday, yet powerful, means of dispossession in the name of conservation. By analyzing the effects of the production of peasants as environmental predators, illegal occupants and collateral damage, we show how official conservation strategies have justified local communities’ political and material erasure, and how they have resulted in the destruction of their lived ecologies and the erosion of their livelihood strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While literature on land grabbing and land formalisation respectively has literally exploded the past decade, few studies analyse the practical processes taking place at their confluence, or provide an analysis at an aggregate level. This paper is based on 27 months of in-depth empirical investigation of thirteen large-scale agro-investments across four regions in Tanzania. It explores how four key legislative acts and policies related to land formalisation and land acquisition for large-scale agro-investments unfold on the ground, their implementation and combined effects. We show that land formalisation and acquisition are intrinsically linked: the former paving the way for investment in all thirteen cases. Moreover, rather than fulfilling development policy expectations of land tenure security for smallholder farmers, employment and poverty reduction in rural Africa, we demonstrate that, in Tanzania, these combined processes rather foster village land dispossession, investors' land acquisitions, and a (re)centralisation of land control. Therefore, we argue that the conjoint implementation of policies associated with land formalisation and land investments have adverse consequences for rural farmers whose land is formalised and then set aside for investment ultimately leading to a formalised rural land dispossession. Our unique aggregate analysis thus provides solid support to the existing critique towards the parallel implementation of land formalisation and large-scale agro-investments, and the interlinked reform of the land legislative framework, all strongly supported by global development bodies. • The paper presents the practical outcomes of the land formalisation and large-scale agro-investment agendas in Tanzania. • It's based on 27 months of empirical data from 13 large-scale agro-investments in Tanzania across 4 regions and 6 districts. • Combined, land formalisation and large-scale agro-investments lead to a systematic dispossession of village land. • The dispossession takes place through predatory and legal practices implementing four legislative land acts and policies Such systematic dispossession takes place in favor of investors' land acquisitions and increasing land (re)-centralisation. • Combining land formalisation and land acquisition processes proves detrimental to farmers' and pastoralists' land access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper analyzes the effects of 164 land deals on rural transformation from resource- to wage-based livelihoods in 282 villages in Lao PDR. • Instead of contributing to the transformation from resource- to wage-based livelihoods, land deals push peasants into precarious conditions. • Land deals affected rural employment through dispossession without, with limited, or with adverse semi-proletarianization with investments. • Restrictions on hire of foreign labor and compliance with minimum wages, are essential to minimizing precarization and increase benefits for local people. • Protecting peasants' rights to resources is imperative to minimize the concurrence of precarization and increasing traditional vulnerability. Labor is central to the debates on global land-based investment. Proponents purport that these investments are an avenue for rural transformation from resource- to wage-based livelihoods through the generation of employment and contribution to poverty reduction. Drawing on a recent, unique national dataset on land concessions in Lao PDR, this paper uses an agrarian political economy lens to investigate how land-based investments live up to this expectation. The paper analyzes potential determinants of the degree to which different social groups engage in wage-labor within land-based investments. Results show that while land-based investments create a significant absolute number of jobs, former land users were offered predominantly low-skilled and seasonal jobs. The effects of these investments on rural employment are uneven depending on degrees of land and resource dispossession, the extent of job creation, and the availability of alternative opportunities in the region. In the majority of cases, former land users, especially women were pushed into precarious conditions through three processes: dispossession without proletarianization; limited proletarianization; and adverse proletarianization. We argue that the promotion of land-based investments as an approach for rural development, particularly along the gradient of transforming resource- to wage-labor based livelihoods, is ineffective without concurrent opportunities within and beyond the agricultural sector to absorb the labor reallocated from traditional livelihoods. Enforcing labor regulations, including restrictions on hiring of foreign labor, compliance with minimum wages, and relevant skills transfer are essential to minimize precarization and increase benefits for local people. Further, protecting peasants' individual and common land-use rights is imperative to minimize the concurrence of precarization and increasing traditional vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Attend to context specificity and move beyond public/private debates. [•] Propose alternative way to understand and envision the human right to water. [•] Discuss processes of dispossession and implications for HRW strategic potential. [•] Argue efforts are needed to understand underlying trends across cases and contexts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• External actors use urgency and "last frontier" narratives to legitimize resource control for extraction or conservation. • Disregard for local people's needs, voices or very existence gives rise to dispossession in resource frontiers. • Imaginative, economic and political neglect co-constitute frontier assemblages in places as disparate as Brazil and Myanmar. • Pre-frontier abandonment, selective support, ignored harms and biased sustainability agendas are distinct phases of neglect. • Neglect increasingly leaps from abandonment to socially exclusive conservation