The Power to Plunder: Rethinking Land Grabbing in Latin America.

In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large-scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of 'civilization' and 'savagery', and its inherently whitening logics, re-appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]