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Studies and debates on the issue of land grabs have generated multiple terms and concepts that are used loosely and interchangeably, such as large-scale land acquisitions, land grab, land deals, land enclosure, and land rush, among others. Explanations and critiques of such terms have built and enriched our knowledge. Yet, there is one term that has been underexplored: land rush. Here, we offer our own definition of a ‘land rush’, which has a different meaning from the other commonly used terms. These differences have important theoretical, methodological and political extensions and implications. Applying the lens of ‘land rush’ requires us to adjust our focus, and shows that the literature and public debates have focused on ‘concluded, operational land acquisitions’; they have tended to be dismissive of ‘failed land deals’, blind to ‘pin prick’ types of land accumulation, and have rarely taken the ‘land rush’ itself as the unit of inquiry and subject of public debate in any systematic way. This has led to a fragmented knowledge. Using the concept of the ‘land rush’ enables us to connect the issue of land grabs to broader global social life more effectively. As such, it is a key concept in Critical Agrarian Studies.

Wolford’s (2021) article on the Plantationocene compels us to reexamine the state of agrarian struggles today in relation to struggles within and against capitalism. Although contemporary agrarian movements are relatively vibrant overall, their movement organizations and alliances tend to be sectoral and localized, and plantation workers remain weakly organized. This commentary argues that agrarian struggles can become more relevant if they are better embedded within broader anticapitalist struggles; conversely, broad anticapitalist struggles are better grounded if they are linked to contemporary agrarian struggles. The Plantationocene scholarship validates this point; moreover, scholarship on the Plantationocene can be enriched by engagement with studies on agrarian struggles.

This book is about scholar-activism and political struggles for land. Scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails. The role played by scholar-activists in land struggles is important, but is not straightforward. This book unapologetically celebrates the contributions of scholar-activism in land struggles and scholarship, but more than this, it is about exploring the contradictions and challenges facing scholar-activism. It is neither a glorification of the achievements of scholar-activism, nor a set of prescriptive propositions on how to ‘do’ scholar-activism. Rather, it addresses contentious issues in scholar-activism, many of which are rarely discussed, or are discussed only gingerly and awkwardly when they cannot be avoided. It is a book written by two scholar-activists who have focused their individual and collaborative research and activist works on the politics of land and the role played by radical agrarian movements. Insights in this book are drawn on the experiences of the authors working in the three main sites of global knowledge circuits: academic institutions, independent research institutions oriented to practical politics, and left-wing agrarian movements.

This chapter proposes an anarchist lens to look at the land question. The slogan “Land and Liberty” has been used by many anarchistic movements throughout history to convey the basic message that democratic control over land is a necessary condition for the construction of a free society. Injustice creeps in whenever resource ownership and human needs do not match. In response, anarchistic movements have promoted a variety of institutional arrangements based on usufruct and democratic self-management, two notions that are key anarchist contributions to the land question. In the anarchist sense, usufruct implies reunifying ownership and political deliberation, and therefore abolishing “the economy” as an independent domain of existence. The chapter is divided into three parts. It first briefly explores what some of the main anarchist theorists have said about land and ownership. It then presents three examples, historical and contemporary, of anarchistic organizing around land: the agrarian communes of Makhnovshchina, the Spanish revolution, and the agrarian economy of Zapatismo. Finally, the chapter discusses land in eco-anarchism, with special reference to Murray Bookchin’s work, and in the contemporary degrowth movement.

An institutional perspective should consider the fundamental dynamics among public authority, property, and citizenship. Yet treating any of these elements in isolation or as finished product gets in the way of understanding them. They come about through each other; one always invokes the others, and they are always in the making. Hence, we need to know not just what they are, but also how they come about in conjunction. This is especially relevant in agrarian societies where the political authority and the status of individuals and groups are mediated by land. Both the political powers to rule and the access to livelihoods go through land control. Thus, the institutional relations between authority, property, and citizenship—in a broad sense and at all scales—are central to societal dynamics.

Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of ‘land tenure security’ which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people.

The land rush has remained, and is likely to remain, a significant global phenomenon despite waning international media attention. The scope of the phenomenon is likely to be wider than previously thought. Quantifying the extent of land deals in order to study the social phenomenon spotlights the relevance of two distinct but dialectically linked ‘scopes’, namely, the scope of land deals in terms of the precise geographic physical land area of Operational land deals, and the scope of land deals in terms of the larger extent of lands implicated in land deal-making, of which only a part ends up as operational land deals. The latter category is necessarily bigger than the former, and its logic results in the production of Non-operational land deals. Studies have been overwhelmingly about Operational land deals, inadvertently downplaying the relevance of Non-operational land deals. The challenge is to study both Operational and Non-operational land deals because they are co-constitutive.

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.

Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of ‘land tenure security’ which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people.

This paper examines the situation of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers from Myanmar during the Covid-19 pandemic. It looks at the circumstances of the migrants prior to the global health emergency, before exploring possibilities for a post-pandemic future for this stratum of the working people by raising critical questions addressed to agrarian movements. It does this by focusing on the nature and dynamics of the nexus of land and labour in the context of production and social reproduction, a view that in the context of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers necessarily requires interrelated perspectives on labour, agrarian, and food justice struggles. This requires a rethinking of the role of land, not as a factor in either production or social reproduction, but as a central component in both spheres simultaneously. The question is not ‘whether’ it is necessary and desirable to forge multi-class coalitions and struggles against external capital, while not losing sight of the exploitative relations within rural communities and the household; rather, the question is ‘how’ to achieve this. It will require a messy recursive process, going back and forth between theoretical exploration and practical politics.