as global environmental concerns increase. A convergence of factors creates a worrisome contemporary pattern of resource dispossession of local populations in developing countries. Growing market demand for commodities, states' interest in expanding their fiscally fertile territories, and environmental conservation pressures have promoted resource frontiers, where locals all too frequently lose access to land, water and livelihoods. To add momentum and legitimize outsiders' agendas, such locations are sometimes framed as "last frontiers" – the final places of possibility. While various forms of resource "grabbing" have gained increased attention, we argue that a crucial dimension of frontier dynamics – neglect and its role in facilitating dispossession – warrants further study as it tends to be overlooked. Drawing on the frontiers and political ecology literature, this article analyzes how neglect by state authorities, markets, and environmental organizations paves the way for dispossession in those landscapes. We compare two cases: the Matopiba soy frontier in the savannas of Brazil's Cerrado and the Chin Hills of western Myanmar. Our results show how neglect is critical to imaginatively frame regions as "empty" places of possibility, excluding local actors economically from development and politically from governance initiatives. We argue that neglect not only precedes but is an enduring feature of resource frontiers, and identify four consecutive phases: (I) pre-frontier abandonment, (II) selective support to outsiders, (III) overlooked harms to communities, and (IV) socially exclusive sustainability agendas. As environmental concerns gain increasing global salience, Phase I sometimes leaps to Phase IV as international actors pounce to control what they regard as "last frontiers" for conservation. We conclude that external actors' inaction enables local communities' dispossession as much as their actions. This raises critical policy and scholarly questions about actors' responsibility and accountability, not only for harms done but also for systematically failing to heed local actors' aspirations and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature suggests that the spatial concentration of violence can contribute to destabilizing property relations. In this context, there is an underexplored area related to the study of the relationship between specific forms of violence (homicide) and dispossession – defined as the criminal intent of taking property through violence and force. This study seeks to fill this gap by testing the violence/property hypothesis using information from 2471 sub-national units of Mexico for the period 2015–2019. Findings confirm a spatial association between dispossession and homicide that is not randomly distributed across space. Moreover, it is found to be neither fixed nor dichotomous. This could open a debate on the causal direction between homicidal violence and property dispute. • Dispossession represents one of the rising illegal activities in contemporary societies. • Spatial concentration of violence can contribute to destabilizing property relations. • Property conflicts tend to be more frequent in spaces with violent environment. • Asymmetric spatial association between homicidal violence and dispossession in Mexico. • The dispossession-homicide relationship is significant in 10% of Mexico's municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounting global evidence reveals a rise in austerity driven by neoliberalisation. We explored the health impacts of an austerity decision to shut down the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) in Saskatchewan, Canada. We conducted 100 semi-structured interviews and 4 focus group discussions with former bus riders and stakeholders in health and social services followed by a member checking exercise. The STC closure has negatively affected health through a web of dispossession where the absence of the bus affects individual former users (through healthcare access, psychosocial and financial impacts), family members (through broken relationships and other burdens), communities (through shrinking commons), and entire systems (such as health services through health worker stress and inefficiencies). Analyses of the health impacts of austerity decisions need to move beyond aggregates of individual users of public services to understand the complex ways in which various communities and systems might be caught up in a web of dispossession through austerity. • Policy choices to cut public transportation deteriorate health outcomes. • Austerity policies affect health through a 'web' of negative unintended consequences. • Absence of public transportation has psychosocial health effects. • Austerity is a fundamental driver of poor health and health inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to analyze dispossession processes in rural Brazil that took place during the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, when Brazilian capitalist agriculture had its most significant impulse. From a theoretical perspective, dispossessions that served capital expansion can be distinguished from those that did not. The first group includes processes that led to proletarianization of immediate producers who had been peasants, or to the capitalization of lands that they had been using for subsistence. Among processes that did not expand capital are those that involved the simple redistribution of the means of production—including land—or surpluses. State violence was one of the mechanisms used to execute many of these processes, which supported the expansion project of the dictatorial regime, particularly in northern Brazil. By converting means of subsistence—land—into capital, or immediate producers—peasants—into proletarians, these processes reproduced in contemporary formats what Marx had called primitive accumulation and that in late capitalism I call expanding dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Rampal power plant project in Bangladesh radically changes land control. • Land dispossessions are threatening agriculture-based rural livelihoods. • This project-driven development mainly benefits rich and powerful social groups. • Therefore Bangladesh's latest development narrative should be seriously questioned. In this article, we critically review the developmental claims made for the construction of the Rampal power plant in southwestern Bangladesh, in the light of evidence about transformations of land control related to this construction project. Land has become a heavily contested resource in the salinity-intruded southwestern coastal area of Bangladesh. Changes in land control for the construction of the Rampal power plant and similar projects have intensified decades of struggles over rights and access to land. The Rampal project is labelled as "development" and claims to contribute to the elimination of poverty. However, we find that, in reality, this project leads to a reorganization of land control, rights and access in ways that perpetuate and intensify waves of eviction and exclusion of small landholders and landless laborers, thus threatening agriculture-based rural livelihoods. We analyze how four actor groups involved in land control are differently affected by the project interventions, embedded in the context of historical land tenure developments. We find that the benefits of this "development", primarily favoring rich and powerful social groups and investors, necessitates a critical rethinking of Bangladesh's development and its claims of poverty elimination in the light of related land control practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Explores three ways that responses to climate change can entrench, exacerbate or reconfigure the power of elites. • Experimentation is when elites test or pilot low-carbon technologies or policy models, transferring risks but not benefits. • Financialisation refers to the expansion of finance, capital, and markets in decarbonisation pathways. • Dispossession is when elites use decarbonisation as a process through which to appropriate land, wealth, or other assets. What is a low-carbon pathway? To many, it is a way of mitigating climate change. To others, it is about addressing market failure or capturing the co-benefits attached to low-carbon systems, such as jobs or improved health. To still others, it represents building adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of climate change. However, these interpretations can fail to acknowledge how pathways of low-carbon transitions can also become intertwined with processes and structures of inequality, exclusion and injustice. Using a critical lens that draws from a variety of disciplines, this article explores three ways through which responses to climate change can entrench, exacerbate or reconfigure the power of elites. As society attempts to create a low-carbon society, including for example via coastal protection efforts, disaster recovery, or climate change mitigation and renewable energy, these efforts intersect with at least three processes of elite power: experimentation, financialisation, and dispossession. Experimentation is when elites use the world as a laboratory to test or pilot low-carbon technologies or policy models, transferring risks yet not always sharing benefits. Financialisation refers to the expansion and proliferation of finance, capital, and financial markets in the global economy and many national economies, processes of which have recently extended to renewable energy. Dispossession is when elites use decarbonisation as a process through which to appropriate land, wealth, or other assets (and in the process make society more majoritarian and/or unequal). We explore these three themes using a variety of evidence across illustrative case studies, including hard and soft coastal protection measures (Bangladesh, Netherlands), climate risk insurance (Malawi), and renewable energy auctions and associated mechanisms of finance and investment (South Africa and Mexico). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical processes that transformed tar sands bitumen in the Athabasca river basin into a natural resource of Canada. The discourse of the resource was first applied to bitumen during the second half of the nineteenth century as the settler colonial state dispatched geologists into the region to quantify, calculate, and measure its properties, and to speculate upon its potential economic applications. The re-storying of bitumen as a natural resource fostered a sense of resource nationalism among citizens of this newly formed state, who projected their fantasies of a settler colonial future upon the stored potentialities that the resource offered. In turn, this desire to secure resources on behalf of the Canadian nation served to consolidate the state's incursion into the Athabasca, enabling the spatial reorganization of the region in accordance with the settler resource imaginary. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I suggest that we can think about this relationship between settler colonialism and the resource as a "resource desiring machine," where both the subject and the object of desire are co-produced through the relationship of desire itself. Moreover, I argue that this can help us to rethink the relationship between resources and violence. Rather than asking how and when resources cause violence, I argue that violence is inherent to the very category of resource. Violence is the constitutive moment of resource-making, and sustaining the resource imaginary relies on the ongoing violence (threatened or actual) of political and economic institutions such as private property and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the case of anti-eviction politics to examine the urban land question. Following the ideas and practices of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its global interconnections, it traces the potentialities and limits of poor people’s movements as they battle displacement and enact a politics of emplacement. In doing so, it seeks to expand existing understandings of dispossession. Drawing on critical race studies and postcolonial theory, the article pays attention to the relationship between property and personhood in the context of long histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. It asks: what politics of home and land is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self? The work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign points to how various modes of collectivism can be asserted through practices of occupation as well as through global frameworks of human rights. Challenging the secure categories of property and personhood through which liberalism is constituted, such politics is attuned to the present history of racial banishment but is also subject to aspirations of resolution and possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]